By some editing glitch, the Washington Times mistakenly placed Bill Gertz’s piece “Analysts Missed Chinese Buildup” on its national news page.
It could have qualified as an op-ed, a plug for Gertz’s scaremongering The China Threat: How the People’s Republic of China Targets America, an infomercial for the pro-confrontation Blue Team of anti-China adventurers, or as a submission for the agony column in which Gertz vents his choking rage that the CIA has not yet purged the analysts who perversely persist in trying to apply standards of evidence, logic, and common sense to data about China.
But news it ain’t.
The hard news lede is followed by Gertz’s determination to spin the report as a whitewash:
Instead, these officials said, the report looks like a bid to exonerate analysts within the close-knit fraternity of government China specialists, who for the past 10 years dismissed or played down intelligence showing that Beijing was engaged in a major military buildup.
"This report conceals the efforts of dissenting analysts [in the intelligence community] who argued that China was a threat," one official said, adding that covering up the failure of intelligence analysts on China would prevent a major reorganization of the system. A former U.S. official said the report should help expose a "self-selected group" of specialists who fooled the U.S. government on China for 10 years.
And just in case Porter Goss needed to know what Clinton-era appeasers need bulls-eyes painted on their backs:
According to the officials, the study was produced by a team of analysts for the intelligence contractor Centra Technologies.
Spokesmen for the CIA and Mr. Negroponte declined to comment.
Its main author is Robert Suettinger, a National Security Council staff member for China during the Clinton administration and the U.S. intelligence community's top China analyst until 1998. Mr. Suettinger is traveling outside the country and could not be reached for comment, a spokesman said.
John Culver, a longtime CIA analyst on Asia, was the co-author.
Among those who took part in the study were former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Lonnie Henley, who critics say was among those who in the past had dismissed concerns about China's military in the past 10 years.
Also participating in the study was John F. Corbett, a former Army intelligence analyst and attache who was a China policy-maker at the Pentagon during the Clinton administration.
It seems to me that Gertz may get his way, though he may not see his dream of having Suettinger, Corbett, and Henley’s heads mounted on pikes outside the Washington Times’ front door.
Porter Goss’s brief is not to promote CIA analytical independence and the messy controversies that would come with it. The CIA’s job is now to implement White House policy by producing the necessary policy-promoting (instead of analytical) product and initiatives needed to shape public opinion, steamroll Congress, and coerce foreign governments.
So people who claim to know China—but have a tin ear for picking up what the White House wants to hear—may find themselves out of work.
Saturday, June 11, 2005
Thursday, June 09, 2005
Is China the True Target of North Korean Nuclear Blackmail?
On June 3, our ambassador to Japan said:
``If you had a nuclear North Korea, it just introduces a whole different dynamic,'' Schieffer said. ``It seems to me that that increases the pressure on both South Korea and Japan to consider going nuclear themselves.''
Statements like these are meant to rattle China’s cage.
There is nothing that China would like less than a hostile, right-leaning Japan armed with nuclear weapons.
Forestalling a nuclear Japan is a good reason for the Chinese to put pressure on North Korea. Pressure is applied accordingly, and the DPRK signals its willingness to return to the Six-Party talks.
So what happens today?
Just when it looked like things were going so well, and the ROK’s President Roh is on his way to Washington to justify his appeasement-lite policy of engagement toward Pyongyang, the North Koreans add conditions to their return to the talks and, as a bonus, go out of their way on ABC to announce they got lotsa nukes.
What’s going on?
Are the North Koreans nuts?
As readers of China Matters know, I go out of my way to look for rational motives for dictators and countries that it is fashionable to describe as “irrational”.
No exception here.
There is, I believe, a more subtle dynamic than raving madness at work behind the otherwise mystifying behavior of North Korea.
Kim Jung Il is deliberately fomenting the nuclear crisis in order to extort Chinese aid and support.
According to this scenario, when he gets what he’s looking for, he’ll back down and remove the easiest pretext at hand for Japan to go nuclear.
And China can breathe a little easier.
This interpretation fits in with the few observable facts and conservative conclusions we can draw from them about North Korean behavior.
First of all, North Korea has used the nuclear gambit before, against the United States, in an effort to compel engagement and aid from the Clinton administration.
This tactic isn’t effective against the Bush administration.
President Bush possesses a visceral hatred both of Kim Jung Il and of Bill Clinton’s foreign policy initiatives (in Bush’s first term, his approach to North Korea and the Palestinian problem were defined as ABC—Anything But Clinton).
Bush enrolled North Korea in the Axis of Evil and enshrined America’s unilateral right to attack evildoers in his first term. In his second term, he upped the ante by explicitly committing his administration to a worldwide democracy crusade, thereby asserting our right to destabilize dictators we don’t like even if they didn’t present a plausible threat to our national security.
The Bush administration prefers regime change in North Korea, and rapprochement with North Korea is both distasteful and close to politically impossible for the Bush administration.
Flaunting a nuclear threat isn’t going to bring Pyongyang aid and concessions from the US. It’s only going to bring the day of reckoning closer.
With the US hamstrung by military overstretch in Iraq and hostility to its regime change style of diplomacy by all the key players in Northeast Asia except Japan, why is Kim Jung Il perversely and seemingly profitlessly provoking the US and making it more difficult for everybody to move past this crisis?
I think the key distinction here is to view Kim Jung Il as rational. Presenting him as a goggle-eyed, delusional dingbat princeling with an unslakable thirst for reckless confrontation is amusing and partially accurate, and makes it easy to rally international opposition against him.
But it’s only part of the story.
He’s at the center of a regime that is struggling desperately to cope with virtually total economic collapse triggered by the end of Soviet aid in 1989, agricultural failure, mass death and starvation, domestic dissent, and the determination of the world’s only superpower to end his regime.
He’s planning and scheming obsessively—and rationally—to create some breathing space for his regime so it can continue its recovery and transition into a dictatorship with a market-oriented, more globalized economy like China’s.
Kim Jung Il only has a few assets to deploy, some positive—a big army, draconian security apparatus, lukewarm support from China, and tentative engagement with South Korea.
He’s got two giant negative assets—the threat that the collapse of his regime will destabilize the Korean peninsula to the detriment of China and South Korea, and the threat that his nuclear program can provoke an arms race throughout Northeast Asia.
Add to that his personality. Like George W. Bush, another ruler who owes his rise to his family connections and considers it grounds for a feeling of entitlement, Kim Jung Il strives to maintain the upper hand in any relationship. He doesn’t want to beg or persuade, he wants to dictate.
Kim’s relations with China are notoriously prickly. (For a superb dissection of PRC-DPRK relations, see Andrew Scobell’s China and North Korea: From Comrades-in-Arms to Allies at Arms’ Length).
Kim lacks the deep rapport his father held with the Chinese leadership, based on their shared fight against America and South Korea in the Korean War. He found China’s rapid and profitable engagement with South Korea and concurrent neglect of North Korea—just when the cutoff of Soviet aid and natural disasters put his country through the wringer—intensely annoying.
The Chinese clearly are not interested in subsidizing North Korea as a socialist client state as the USSR did. Instead, they drain DPRK foreign exchange reserves by denominating energy exports in dollars and goad Kim to make politically risky reforms in agriculture and economics in order to become self-sufficient.
In response, Kim denounced Deng Xiaoping as a traitor to socialism and even went so far as to play the Taiwan card by opening discussions with the ROC concerning, of all things, a Taipei to Pyongyang air link.
Without leverage, Kim can rely on little more than malign neglect and lip service from Peking in his dealings with the US.
And what better leverage, what better way to dictate and preserve the initiative in Northeast Asia—and make China dance to his tune-- than by threatening to acquire nuclear weapons and provoke a massive injection of Western nuclear and anti-missile deterrent into the region by Japan and the United States?
So don’t believe for a minute that China will threaten to cut off aid and impose sanctions—as the US hopes—in order to bring Kim Jung Il to heel. If anything, the exact opposite will happen.
Don’t look for those pesky North Korean nukes to go away until North Korea’s demanding supremo feels he is getting all the respect and support—from China—that he needs.
``If you had a nuclear North Korea, it just introduces a whole different dynamic,'' Schieffer said. ``It seems to me that that increases the pressure on both South Korea and Japan to consider going nuclear themselves.''
Statements like these are meant to rattle China’s cage.
There is nothing that China would like less than a hostile, right-leaning Japan armed with nuclear weapons.
Forestalling a nuclear Japan is a good reason for the Chinese to put pressure on North Korea. Pressure is applied accordingly, and the DPRK signals its willingness to return to the Six-Party talks.
So what happens today?
Just when it looked like things were going so well, and the ROK’s President Roh is on his way to Washington to justify his appeasement-lite policy of engagement toward Pyongyang, the North Koreans add conditions to their return to the talks and, as a bonus, go out of their way on ABC to announce they got lotsa nukes.
What’s going on?
Are the North Koreans nuts?
As readers of China Matters know, I go out of my way to look for rational motives for dictators and countries that it is fashionable to describe as “irrational”.
No exception here.
There is, I believe, a more subtle dynamic than raving madness at work behind the otherwise mystifying behavior of North Korea.
Kim Jung Il is deliberately fomenting the nuclear crisis in order to extort Chinese aid and support.
According to this scenario, when he gets what he’s looking for, he’ll back down and remove the easiest pretext at hand for Japan to go nuclear.
And China can breathe a little easier.
This interpretation fits in with the few observable facts and conservative conclusions we can draw from them about North Korean behavior.
First of all, North Korea has used the nuclear gambit before, against the United States, in an effort to compel engagement and aid from the Clinton administration.
This tactic isn’t effective against the Bush administration.
President Bush possesses a visceral hatred both of Kim Jung Il and of Bill Clinton’s foreign policy initiatives (in Bush’s first term, his approach to North Korea and the Palestinian problem were defined as ABC—Anything But Clinton).
Bush enrolled North Korea in the Axis of Evil and enshrined America’s unilateral right to attack evildoers in his first term. In his second term, he upped the ante by explicitly committing his administration to a worldwide democracy crusade, thereby asserting our right to destabilize dictators we don’t like even if they didn’t present a plausible threat to our national security.
The Bush administration prefers regime change in North Korea, and rapprochement with North Korea is both distasteful and close to politically impossible for the Bush administration.
Flaunting a nuclear threat isn’t going to bring Pyongyang aid and concessions from the US. It’s only going to bring the day of reckoning closer.
With the US hamstrung by military overstretch in Iraq and hostility to its regime change style of diplomacy by all the key players in Northeast Asia except Japan, why is Kim Jung Il perversely and seemingly profitlessly provoking the US and making it more difficult for everybody to move past this crisis?
I think the key distinction here is to view Kim Jung Il as rational. Presenting him as a goggle-eyed, delusional dingbat princeling with an unslakable thirst for reckless confrontation is amusing and partially accurate, and makes it easy to rally international opposition against him.
But it’s only part of the story.
He’s at the center of a regime that is struggling desperately to cope with virtually total economic collapse triggered by the end of Soviet aid in 1989, agricultural failure, mass death and starvation, domestic dissent, and the determination of the world’s only superpower to end his regime.
He’s planning and scheming obsessively—and rationally—to create some breathing space for his regime so it can continue its recovery and transition into a dictatorship with a market-oriented, more globalized economy like China’s.
Kim Jung Il only has a few assets to deploy, some positive—a big army, draconian security apparatus, lukewarm support from China, and tentative engagement with South Korea.
He’s got two giant negative assets—the threat that the collapse of his regime will destabilize the Korean peninsula to the detriment of China and South Korea, and the threat that his nuclear program can provoke an arms race throughout Northeast Asia.
Add to that his personality. Like George W. Bush, another ruler who owes his rise to his family connections and considers it grounds for a feeling of entitlement, Kim Jung Il strives to maintain the upper hand in any relationship. He doesn’t want to beg or persuade, he wants to dictate.
Kim’s relations with China are notoriously prickly. (For a superb dissection of PRC-DPRK relations, see Andrew Scobell’s China and North Korea: From Comrades-in-Arms to Allies at Arms’ Length).
Kim lacks the deep rapport his father held with the Chinese leadership, based on their shared fight against America and South Korea in the Korean War. He found China’s rapid and profitable engagement with South Korea and concurrent neglect of North Korea—just when the cutoff of Soviet aid and natural disasters put his country through the wringer—intensely annoying.
The Chinese clearly are not interested in subsidizing North Korea as a socialist client state as the USSR did. Instead, they drain DPRK foreign exchange reserves by denominating energy exports in dollars and goad Kim to make politically risky reforms in agriculture and economics in order to become self-sufficient.
In response, Kim denounced Deng Xiaoping as a traitor to socialism and even went so far as to play the Taiwan card by opening discussions with the ROC concerning, of all things, a Taipei to Pyongyang air link.
Without leverage, Kim can rely on little more than malign neglect and lip service from Peking in his dealings with the US.
And what better leverage, what better way to dictate and preserve the initiative in Northeast Asia—and make China dance to his tune-- than by threatening to acquire nuclear weapons and provoke a massive injection of Western nuclear and anti-missile deterrent into the region by Japan and the United States?
So don’t believe for a minute that China will threaten to cut off aid and impose sanctions—as the US hopes—in order to bring Kim Jung Il to heel. If anything, the exact opposite will happen.
Don’t look for those pesky North Korean nukes to go away until North Korea’s demanding supremo feels he is getting all the respect and support—from China—that he needs.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Nicholas Eberstadt and North Korea Regime Change
Reading the NK Zone, a group blog that provides a lot of interesting information on North Korea, a post directed me to a "must read" transcript of remarks by Nicholas Eberstadt. Eberstadt is the hardest of hard core North Korea regime changers at the American Enterprise Institute. In his speech, he's trying to get South Korea to drink the regime change elixir (or Kool-Aid) indirectly, with some moral arm twisting about how the ROK has to set up a program to patriate North Korean refugees who fled to China.
I commented as follows:
As you counseled, I read “every word” of Nick Eberstadt’s talk and came away sorely disappointed.
I’ll be upfront. I opppose the Bush administration program of “regime change” as a tool of foreign policy, which makes me a deluded appeaser in Eberstadt’s book.
Eberstadt is an unwavering advocate of regime change. When he encourages South Korea to welcome and resettle North Korean refugees who have fled to China, he is clearly (to me, at least) hoping to create an overwhelming flood of refugees that will hollow out and destabilize the North Korean regime.
His article devoid of specifics as to why the Chinese would want to create an EZ Pass lane to South Korea for the refugees, thereby contributing to the destruction of the DPRK, which China regards as a reassuring buffer against the US military presence in North Asia.
All he says is:
If Seoul adopts an activist stance and insists upon the law—including its own laws—many of the problems encountered with China today may solve themselves.
Does anybody seriously believe this?
If North Korean refugees become an international political issue, it’s more likely that China would seek to remove the problem by militarizing its border with North Korea more than it already has, to make sure no more refugees get in. Not exactly a victory for freedom or the North Korean people.
Eberstadt hits the Judeo-Christian trifecta by unctuous references to the Jewish diaspora, sins of omission and commission (Catholicism), and “the bread of righteousness” (Protestantism).
This is not an attempt to underline the moral imperative of helping the North Korean people. It is all of a piece with the efforts since 1995 of Michael Horowitz to recast the struggle for human rights (a traditionally liberal concern) as a battle against religious persecution, and make regime change a religious imperative and political rallying point for the Christian right in U.S. domestic politics.
Instead of enlarging the world consensus in favor of active support of human rights in North Korea, evangelizing the issue of human rights in North Korea links it to the Bush doctrine of regime change—which has turned US diplomacy in North Asia into a litany of futility and at the same time stalls any increase in humanitarian engagement that might contribute to the well-being of the North Korean people.
So put me down as somebody who read the Eberstadt article—and found it shallow, hypocritical, and mendacious.
Perhaps what’s needed instead is some debate as to whether a militant pursuit of regime change, regardless of its near term probability or long term consequences, is preferable as a means of promoting the welfare of the North Korean people to a policy of engagement whose objective of regime modification might include regime change as one of its possible results—but not as its sole aim.
It’s a debate I hope to see at NKZone.
I commented as follows:
As you counseled, I read “every word” of Nick Eberstadt’s talk and came away sorely disappointed.
I’ll be upfront. I opppose the Bush administration program of “regime change” as a tool of foreign policy, which makes me a deluded appeaser in Eberstadt’s book.
Eberstadt is an unwavering advocate of regime change. When he encourages South Korea to welcome and resettle North Korean refugees who have fled to China, he is clearly (to me, at least) hoping to create an overwhelming flood of refugees that will hollow out and destabilize the North Korean regime.
His article devoid of specifics as to why the Chinese would want to create an EZ Pass lane to South Korea for the refugees, thereby contributing to the destruction of the DPRK, which China regards as a reassuring buffer against the US military presence in North Asia.
All he says is:
If Seoul adopts an activist stance and insists upon the law—including its own laws—many of the problems encountered with China today may solve themselves.
Does anybody seriously believe this?
If North Korean refugees become an international political issue, it’s more likely that China would seek to remove the problem by militarizing its border with North Korea more than it already has, to make sure no more refugees get in. Not exactly a victory for freedom or the North Korean people.
Eberstadt hits the Judeo-Christian trifecta by unctuous references to the Jewish diaspora, sins of omission and commission (Catholicism), and “the bread of righteousness” (Protestantism).
This is not an attempt to underline the moral imperative of helping the North Korean people. It is all of a piece with the efforts since 1995 of Michael Horowitz to recast the struggle for human rights (a traditionally liberal concern) as a battle against religious persecution, and make regime change a religious imperative and political rallying point for the Christian right in U.S. domestic politics.
Instead of enlarging the world consensus in favor of active support of human rights in North Korea, evangelizing the issue of human rights in North Korea links it to the Bush doctrine of regime change—which has turned US diplomacy in North Asia into a litany of futility and at the same time stalls any increase in humanitarian engagement that might contribute to the well-being of the North Korean people.
So put me down as somebody who read the Eberstadt article—and found it shallow, hypocritical, and mendacious.
Perhaps what’s needed instead is some debate as to whether a militant pursuit of regime change, regardless of its near term probability or long term consequences, is preferable as a means of promoting the welfare of the North Korean people to a policy of engagement whose objective of regime modification might include regime change as one of its possible results—but not as its sole aim.
It’s a debate I hope to see at NKZone.
Monday, June 06, 2005
Bill Clinton and North Korea: Big Dog Speaks the Truth
The entire North Korean debate hinges on the question of irrationality.
Are the North Koreans so irrational that they have forfeited their sovereignty, thereby exposing their country to the full range of sanctions, destabilization, subversion, and pre-emptive attack that the Bush administration and its nutbar fellow travelers can inflict upon it?
Accusations of irrationality—and the insistence that the US must therefore act on the very worst of worst-case assumptions about tiny countries that otherwise would appear to pose no threat to the United States—have been the bedrock of neo-con geopolitical strategy.
But now Bill Clinton joins the fray.
In an interview with Fox News (!) the Big Dog lays out the common sense proposition:
"Oh, they are irrational to some extent, but I don’t think they’re totally irrational," he said. "I think they watch American cable channels. I think they watch the European cable channels. I think their decision makers keep up more than we know. And I think they want us to think they’re a little crazy.
What’s interesting is that Clinton has been spending quality time with Poppy Bush on tsunami relief and assiduously positioning himself as a mainstream emeritus president sufficiently palatable to the forebrain-endowed wing of the Republican Party, in preparation for his wife’s run in 2008 and/or his campaign to become U.N. General Secretary.
The fact that he’s willing to say something sensible about North Korea is an indication that there is enough support within the Republican apparatus for a non-confrontational approach with Pyongyang that Clinton feels he can make such a statement without getting his head snapped off as an appeaser.
One could also look at it as a sign that he’s acquired enough mainstream political capital that Condi Rice and the foreign party realists could conceivable use his remarks to support a step back from the regime change/democracy crusade that looks more and more as a counter-productive dead end.
In a high-profile statement in the Washington Post, Condi repudiated a Pentagon leak, no doubt from a grumpy warlord with the initials DR who is currently touring Asia to hype the regional security threat from China and North Korea--that the US would be referring the North Korea issue to the Security Council soon.
Today came a timely report that representatives of the DPKR and the US are meeting again in New York for direct talks—just like Bill Clinton said they should!
So yes, the Chinese can help us, yes, others can help us, these six party talks can be valuable, but sooner or later we’re probably going to have to take more initiative. And I see that, the administration has basically been saying that. Just kind of read between the lines, that’s pretty much what they’ve concluded, I think.
In the past, the neo-con litany of failure in prediction and execution has not resulted in lasting political damage to their stature in Washington.
But if Bill Clinton-the last American president with the credibility to act as an honest broker in the realm of conventional diplomacy--can enter the fray on North Korea in a productive way, it may be a sign that the power of the neo-cons to drive US policy in North Korea and Iran has been broken.
Are the North Koreans so irrational that they have forfeited their sovereignty, thereby exposing their country to the full range of sanctions, destabilization, subversion, and pre-emptive attack that the Bush administration and its nutbar fellow travelers can inflict upon it?
Accusations of irrationality—and the insistence that the US must therefore act on the very worst of worst-case assumptions about tiny countries that otherwise would appear to pose no threat to the United States—have been the bedrock of neo-con geopolitical strategy.
But now Bill Clinton joins the fray.
In an interview with Fox News (!) the Big Dog lays out the common sense proposition:
"Oh, they are irrational to some extent, but I don’t think they’re totally irrational," he said. "I think they watch American cable channels. I think they watch the European cable channels. I think their decision makers keep up more than we know. And I think they want us to think they’re a little crazy.
What’s interesting is that Clinton has been spending quality time with Poppy Bush on tsunami relief and assiduously positioning himself as a mainstream emeritus president sufficiently palatable to the forebrain-endowed wing of the Republican Party, in preparation for his wife’s run in 2008 and/or his campaign to become U.N. General Secretary.
The fact that he’s willing to say something sensible about North Korea is an indication that there is enough support within the Republican apparatus for a non-confrontational approach with Pyongyang that Clinton feels he can make such a statement without getting his head snapped off as an appeaser.
One could also look at it as a sign that he’s acquired enough mainstream political capital that Condi Rice and the foreign party realists could conceivable use his remarks to support a step back from the regime change/democracy crusade that looks more and more as a counter-productive dead end.
In a high-profile statement in the Washington Post, Condi repudiated a Pentagon leak, no doubt from a grumpy warlord with the initials DR who is currently touring Asia to hype the regional security threat from China and North Korea--that the US would be referring the North Korea issue to the Security Council soon.
Today came a timely report that representatives of the DPKR and the US are meeting again in New York for direct talks—just like Bill Clinton said they should!
So yes, the Chinese can help us, yes, others can help us, these six party talks can be valuable, but sooner or later we’re probably going to have to take more initiative. And I see that, the administration has basically been saying that. Just kind of read between the lines, that’s pretty much what they’ve concluded, I think.
In the past, the neo-con litany of failure in prediction and execution has not resulted in lasting political damage to their stature in Washington.
But if Bill Clinton-the last American president with the credibility to act as an honest broker in the realm of conventional diplomacy--can enter the fray on North Korea in a productive way, it may be a sign that the power of the neo-cons to drive US policy in North Korea and Iran has been broken.
Is China Bi-Polar?
Peking Duck posts on an article by Orville Schell condemning China as “bipolar” for what he saw as the victim mentality behind the anti-Japanese demonstrations.
I responded with a comment reproduced below, in which I posit that the Chinese leadership—and its response to the development in its relationship with Japan—are rational.
A distinction can be made ithat there might be a rational, cynical anti-Japanese strategy cooked up by the Chinese leadership and a putatively irrational response by the Chinese people. And the fact that the Bush administration was able to convert an attack by Saudi and Eqyptian Wahabbists on 9/11 into war fever against a secular/socialist regime in Iraq is a sobering reminder that a regime with disciplined information management can shape and direct public opinion in order to advance its goals.
But, and it’s a big but…
…calling people “bipolar” or “irrational” is, to me, to underestimate the genuineness, the significance, and the “rationality” of the powerful popular response that the government was able to elicit.
If we start from the assumption that the Chinese demonstrators were “rational” and analyze their demographics, ideology, and agenda, we might come away with more useful conclusions than the impression that “the Chinese” are hysterical dingbats hung up on sixty year-old war crimes.
Here’s my post:
My take on China vs. Japan is 180 degrees from Schell's, and more in line with Coll Hanninan's commentary in Asia Times: China is responding to Japan's emergence as a frontline state in the U.S. effort to contain China.
I have a more fundamental gripe with Schell's use of "bipolar", and his implication that China is acting irrationally. Whatever you may think of the CCP leadership, they are not a bunch of guys in rags pushing shopping carts around Zhongnanhai and muttering to themselves about the radio receivers implanted in their skulls. They are hardheaded, ruthless, and rational politicians who have managed, through a tiny Leninist party, to keep control of the world's most populous country for over 50 years.
Painting China as "bipolar" and psychologically crippled by a "victim mentality" implies that the US can't engage with China as a rational actor. This paves the way for assertions that China can't be dealt with through conventional diplomacy as a peer; instead it has to be treated as a potentially dangerous pariah state, to be neutralized through containment, sanctions, and whatever other tricks the Bush administration has in its bag.
The Bush administration tried the same tactic with Saddam Hussein to enable the invasion, even though subsequent events have shown that Hussein was no irrational threat to the world. He was a rational, calculating dictator who knew how to run his country a lot better than we can. Things might have been different if the American public had understood that we were not bringing reason and sanity to the irrational madness of Iraq, but exporting ignorance, error, and wishful thinking to a fragile, resentful country instead.
Is China irrational? Or is the Chinese regime rational but detestable? Yes, there is a difference.
I responded with a comment reproduced below, in which I posit that the Chinese leadership—and its response to the development in its relationship with Japan—are rational.
A distinction can be made ithat there might be a rational, cynical anti-Japanese strategy cooked up by the Chinese leadership and a putatively irrational response by the Chinese people. And the fact that the Bush administration was able to convert an attack by Saudi and Eqyptian Wahabbists on 9/11 into war fever against a secular/socialist regime in Iraq is a sobering reminder that a regime with disciplined information management can shape and direct public opinion in order to advance its goals.
But, and it’s a big but…
…calling people “bipolar” or “irrational” is, to me, to underestimate the genuineness, the significance, and the “rationality” of the powerful popular response that the government was able to elicit.
If we start from the assumption that the Chinese demonstrators were “rational” and analyze their demographics, ideology, and agenda, we might come away with more useful conclusions than the impression that “the Chinese” are hysterical dingbats hung up on sixty year-old war crimes.
Here’s my post:
My take on China vs. Japan is 180 degrees from Schell's, and more in line with Coll Hanninan's commentary in Asia Times: China is responding to Japan's emergence as a frontline state in the U.S. effort to contain China.
I have a more fundamental gripe with Schell's use of "bipolar", and his implication that China is acting irrationally. Whatever you may think of the CCP leadership, they are not a bunch of guys in rags pushing shopping carts around Zhongnanhai and muttering to themselves about the radio receivers implanted in their skulls. They are hardheaded, ruthless, and rational politicians who have managed, through a tiny Leninist party, to keep control of the world's most populous country for over 50 years.
Painting China as "bipolar" and psychologically crippled by a "victim mentality" implies that the US can't engage with China as a rational actor. This paves the way for assertions that China can't be dealt with through conventional diplomacy as a peer; instead it has to be treated as a potentially dangerous pariah state, to be neutralized through containment, sanctions, and whatever other tricks the Bush administration has in its bag.
The Bush administration tried the same tactic with Saddam Hussein to enable the invasion, even though subsequent events have shown that Hussein was no irrational threat to the world. He was a rational, calculating dictator who knew how to run his country a lot better than we can. Things might have been different if the American public had understood that we were not bringing reason and sanity to the irrational madness of Iraq, but exporting ignorance, error, and wishful thinking to a fragile, resentful country instead.
Is China irrational? Or is the Chinese regime rational but detestable? Yes, there is a difference.
Thursday, June 02, 2005
Jay Lefkowitz, Michael Horowitz, and the Christian Conservative Agenda for North Korea
The New York Sun reports that Jay Lefkowitz will probably be named special envoy for North Korea human rights.
Actually, the story was first leaked almost one month ago.
Via Buzzflash, the first murmurings concerning Lefkowitz's possible appointment appeared on May 5:
The Chosun Ilbo, South Korea--U.S. TENTATIVELY NAMES HARDLINER AS N.K. RIGHTS POINT MAN (Officials connected with the North Korean human rights movement said Thursday the U.S. has tentatively decided to name former White House domestic policy advisor and noted neocon Jay Lefkowitz as special envoy for human rights in North Korea. … The U.S. had put off naming an envoy for the last six months to avoid provoking North Korea, but analysts believe the naming of a neoconservative at this juncture shows Washington is no longer prepared to tread softly now that tensions over Pyongyang's nuclear program are approaching crisis level.)
Bush—or somebody—really wants this guy. He looks like some kind of Baby Bolton, an in your face confrontationalist whose job is to antagonize and polarize.
It’s obvious that the White House wants to yank Kim Jung Il’s chain with the appointment. Now may be the time. If it happens, it represents another step in the hardening of our North Korea policy.
But why Lefkowitz?
His foreign policy experience is risible. He’s a corporate lawyer who works for Ken Starr’s firm. Dana Milbank profiled him as “a hard-nosed litigant”, nicknamed The Viper by one of his clients.
Lefkowitz was Bush’s deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy, and, together with Karen Hughes, helped craft the administration’s notorious stem cell policy. His last stint was as general counsel to the Office of Management and Budget.
Lefkowitz’s otherwise inexplicable elevation to sachem for North Korean human rights appears to have much to do with his links to Michael Horowitz, the neocon progenitor of the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004—the legislation that created the special envoy post.
Embattled conservative journalist Evan Gahr claims that Lefkowitz has a close relationship to Horowitz; that they talk frequently; and Horowitz got Lefkowitz his job as OMB general counsel (Horowitz himself did a stint as OMB general counsel under Reagan). He further claims that Horowitz and Lefkowitz are, in fact, cousins.
With this background, it would be no surprise if Horowitz is promoting Lefkowitz for the human rights envoy posting.
On one level, Lefkowitz’s appointment may be simply another example of the incestuous backscratching that sees inside-the-Beltway types continually rewarded for their ideology, connections, and pliancy instead of expertise.
However, Lefkowitz’s appointment may be more important as a coded indicator by President Bush, meant to reward and mobilize the evangelical right on behalf of his political objectives.
If so, we are in new and dangerous waters.
As reported in the Wall Street Journal, Horowitz, a charter member of the neo-cons ensconced at the Hudson Institute directing its Project for International Religious Liberty, has toiled tirelessly since 1995 to create a significant, active evangelical Christian base for conservative foreign policy priorities by exchanging the ideological rhetoric of national security and freedom for moral rhetoric of religious persecution and human rights.
He is the godfather of the right wing’s attempts to harness the political energies of traditionally isolationist Christian conservatives to promote the GOP’s foreign policy agenda in the same way that domestic hot button issues like abortion, gay marriage, and “Intelligent Design” are exploited to drive evangelicals to the polls.
Horowitz has used the theme of persecution of Christians in regimes like the Sudan, North Korea, and China to create a set of evangelical foreign policy priorities that Karl Rove and the Bush White House, with their conviction that the evangelical political force is crucial to their electoral success, are anxious to heed, acknowledge, and encourage.
Evangelical Christians have responded and Horowitz was recognized as one of the world’s ten most influential Christians by a Southern Baptist magazine. Even though he’s Jewish and, according to one piece I read, an ex-communist.
With a Christian population estimated at 10-12,000 in a country of 23 million, North Korea would seem to be an area in which the rhetoric of Christian persecution would find little international resonance.
However, history does supply justification for viewing North Korea as a fruitful field for Christian endeavor. Between 1890 and the 1950s, Pyongyang was a center of highly successful Presbyterian mission centered on a 120-acre campus with a population of 180,000 and was celebrated, perhaps presumptuously, as the “Jerusalem of the East”. In 1907 it was the center of an intense revival movement that brought tens of thousands of Korean converts to Christianity. One-sixth of its residents—including the family of Kim Il-sung (!) were Christians. By the end of World War II, the Christian population of what is now North Korea reportedly numbered 600,000, most of whom fled to the South.
The proliferation of web pages dealing with the fate of Christians in North Korea is evidence of the enthusiasm and hope that the evangelical movement has been able to generate on this topic—and contribute to Michael Horowitz’s political activities.
One of Horowitz’s greatest and most recent triumphs was the passage of the North Korea Human Rights Act of 2004.
In an interview with Christianity Today, given when the legislation cleared the Senate, Horowitz began by preening unctuously
Here's an abused term, but in this case, I have come to feel that it is literally correct to call this success a miracle.
And went on to provide an insight into the political dynamics behind the legislation:
(CT) What was the role of evangelicals in seeing the legislation get passed?
Oh, they played the central role here. I think it was this powerful evangelical coalition that was working with Senator [Sam] Brownback and Senator [Evan] Bayh…
It was then the coalition, working with key Senate aides, in particular, that played this extraordinary difference in moving matters forward. There is a process in the Senate where bills get so-called "hot-wired." That means that the Senate leadership says, "We want this bill to be adopted," and they give a 24-hour period for all senators to indicate whether they object to the bill. And the bill cleared all the Senate Republicans. … It had Republicans and Democrats in the House and all Republicans in the Senate unanimously approving the bill. Then it was up to the Senate Democrats, and Senate Democrats began registering objections to the bill.
At that point, there was a coalition led by the National Association of Evangelicals that prepared and drafted a letter that went to Senator [Joe] Biden, [ranking Democratic Party member of] the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator [Tom] Daschle, the Senate majority leader, and Senator [John] Kerry, the Democratic nominee for President, indicating that any one of them had the power, if they so chose, to ensure that the bill got a Senate vote—and making it very clear that those three men would be held accountable if the Senate buried the vote. And there was a readiness on the part of evangelical groups to go to churches throughout critical [voting] states showing films of gulags and gas chambers. You'd better be sure that that played a role in the ultimate willingness of members of the Senate to negotiate, which they did in honor and good faith, for legislation.
North Korea is now, together with Sudan and a rather quixotic if not suicidal desire to obtain U.S. government support for evangelism among Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, a hot button issue for the politically ambitious arm of the Christian right.
Officially, supporters of the NKHRA insist that the bill concerns only human rights and not the potentially bloody and burdensome activities associated with regime change under U.S. government aegis.
However, regime change is not far from Horowitz’s mind:
In a lecture entitled "It Ain't Christmas in Pyongyang: Will the Kim Jong-il Regime Last?" Horowitz said, "North Korea will implode before next Christmas and Kim Jong-il shall not enjoy Christmas next year." The scholar had recently visited South Korea, where he criticized Seoul policies toward North Korea and called for regime change in Pyongyang. He said the collapse of North Korea's communist regime was historically inevitable, and that such a collapse would happen automatically and without much delay. He also mentioned the possibility of a coup occurring in North Korea. He said that if the United States discovered generals it could trust to close North Korea's "concentration camps" and shut down its nuclear program, Washington could send a message to them that it would support such moves.
As noted above, the NKHRA created the post of human rights envoy for North Korea. Speaking with Christianity Today, Horowitz said:
The Senate bill calls for the appointment of a special envoy for human rights to be designated by the President. And the legislation further provides that this person must be a person of recognized international stature in the field of human rights.
There seems to be a bit of a stature gap here.
Jay Lefkowitz's only noteworthy foreign policy experience in recent years has been participation in some conferences on anti-Semitism, where he complains that singling out Israel for criticism while not condemning North Korea, Sudan, etc. is a sign of anti-Semitism.
Lefkowitz’s conservative credentials are, however, impeccable.
From Dana Milbank's profile:
Lefkowitz has enjoyed ideological combat, writing for neoconservative journals such as Commentary and the Public Interest and founding the Dark Ages convention, conservatives' answer to Bill Clinton's Renaissance Weekends.
…
Lefkowitz, friends and colleagues say, is the quintessential nerd. The bespectacled Columbia University graduate has a baby face. His West Wing office contains a little-used tennis racket, a copy of Commentary on the table and a framed picture of drawings of stem cells.
"He's proud to be a geek," said conservative commentator Laura Ingraham, who started the Dark Ages convention with him.
Lefkowitz, who as general counsel for the Office of Management and Budget last year was the architect of Bush's decision on stem-cell research, is attracted to controversial issues. As a junior staffer in the first Bush administration, he encouraged Vice President Dan Quayle's speech criticizing "Murphy Brown" for celebrating single motherhood and worked on an executive order restricting labor unions' power. In 1993, he joined a think tank project with Quayle's former chief of staff, William Kristol, before becoming a partner at Kirkland, Kenneth W. Starr's law firm. There, he represented Florida and Wisconsin in defense of their private-school voucher programs.
Apparently close to Rove and Karen Hughes, Lefkowitz had responsibility for beating the bushes for the Jewish vote in the 2004 election. He was mentioned as possible executive director of the platform writing committee at the GOP convention, and was reportedly considered for the top domestic policy slot in the second Bush administration before Rove took the job.
In sum, he looks like a dependable neo-con, a junior member of the trusted inner circle, loyal to George W. Bush, and ready to go that extra mile to serve President Bush’s agenda.
He could be anywhere, or nowhere. Why North Korea?
What makes the Horowitz/Lefkowitz link even more significant, beyond their reported family ties, is their shared interest in evangelical outreach.
Again, from Milbank:
Along the way, Lefkowitz has become Bush's de facto in-house ethicist and a primary liaison to Christian conservatives -- a seemingly odd role for someone of the Jewish faith. Lefkowitz, the son of New York-born Zionist parents who taught him Hebrew as his first language, keeps Kosher, has a well-thumbed Hebrew language Bible in his office and took a bicycle to work to avoid driving during Passover. Lefkowitz hopes to convince fellow Jews to embrace Republicans. In a 1996 speech, he said the Jewish community is "disintegrating," in part because of its "embrace of the assimilationist ideal endorsed by the liberal Democratic Party."
In the White House, Lefkowitz’s high profile conservative religiosity found expression in promotion of a shared, morality-based approach to social issues with the Christian right.
On a more practical plane, Lefkowitz seems to have been the godly go-to mensch when the White House wanted to reaffirm to the true believers that President Bush’s every thought and action are guided by his profound religious faith.
As revealed in Christianity Today:
Jay Lefkowitz, deputy assistant to the President, says Bush starts every policy discussion on action by asking, "What is the right thing to do?"—meaning, Lefkowitz says, "What is the morally correct thing to do?"
And from a briefing to Catholic and religious journalists reported in the Arlington Catholic Herald:
Jay Lefkowitz, deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy, said in the discussion on partial birth abortion and human cloning, the president always asks, "What is the right answer?"
The clearest indication of Lefkowitz’s role as signalman to the religious right was the spectacular botch on stem cell research.
The Bush administration touted Bush’s intense interest in this issue and the wide-ranging views presented to the President by Lefkowitz, the point man on the issue.
As reported in World Magazine (Mission Statement: To report, interpret, and illustrate the news in a timely, accurate, enjoyable, and arresting fashion from a perspective committed to the Bible as the inerrant Word of God):
WORLD interviewed Mr. Lefkowitz, former counselor to the president Karen Hughes, national campaign manager Ken Mehlman, Rep. Kay Granger, and others. They portray him as a man of faith who doesn't think he has all the answers, but who has learned to seek insights both from others and through prayerful consideration.
President Bush's decision on stem-cell research shows how he works. From March through August 2001, he painstakingly investigated the issue. The president began by asking Mr. Lefkowitz to bring in experts from all sides. …
Many others from a variety of viewpoints and expertise met with the president. Mr. Lefkowitz, who attended every one of these meetings, recalls they usually were held in the Oval Office and almost always began with the president saying to his guests, "Tell me what your opinion is and why." As the discussion continued, the president would press the experts further. In these sessions, Mr. Bush always listened, often took notes, and never failed to ask questions.
It turned out that Lefkowitz, despite the importance of the issue and the resources and Presidential focus laid at his disposal--and his own reputation as a dogged and diligent lawyer--got the science all wrong, overstating the number of existing stem cell lines by a factor of 5. With only a dozen viable lines available for research and access to new lines precluded, the federal program is irrelevant.
In retrospect, the ostentatious soul searching orchestrated by Jay Lefkowitz seems merely to have been rhetorical chaff, meant to obscure a strong, pre-existing disposition to give the evangelical right the de facto restriction on federally-funded stem cell research that it sought.
And it’s hard to see naming Lefkowitz to the special envoy post as anything other than a nod and a wink to the internationally-minded Christian conservatives that Bush shares their views on the desirability of moral militancy in our dealings with North Korea.
If the Bush administration follows through on its leaks this time and appoints Jay Lefkowitz, one can look at it in several ways:
First, an endorsement of a de facto policy of regime change against the North Korean regime.
Second, a coded signal to the evangelicals that President Bush professes to share their views and expects their enthusiastic endorsement for whatever he does on the North Korean issue.
Third, a worrisome sign that our North Korean policy will be driven by the imperative of catering to--and inflaming--one useful political constituency, at the expense of prudence, U.S. credibility as a responsible diplomatic force, and reasonable expectations of success in our effort to stabilize the situation on the Korean peninsula.
Actually, the story was first leaked almost one month ago.
Via Buzzflash, the first murmurings concerning Lefkowitz's possible appointment appeared on May 5:
The Chosun Ilbo, South Korea--U.S. TENTATIVELY NAMES HARDLINER AS N.K. RIGHTS POINT MAN (Officials connected with the North Korean human rights movement said Thursday the U.S. has tentatively decided to name former White House domestic policy advisor and noted neocon Jay Lefkowitz as special envoy for human rights in North Korea. … The U.S. had put off naming an envoy for the last six months to avoid provoking North Korea, but analysts believe the naming of a neoconservative at this juncture shows Washington is no longer prepared to tread softly now that tensions over Pyongyang's nuclear program are approaching crisis level.)
Bush—or somebody—really wants this guy. He looks like some kind of Baby Bolton, an in your face confrontationalist whose job is to antagonize and polarize.
It’s obvious that the White House wants to yank Kim Jung Il’s chain with the appointment. Now may be the time. If it happens, it represents another step in the hardening of our North Korea policy.
But why Lefkowitz?
His foreign policy experience is risible. He’s a corporate lawyer who works for Ken Starr’s firm. Dana Milbank profiled him as “a hard-nosed litigant”, nicknamed The Viper by one of his clients.
Lefkowitz was Bush’s deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy, and, together with Karen Hughes, helped craft the administration’s notorious stem cell policy. His last stint was as general counsel to the Office of Management and Budget.
Lefkowitz’s otherwise inexplicable elevation to sachem for North Korean human rights appears to have much to do with his links to Michael Horowitz, the neocon progenitor of the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004—the legislation that created the special envoy post.
Embattled conservative journalist Evan Gahr claims that Lefkowitz has a close relationship to Horowitz; that they talk frequently; and Horowitz got Lefkowitz his job as OMB general counsel (Horowitz himself did a stint as OMB general counsel under Reagan). He further claims that Horowitz and Lefkowitz are, in fact, cousins.
With this background, it would be no surprise if Horowitz is promoting Lefkowitz for the human rights envoy posting.
On one level, Lefkowitz’s appointment may be simply another example of the incestuous backscratching that sees inside-the-Beltway types continually rewarded for their ideology, connections, and pliancy instead of expertise.
However, Lefkowitz’s appointment may be more important as a coded indicator by President Bush, meant to reward and mobilize the evangelical right on behalf of his political objectives.
If so, we are in new and dangerous waters.
As reported in the Wall Street Journal, Horowitz, a charter member of the neo-cons ensconced at the Hudson Institute directing its Project for International Religious Liberty, has toiled tirelessly since 1995 to create a significant, active evangelical Christian base for conservative foreign policy priorities by exchanging the ideological rhetoric of national security and freedom for moral rhetoric of religious persecution and human rights.
He is the godfather of the right wing’s attempts to harness the political energies of traditionally isolationist Christian conservatives to promote the GOP’s foreign policy agenda in the same way that domestic hot button issues like abortion, gay marriage, and “Intelligent Design” are exploited to drive evangelicals to the polls.
Horowitz has used the theme of persecution of Christians in regimes like the Sudan, North Korea, and China to create a set of evangelical foreign policy priorities that Karl Rove and the Bush White House, with their conviction that the evangelical political force is crucial to their electoral success, are anxious to heed, acknowledge, and encourage.
Evangelical Christians have responded and Horowitz was recognized as one of the world’s ten most influential Christians by a Southern Baptist magazine. Even though he’s Jewish and, according to one piece I read, an ex-communist.
With a Christian population estimated at 10-12,000 in a country of 23 million, North Korea would seem to be an area in which the rhetoric of Christian persecution would find little international resonance.
However, history does supply justification for viewing North Korea as a fruitful field for Christian endeavor. Between 1890 and the 1950s, Pyongyang was a center of highly successful Presbyterian mission centered on a 120-acre campus with a population of 180,000 and was celebrated, perhaps presumptuously, as the “Jerusalem of the East”. In 1907 it was the center of an intense revival movement that brought tens of thousands of Korean converts to Christianity. One-sixth of its residents—including the family of Kim Il-sung (!) were Christians. By the end of World War II, the Christian population of what is now North Korea reportedly numbered 600,000, most of whom fled to the South.
The proliferation of web pages dealing with the fate of Christians in North Korea is evidence of the enthusiasm and hope that the evangelical movement has been able to generate on this topic—and contribute to Michael Horowitz’s political activities.
One of Horowitz’s greatest and most recent triumphs was the passage of the North Korea Human Rights Act of 2004.
In an interview with Christianity Today, given when the legislation cleared the Senate, Horowitz began by preening unctuously
Here's an abused term, but in this case, I have come to feel that it is literally correct to call this success a miracle.
And went on to provide an insight into the political dynamics behind the legislation:
(CT) What was the role of evangelicals in seeing the legislation get passed?
Oh, they played the central role here. I think it was this powerful evangelical coalition that was working with Senator [Sam] Brownback and Senator [Evan] Bayh…
It was then the coalition, working with key Senate aides, in particular, that played this extraordinary difference in moving matters forward. There is a process in the Senate where bills get so-called "hot-wired." That means that the Senate leadership says, "We want this bill to be adopted," and they give a 24-hour period for all senators to indicate whether they object to the bill. And the bill cleared all the Senate Republicans. … It had Republicans and Democrats in the House and all Republicans in the Senate unanimously approving the bill. Then it was up to the Senate Democrats, and Senate Democrats began registering objections to the bill.
At that point, there was a coalition led by the National Association of Evangelicals that prepared and drafted a letter that went to Senator [Joe] Biden, [ranking Democratic Party member of] the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator [Tom] Daschle, the Senate majority leader, and Senator [John] Kerry, the Democratic nominee for President, indicating that any one of them had the power, if they so chose, to ensure that the bill got a Senate vote—and making it very clear that those three men would be held accountable if the Senate buried the vote. And there was a readiness on the part of evangelical groups to go to churches throughout critical [voting] states showing films of gulags and gas chambers. You'd better be sure that that played a role in the ultimate willingness of members of the Senate to negotiate, which they did in honor and good faith, for legislation.
North Korea is now, together with Sudan and a rather quixotic if not suicidal desire to obtain U.S. government support for evangelism among Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, a hot button issue for the politically ambitious arm of the Christian right.
Officially, supporters of the NKHRA insist that the bill concerns only human rights and not the potentially bloody and burdensome activities associated with regime change under U.S. government aegis.
However, regime change is not far from Horowitz’s mind:
In a lecture entitled "It Ain't Christmas in Pyongyang: Will the Kim Jong-il Regime Last?" Horowitz said, "North Korea will implode before next Christmas and Kim Jong-il shall not enjoy Christmas next year." The scholar had recently visited South Korea, where he criticized Seoul policies toward North Korea and called for regime change in Pyongyang. He said the collapse of North Korea's communist regime was historically inevitable, and that such a collapse would happen automatically and without much delay. He also mentioned the possibility of a coup occurring in North Korea. He said that if the United States discovered generals it could trust to close North Korea's "concentration camps" and shut down its nuclear program, Washington could send a message to them that it would support such moves.
As noted above, the NKHRA created the post of human rights envoy for North Korea. Speaking with Christianity Today, Horowitz said:
The Senate bill calls for the appointment of a special envoy for human rights to be designated by the President. And the legislation further provides that this person must be a person of recognized international stature in the field of human rights.
There seems to be a bit of a stature gap here.
Jay Lefkowitz's only noteworthy foreign policy experience in recent years has been participation in some conferences on anti-Semitism, where he complains that singling out Israel for criticism while not condemning North Korea, Sudan, etc. is a sign of anti-Semitism.
Lefkowitz’s conservative credentials are, however, impeccable.
From Dana Milbank's profile:
Lefkowitz has enjoyed ideological combat, writing for neoconservative journals such as Commentary and the Public Interest and founding the Dark Ages convention, conservatives' answer to Bill Clinton's Renaissance Weekends.
…
Lefkowitz, friends and colleagues say, is the quintessential nerd. The bespectacled Columbia University graduate has a baby face. His West Wing office contains a little-used tennis racket, a copy of Commentary on the table and a framed picture of drawings of stem cells.
"He's proud to be a geek," said conservative commentator Laura Ingraham, who started the Dark Ages convention with him.
Lefkowitz, who as general counsel for the Office of Management and Budget last year was the architect of Bush's decision on stem-cell research, is attracted to controversial issues. As a junior staffer in the first Bush administration, he encouraged Vice President Dan Quayle's speech criticizing "Murphy Brown" for celebrating single motherhood and worked on an executive order restricting labor unions' power. In 1993, he joined a think tank project with Quayle's former chief of staff, William Kristol, before becoming a partner at Kirkland, Kenneth W. Starr's law firm. There, he represented Florida and Wisconsin in defense of their private-school voucher programs.
Apparently close to Rove and Karen Hughes, Lefkowitz had responsibility for beating the bushes for the Jewish vote in the 2004 election. He was mentioned as possible executive director of the platform writing committee at the GOP convention, and was reportedly considered for the top domestic policy slot in the second Bush administration before Rove took the job.
In sum, he looks like a dependable neo-con, a junior member of the trusted inner circle, loyal to George W. Bush, and ready to go that extra mile to serve President Bush’s agenda.
He could be anywhere, or nowhere. Why North Korea?
What makes the Horowitz/Lefkowitz link even more significant, beyond their reported family ties, is their shared interest in evangelical outreach.
Again, from Milbank:
Along the way, Lefkowitz has become Bush's de facto in-house ethicist and a primary liaison to Christian conservatives -- a seemingly odd role for someone of the Jewish faith. Lefkowitz, the son of New York-born Zionist parents who taught him Hebrew as his first language, keeps Kosher, has a well-thumbed Hebrew language Bible in his office and took a bicycle to work to avoid driving during Passover. Lefkowitz hopes to convince fellow Jews to embrace Republicans. In a 1996 speech, he said the Jewish community is "disintegrating," in part because of its "embrace of the assimilationist ideal endorsed by the liberal Democratic Party."
In the White House, Lefkowitz’s high profile conservative religiosity found expression in promotion of a shared, morality-based approach to social issues with the Christian right.
On a more practical plane, Lefkowitz seems to have been the godly go-to mensch when the White House wanted to reaffirm to the true believers that President Bush’s every thought and action are guided by his profound religious faith.
As revealed in Christianity Today:
Jay Lefkowitz, deputy assistant to the President, says Bush starts every policy discussion on action by asking, "What is the right thing to do?"—meaning, Lefkowitz says, "What is the morally correct thing to do?"
And from a briefing to Catholic and religious journalists reported in the Arlington Catholic Herald:
Jay Lefkowitz, deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy, said in the discussion on partial birth abortion and human cloning, the president always asks, "What is the right answer?"
The clearest indication of Lefkowitz’s role as signalman to the religious right was the spectacular botch on stem cell research.
The Bush administration touted Bush’s intense interest in this issue and the wide-ranging views presented to the President by Lefkowitz, the point man on the issue.
As reported in World Magazine (Mission Statement: To report, interpret, and illustrate the news in a timely, accurate, enjoyable, and arresting fashion from a perspective committed to the Bible as the inerrant Word of God):
WORLD interviewed Mr. Lefkowitz, former counselor to the president Karen Hughes, national campaign manager Ken Mehlman, Rep. Kay Granger, and others. They portray him as a man of faith who doesn't think he has all the answers, but who has learned to seek insights both from others and through prayerful consideration.
President Bush's decision on stem-cell research shows how he works. From March through August 2001, he painstakingly investigated the issue. The president began by asking Mr. Lefkowitz to bring in experts from all sides. …
Many others from a variety of viewpoints and expertise met with the president. Mr. Lefkowitz, who attended every one of these meetings, recalls they usually were held in the Oval Office and almost always began with the president saying to his guests, "Tell me what your opinion is and why." As the discussion continued, the president would press the experts further. In these sessions, Mr. Bush always listened, often took notes, and never failed to ask questions.
It turned out that Lefkowitz, despite the importance of the issue and the resources and Presidential focus laid at his disposal--and his own reputation as a dogged and diligent lawyer--got the science all wrong, overstating the number of existing stem cell lines by a factor of 5. With only a dozen viable lines available for research and access to new lines precluded, the federal program is irrelevant.
In retrospect, the ostentatious soul searching orchestrated by Jay Lefkowitz seems merely to have been rhetorical chaff, meant to obscure a strong, pre-existing disposition to give the evangelical right the de facto restriction on federally-funded stem cell research that it sought.
And it’s hard to see naming Lefkowitz to the special envoy post as anything other than a nod and a wink to the internationally-minded Christian conservatives that Bush shares their views on the desirability of moral militancy in our dealings with North Korea.
If the Bush administration follows through on its leaks this time and appoints Jay Lefkowitz, one can look at it in several ways:
First, an endorsement of a de facto policy of regime change against the North Korean regime.
Second, a coded signal to the evangelicals that President Bush professes to share their views and expects their enthusiastic endorsement for whatever he does on the North Korean issue.
Third, a worrisome sign that our North Korean policy will be driven by the imperative of catering to--and inflaming--one useful political constituency, at the expense of prudence, U.S. credibility as a responsible diplomatic force, and reasonable expectations of success in our effort to stabilize the situation on the Korean peninsula.
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Deja Vu All Over Again
With North Korea unwilling to return to the six-party talks, the U.S. has embarked on a policy of confrontation and saber rattling, terminating military cooperation on servicemen’s remains with the DPKR, “decapitating” the international initiative to provide North Korea with a peaceful nuke power station by removing its director, Charles Kartman, and, as reported in today’s New York Times, dispatching 15 Stealth fighters to South Korea to show Kim Jung-il:
that even though the American military is tied up in Iraq, it can reach his capital, Pyongyang, and the nuclear facilities north of it.
As the LA Times reported on May 28,
A former State Department official, who did not want to be quoted by name, said the suspension of the remains recovery program and Kartman's termination indicated a concerted effort by the administration to tighten the screws on Pyongyang."They are putting all the pieces in place to shut everything down around North Korea," he said.
The current confrontational policy against North Korea eerily recapitulates our campaign against Iraq in 2003.
Once again, the United States has labored mightily to delegitimize an unsavory regime as a pariah state and use incendiary claims about weapons of mass destruction to declare the existence of a pressing global security crisis. However, we have been unable to forge a genuine consensus concerning the nature or severity of the threat, or the proper measures to counter it. Instead of a global coalition, the Bush administration can claim the enthusiastic support of one regional ally—Japan—and the overt resistance and silent opposition of virtually all the major powers, including the dominant presence in Asia--China.
The only difference: this time we are admitting up front we’re not sure the policy will work.
From the New York Times:
But in the absence of(six-party) talks, much of the discussion inside the administration now is about instituting strong punitive measures, including interceptions of any shipments of suspected illicit goods. On Saturday, however, one official said that such an effort "just won't work if we can't get the Chinese to go along."
…
Even as the administration accepts a more pessimistic view of China's willingness to help, almost every option under discussion similarly relies on China.
As I argued in my May 26 post, the Bush administration has knowingly or unwittingly foreclosed its foreign policy options with its freedom crusade rhetoric.
The U.S. simply doesn’t have the credibility anymore to represent itself as an honest broker in the world of diplomacy, sovereignty, and negotiation.
All that’s left is the unilateral, unrestrained superpower “master of war” strategy that the Bush administration feels so comfortable with. But, without the capability to attract or compel Chinese support on North Korea, we are nowhere near being “master of events”.
So we are pursuing a foreign policy option that we understand ahead of time is probably futile.
Perhaps the Bush administration hopes that a hard line will produce some fruitful chaos, a “Perfect Storm” provoking some combination of crisis in North Korea and recalculation in China that will prove beneficial to U.S. interests.
But hope, as they say, is not a plan, and it is disturbing to see the United States resorting to a policy that can be best described as regional reckless endangerment without the mainstream press understanding the issues or the U.S. public having the slightest idea of what’s going on.
An effective resolution of our North Korean dilemma would probably require the repudiation of the Bush unilateral pre-emption doctrine and its authors. Failing that, we can only hope that when, we repeat the absurdities of Bush foreign policy this year, it is as farce, instead of tragedy.
that even though the American military is tied up in Iraq, it can reach his capital, Pyongyang, and the nuclear facilities north of it.
As the LA Times reported on May 28,
A former State Department official, who did not want to be quoted by name, said the suspension of the remains recovery program and Kartman's termination indicated a concerted effort by the administration to tighten the screws on Pyongyang."They are putting all the pieces in place to shut everything down around North Korea," he said.
The current confrontational policy against North Korea eerily recapitulates our campaign against Iraq in 2003.
Once again, the United States has labored mightily to delegitimize an unsavory regime as a pariah state and use incendiary claims about weapons of mass destruction to declare the existence of a pressing global security crisis. However, we have been unable to forge a genuine consensus concerning the nature or severity of the threat, or the proper measures to counter it. Instead of a global coalition, the Bush administration can claim the enthusiastic support of one regional ally—Japan—and the overt resistance and silent opposition of virtually all the major powers, including the dominant presence in Asia--China.
The only difference: this time we are admitting up front we’re not sure the policy will work.
From the New York Times:
But in the absence of(six-party) talks, much of the discussion inside the administration now is about instituting strong punitive measures, including interceptions of any shipments of suspected illicit goods. On Saturday, however, one official said that such an effort "just won't work if we can't get the Chinese to go along."
…
Even as the administration accepts a more pessimistic view of China's willingness to help, almost every option under discussion similarly relies on China.
As I argued in my May 26 post, the Bush administration has knowingly or unwittingly foreclosed its foreign policy options with its freedom crusade rhetoric.
The U.S. simply doesn’t have the credibility anymore to represent itself as an honest broker in the world of diplomacy, sovereignty, and negotiation.
All that’s left is the unilateral, unrestrained superpower “master of war” strategy that the Bush administration feels so comfortable with. But, without the capability to attract or compel Chinese support on North Korea, we are nowhere near being “master of events”.
So we are pursuing a foreign policy option that we understand ahead of time is probably futile.
Perhaps the Bush administration hopes that a hard line will produce some fruitful chaos, a “Perfect Storm” provoking some combination of crisis in North Korea and recalculation in China that will prove beneficial to U.S. interests.
But hope, as they say, is not a plan, and it is disturbing to see the United States resorting to a policy that can be best described as regional reckless endangerment without the mainstream press understanding the issues or the U.S. public having the slightest idea of what’s going on.
An effective resolution of our North Korean dilemma would probably require the repudiation of the Bush unilateral pre-emption doctrine and its authors. Failing that, we can only hope that when, we repeat the absurdities of Bush foreign policy this year, it is as farce, instead of tragedy.
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