Asshole Bush blew North Korea out his butt and now it's back to bite him there

1. Dear Leaders -- by Molly Ivins

AUSTIN, Texas - Nobody else seems to be asking the obvious question about Susan B. Ralston, former administrative assistant to Jack Abramoff and, until last week, assistant to Karl Rove. She got hired by Rove at $64,700 after the 2004 election and then received a raise to $122,000. Why? I’ve never gotten a 100 percent raise. Did you? Is this common?

I know next to nothing about North Korea, but I know how to find out. People who do know the weird country have been worrying about it in print for six years now. (See articles in The New York Review of Books.) Eric Alterman picked this bit up in “The Book on Bush”: “The tone of [Colin] Powell’s tenure was set early in the administration, when he announced that he planned ‘to pick up where the Clinton administration had left off’ in trying to secure the peace between North and South Korea, while negotiating with the North to prevent its acquisition of nuclear weaponry. The president not only repudiated his secretary of state in public, announcing, ‘We’re not certain as to whether or not they’re keeping all terms of all agreements,’ he did so during a joint appearance with South Korean President (and Nobel laureate for peace for his own efforts with the North) Kim Dae-Jung, thereby humiliating his honored guest, as well.

“A day later, Powell backpedaled. ‘The president forcefully made the point that we are undertaking a full review of our relationship with North Korea,’ Powell said. ‘There was some suggestion that imminent negotiations are about to begin—that is not the case.’ ”

This was pre-9/11, when Bush’s entire foreign policy consisted in not doing whatever Clinton had done, and vice versa. Also from “The Book on Bush”: “As former Ambassadors Morton Abramowitz and James Laney warned at the moment of Bush’s carelessly worded ‘Axis of Evil’ address, ‘Besides putting another knife in the diminishing South Korean president,’ the speech would likely cause ‘dangerous escalatory consequences, (including) ... renewed tensions on the peninsula and continued export of missiles to the Mideast.’ ... North Korea called the Bush bluff, and the result, notes (Washington Post) columnist Richard Cohen, was ‘a stumble, a fumble, an error compounded by a blooper ... as appalling a display of diplomacy as anyone has seen since a shooting in Sarajevo turned into World War I.’ ”

Remember Bush’s diplomatic interview with Bob Woodward in which he said, “I loathe Kim Jong Il!” Waving his finger, he added, “I’ve got a visceral reaction to this guy because he is starving his people.” Bush also said he wanted to “topple him” and called him a “pygmy.” How old were you when you learned not to antagonize and infuriate the local crazy bully?

Always a top diplomat. But I warn you, when Bush makes reference of this, as in “my gut tells me,” we are in big trouble. By any measure, North Korea continued to be more dangerous than Iraq.

I don’t see how this mess can be blamed on anyone but Bush, but I notice that a few Republicans have dragged out the shade of Bill Clinton because he tried to deal with North Korea. I would have thought there wasn’t much water left in that bogeyman, but I guess he is the straw man for all seasons among Republicans. Why doesn’t someone on Fox News ask him about it?

Meanwhile, our fiendishly clever president has dragged his daddy’s old family consigliore , James Baker, out of retirement to think of something to do about Iraq. A three-part partition is mentioned. History Professor Juan Cole on his blog explains why that’s a disaster, but I suspect that’s where the poor Iraqis end up anyway, followed by war with Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

(Molly Ivins is from Houston, Texas, graduated from Smith College in 1966, attended Columbia University's School of Journalism and studied for a year at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris. Her first newspaper job was at the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. She rapidly worked her way up to the position of sewer editor, where she wrote a number of gripping articles about street closings. She went on to the Minneapolis Tribune and was the first woman police reporter in that city. In the late 1960s, she was assigned to a beat called "Movements for Social Change," covering angry blacks, radical students, uppity women and a motley assortment of other misfits and troublemakers. Ivins counts as her highest honors that the Minneapolis police force named its mascot pig after her, and that she was once banned from the campus of Texas A&M.)


2. A Good Week for the Axis of Evil
Two of its three countries made strides in acquiring nukes, and Bush should get a big chunk of the blame.
By Rosa Brooks

There was good news and bad news for authoritarians this week.

On the international front, the authoritarian regime in North Korea scored a major victory, testing a nuclear weapon in defiance of the United States and the world community. Sure, millions of North Koreans face potential famine, but the "Dear Leader" himself — Kim Jong Il — is sitting pretty.

With dissidents tucked away in prison and scarce food supplies doled out strictly on the basis of ideology and party loyalty, Kim has every reason to indulge in a bit of self-congratulation. Technologically, his nuclear test may have been only a partial success, but it sure did get the world's attention. As the Korean Central News Agency — the "Dear Leader's" media mouthpiece — reported on Monday, this is "truly a stirring time when all the people of the country are making a great leap forward in the building of a great, prosperous, powerful socialist nation."

Elsewhere in the "axis of evil," things are also looking good. With the world otherwise occupied, the authoritarian Iranian regime has continued to suppress dissent and advance its own nuclear program, and it's surely heartened by North Korea's "great leap forward."

Al Qaeda must be pleased by the news too. Because Kim has always made clear his willingness to sell lethal technologies to the highest bidder, Al Qaeda has another potential purveyor of nuclear weapons.

Even Saddam Hussein may be enjoying the week's news. After all, he's having a ball at his Baghdad trial, while the U.S. struggles to respond to the rising tide of violence in Iraq and is impotent against Iran and North Korea.

If the "axis of evil" keeps making great leaps forward, we may someday see an Asia where a nuclear North Korea is a major power-broker, a Middle East where a nuclear Iran is a major power-broker, and a destabilized world where terrorist groups hold states hostage through their possession of nuclear technologies.

Back on the domestic front, however, this week's news was a humiliating setback for the United States' homegrown authoritarians — a.k.a. the Bush administration — who once pledged to keep nuclear weapons away from the "axis of evil."

In the 1990s, the Clinton administration used a mix of tough sanctions and incentives to keep North Korea and Iran from becoming urgent threats to global security. Though imperfect, that approach produced results. Under President Clinton, for instance, the North Koreans produced no new plutonium, conducted no nuclear weapons tests and produced no new nuclear weapons.

But like Kim and the Iranian mullahs, our own "Dear Leader" — President Bush — prizes ideology and loyalty uber alles.

When he took office, he refused to have anything to do with the policies embraced by his predecessors. Instead of using diplomacy and a careful balance of carrots and sticks, Bush just blustered and threatened. Dividing the world into good and evil, black and white, Bush insisted that he wouldn't negotiate with evil. And he tolerated no internal dissent. When then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell praised Clinton for reining in North Korean nuclear ambitions, Bush sent out Vice President Dick Cheney to issue a public rebuke.

Today, with North Korea and Iran openly thumbing their noses at us, we're seeing the predictable result of Bush's rigid and simplistic policies.

Of course, Bush's foolish policies were supported by all too many Americans — particularly those who share Bush's penchant for authoritarian-style political thinking. Data from the National Election Study suggest that, in recent years, those Americans with authoritarian personalities have flocked to the Republican Party.

Writing in the Democratic Strategist, Jonathan Weiler and Marc Hetherington note that "authoritarian personalities" are characterized by "a general moral, political and social intolerance, an aversion to ambiguity and a related desire for clear and unambiguous authority." Given their "antipathy toward complexity and moral ambiguity," authoritarians prefer "clear and simply stated solutions to vexing problems." And guess what? When you introduce voters with authoritarian personalities to Bush's "you're with us or you're against us" foreign policy, it's a match made in heaven!

But the real world is messy and ambiguous rather than black and white. In the real world, simplistic solutions that appeal to authoritarian personalities often backfire. Certainly, when it comes to the "axis of evil," the Bush administration's rigid, reductionist, good-versus-evil policies have only enhanced the power of our authoritarian foreign enemies.

Bottom line? This was a good week for foreign authoritarians, and a bad week for our homegrown ones.

But there's a silver lining for our local authoritarians. If the North Koreans or the Iranians ever do manage to take over the globe, our homegrown authoritarians may have to go through a brief period of reeducation. But after that, they're gonna fit right in.


3. Why Bush “Lost” Korea – by Tony Karon

The furor over North Korea’s bomb test, if that’s what it was, has highlighted the extent to which the Bush Administration has squandered Washington’s traditional global leadership role. Sure, the international community is united in condemning Pyongyang’s nuclear test — the world never applauds the emergence of a new nuclear-weapons power. But much of the international community actually holds the Bush Administration partly responsible for this development because of its refusal to engage seriously with the regime in Pyongyang, which gave it neither sufficient incentive to refrain from testing nor disincentive for doing so. The Bush policy had simply created yet another vacuum, to be filled by its enemies. And when Condoleezza Rice, asks the world to believe that the reason the U.S. can’t talk directly to Pyongyang because it lacks the strength, alone, to force North Korea to keep its promises, the world simply rolls its eyes and wonders when the U.S. is going to get serious.

But another indication of just how seriously the Administration regards the diplomacy of convincing others to follow the U.S. lead is the identity of its UN ambassador — John Bolton. Bolton, whose answer when asked a couple of years ago what lesson Iran and North Korea should take from the U.S. invasion of Iraq, answered “Take a number.” But there are too many instances of Bolton’s demagogic bluster to document. Let’s just say the world looks at Bolton and sees an infantile provocateur who has about as much to offer international diplomacy as does Bill O’Reilly.

But it’s not Bolton’s John Wayne shtick that makes the Security Council push back against the U.S. in order to ensure that the sanctions that are adopted will be largely symbolic, and will facilitate rather than hinder a resumption of negotiations with Pyongyang. It’s simply that the U.S. is unable to lead because it offers no plausible endgame. Resuming talks aimed at a denuclearization deal is the only sane endgame, so the others on the Security Council will ensure that its condemnation and punishment of North Korea works towards that goal.

North Korea is simply the latest failure highlighting a foreign policy hobbled by ideological flights of fancy and a remarkable inability to recognize the limits of U.S. power to remake distasteful realities. When the paintball revolutionary who penned Buhs’s “Axis of Evil” speech popped up this week with a prescription for the Korea crisis that included forcing South Korea to starve North Korea, encouraging Japan to build nuclear weapons, and inviting Taiwan to NATO meetings in order to “punish” China, what became abundantly clear was that the Administration has suffered all along from an absence of adult supervision. .

Colin Powell was always treated like the hired help by the berserk brats he was supposed to be minding. And it was on North Korea that this first became apparent. Powell had been on the job scarcely three weeks when he told reporters that the new administration would be pursuing the engagement strategy of the Clinton team, and was publicly rebuked by Bush, who also made clear his disdain for South Korea’s ‘Sunshine’ policy of engaging the North . The Cheney crowd was having none of it, and appeared to have persuaded Bush that by sheer force of its “moral clarity,” the U.S. could smite those deemed “evil” from its path. Regime-change, not engagement that propped up Kim Jong-il was what they wanted, and this clearly appealed to a president who made no secret of his loathing of Kim. Of course, “regime-change” was a non-starter in the real world, not only because the U.S. couldn’t make it happen without at least a million Koreans being killed, but also because it was flatly rejected by South Korea — whose protection was ostensibly the purpose of the U.S. presence on the peninsula. (For four decades, South Korea had been a military dictatorship ready to do Washington’s bidding; when it finally became a democracy in the early 90s it began adopting positions increasingly at odds with those of the U.S.)

Nobody had any interest in “regime-change,” but the “moral clarity” imperative allowed the hawks to reject any real engagement with North Korea. The result was a hybrid policy that went nowhere, eventually forcing the U.S. to accept the six-party process but never doing what it was going to take — as China and South Korea repeatedly implored — to make it work: direct U.S.-North Korea talks, and security guarantees offered to Pyongyang from the only power it truly feared. That’s why there’s so much pressure on the U.S. five days after North Korea’s announcement to retract its policy of no diret talks. That’ll happen eventually, of course (either on this administration’s watch or the next). And Powell may permit himself a wry smile.

There are general lessons in all of this, of course. Here, a random ten flaws it exposes in the Administration’s handling of foreign affairs:
Megaphone Diplomacy : To be fair to Bush, this began with Madeleine Albright marching around the world on behalf of Bill Clinton and “the indispensable nation” and simply reading everyone else the riot act. Then again, Bush did promise a “humble foreign policy” on his way to the presidency in 2000, and produced anything but. So now, it’s Condi Rice traveling around the world touting”transformational diplomacy,” spreading “creative chaos” in order to change the world, lecturing all and sundry as she went on the error of their ways. Naturally, this approach does little to sway neutrals, or even allies. The essence of diplomacy is conversation: The Bush Administration’s failure to grasp this is evident in one of Bush’s arguments against talking directly to North Korea — “They know our position.”
Selective Hearing : Obviously, the megaphone approach doesn’t lend itself to listening to others. And the basis of diplomacy is listening to others and taking account of their concerns as you push your own agenda — you win the game by articulating your positions in a way that accomodates and addresses the concerns and interests of those you’re facing across the table. That, for example, is exactly what China is doing when it tells the U.S. that Pyongyang has crossed a line and must be punished, but at the same time emphasizes that the punishment must be “appropriate and prudent” and must advance the goal of a negotiated settlement. The reason the Bush Administration has hit a wall time and again at the UN Security Council (Iraq, Iran, and now North Korea) precisely because it only hears that part of what others are saying that affirms the U.S. position. It hears that nobody wants Iran to develop nuclear weapons, or that everyone condemns North Korea’s test, and appears to then deduce that this means others support the U.S. position. But then, when it comes down to action, it discovers that the U.S. position lacks the support to prevail. (I’ve been hearing State Department officials predicting for over a year now that Iran is weeks away from facing sanctions backed by Russia and China… When that doesn’t happen, they say they’re going slowly to “keep Russia and China on board” — as if they’re actually driving a process that has Russia and China “on board.”) If they’d listen properly to what others are saying they’d hear a critique of their own simplistic policies, which others are not prepared to endorse. More often, others are addressing U.S. concerns while articulating what they see as a more prudent and pragmatic way of addressing them.
Don’t Bring it Unless You Can Win it : Kofi Annan has warned the Administration repeatedly that bringing matters to the Security Council without a consensus among the Permanent Five members is a recipe for disaster. Yet the U.S. keeps on doing it, with the result that it’s authority has been continuously denuded. It started over Iraq: It would once have been unthinkable for the likes of Mexico and Chile to resist a U.S. geopolitical initiative that didn’t adversely affect their own interests — to say no to the U.S. simply because they thought it was wrong. Yet so bizarre was the U.S. request for authorization for war in February of 2003 that they did, in fact, say no. And not only were they not punished for it, they were actually vindicated. (What better testimony to Condi Rice’s giddy detachment from reality than her suggestion that the U.S. would “ forgive Russia, ignore Germany, punish France “, all for having been proved right about Iraq.) The more serious point here, of course, was that Iraq was the beginning of a new era in which others didn’t have to take what the U.S. said at the UN that seriously. Other countries could say no to the U.S. and suffer no consequences.
Don’t Write Checks You Can’t Cash : Or else what? That’s how North Korea has responded to every red line drawn by the U.S. so far, and Iran is starting to do the same. The U.S. “won’t tolerate” North Korea testing a nuclear weapon. And then it does. And so the U.S. has to move its red line of intolerability to the insistence that North Korea refrain from sharing its nuclear weapons with others. The U.S. sets Iran deadlines for compliance with the demand to end uranium enrichment, and Iran simply ignores those and answers in its own time. If the U.S. is unable to really to act to reverse those transgressions of red lines, it’s better not to have drawn them in the first place. It’s a simple case of recognizing what the U.S. is able to do by the use of force, and not issuing empty threats which only further undermine its credibility.
In Whose Interest?: Perhaps blinded by its own sense of moral authority or raw power, the Bush Administration has often failed to ask the most basic question of international cooperation: Are there mutual interests that can create agreement for united action among disparate parties. I once heard the idea attributed to John Foster Dulles (not sure that he actually said it) that “America doesn’t have friends; America only has interests.” The same is true for everyone else, too. So, take an issue like getting Chinese support for sanctions or related forms of pressure against Iran: The Bush Administration has operated on the assumption that if the U.S. asks hard and often enough, China will be somehow shamed or cajoled into going along with the crowd. I’ve seen countless instances of Administration officials telling journalists exactly that. And it’s ludicrous. Among China’s vital national interests, now, is access to expanded supplies of oil and natural gas, and to that end it has committed some $70 billion to investment in extracting Iran’s energy resources. Comprehensive sanctions, therefore, let alone regime-change (which the Chinese would correctly suspect may be the real U.S. motive) runs absolutely counter to China’s vital national interests. Frankly, even a nuclear-armed Iran is less threatening to Beijing’s interests than sanctions or regime change. So, on what basis is the Bush Administration demanding Chinese support? What’s in it for Beijing? I’ve never heard a coherent interests-based argument about why China should support U.S. policy on Iran — or even a sense that the U.S. has offered concessions to Chinese interests on some other front, say Taiwan, in order to win their support on Iran. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that Beijing doesn’t support U.S. policy on Iran. And it’s all very well for the U.S. to demand a hard line on North Korea, but the affect of its implementation on South Korea or China make clear why it is not in their interest. (The prime Chinese interest in North Korea is stability, and perhaps also avoiding a situation where the U.S. expands its presence on China’s doorstep.)

A corollary to the point about interests is the question of priority: The priorities of the Bush administration are not those of the entire global community, and to the extent that Washington has failed to recongize this, U.S. leadership has declined. The idea that the defining issue of our time is the terrorism of al-Qaeda and the like is laughable to most of the world — from a strategic point of view, John Kerry was right: Terrorism is a nuisance issue, a matter of law and order. The fact that it’s been all the Bush administration wants to talk about in global forums for years is why, for example in APEC, China is now the dominant player. (Bush comes to APEC to talk about terrorism, which for most of the Asian countries is a peripheral concern, at best — Beijing comes all to talk business, in the way that Bill Clinton used to do.)
‘Moral Clarity’ and Talking to the Enemy: The Bush Administration won’t talk to Iran, North Korea, Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood…. To talk to them, say the hawks, would legitimize them. That’s just plain dumb. None of these political entities is dependent on U.S. recognition for their political status. The legitimacy of Hamas and Hizballah, for example, is established at the ballot box and on the ground through popular actions. Denying them contact with the U.S. hardly weakens the regimes in Tehran, Pyongyang or Damascus, it simply weakens the U.S. ability to anticipate, manage and resolve dangerous conflicts. What I find particularly ironic about this position is that it’s adopted in the name of a Reaganesque “Moral Clarity.” Sure, Reagan had the “moral clarity” to denounce the Soviet Union as “Evil,” but he still pursued the most extensive engagement with its leaders of any U.S. President. The reason James Baker is out publicly telling everyone why it pays to talk to “the enemy” is simply this: Bush Junior, having finally started to panic over the mess he’s made of Iraq, has called in the grownups to clean up — and cleaning up will involve some very generous talking to Iran and Syria, among others…
The fact that interests sometimes coincide doesn’t mean they always coincide: The corollary to the point above is that while two countries can have a common interests on a single issue, they may have sharp differences on another issue. And if the second issue is more important to the country concerned than it is to the U.S., then the mutual interest on the first point won’t be enough to secure an active alliance. Cond Rice’s recent ‘Look Busy’ tour of the Middle East is a perfect example: Having recognized that the moderate pro-U.S. Arab regimes were antagonized by Hizballah’s summer provocation of Israel and that they saw it as a sign of hostile Iranian meddling on their turf, the Administration went out to rally support for a U.S.-Israel-Arab moderate united front against Iran and Hamas — knowing, also, that Islamist groups are threatening to the Arab moderates. But for those regimes, the Israel-Palestinian conflict is a far more immediate crisis and concern, because it generates the hostility towards the U.S. and regimes that do its bidding that Hizballah and other radicals can exploit. So, those regimes want the U.S. as a matter of extreme urgency to move to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and create a fair solution based on the 1967 borders. And that is something the U.S. refuses to do, with the result that the Arab moderates showed no interest in jumping on the anti-Iran, anti-Hamas bandwagon, and Rice’s trip became another flop.
Between Diplomacy and Surrender… : When President Bush talks about diplomacy, he doesn’t mean the sort of give-and-take discussion typically associated with the word. He usually means a kind of foreplay to the main event, a process that must “exhaust itself” in order to persuade others to join a posse for more punitive action. So, it means talking to friends and potential allies about measures that can be adopted to force the other side to submit to the demands and ultimatums of the U.S. and its allies. Diplomacy on Iran for Bush means the Europeans giving Iran a take it or leave it ultimatum, and then talking to the Europeans about what sanctions to put in place. And, of course, North Korea “knows our position.” So it’s not just megaphone diplomacy, what’s being said into the megaphone is “come out with your hands up.” Unless the adversary has or believes he will be defeated by U.S. military power, it doesn’t work.
The Diminishing Returns of Force : Madeleine Albright once asked what the point of America having such a great army was if it wasn’t willing to use it. The answer, of course, is that it may well be more useful unused than used. Having deployed American force in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. has created not one but two situations in which it has failed to prevail by force. And the lesson is not lost on America’s adversaries. Moreover, the fact that those two conflicts remain unresolved and a heavy strain on American military and financial resources further emboldens enemies. The Iranians, for example, now know that even if the U.S. bombed it, it is unable to seriously entertain the possibility of a land war — and Iran can exact a heavy price even for air attacks because of the exposed U.S. flank in Iraq.
You Only Run This Town if People Think You Run This Town : Speaks for itself, really, that line from “Miller’s Crossing.” In the early days of the Bush Administration, “multipolarity” — the notion of a world made up of various power centers combining variously to secure their interests in a variety of different formations and creating a fabric of stability was the wishful thinking of French foreign policy thinktanks. After all, there was only one “Hyperpower,” as Villepin put it. Yet six years into the Bush Administration, multipolarity has become a reality. Iraq has left U.S. power stained and no longer intimidating to regional foes; U.S. failure to impose its will in the disastrous war of choice there has brought a precipitous decline in its diplomatic influence. Foreigners listening to Bush define what’s going on in Iraq as a war between democracy and “Islamofascism” can’t possibly take him serious. North Korea’s nuclear test, and the way the UN will respond, are both symptoms of the decline in the perception of U.S. power, and of Washington’s ability to provide global leadership that others will benefit from following. Everybody knows, now, that the “hyperpower” is on the skids. It’s still by far the most powerful entity on the planet, but its power is not nearly absolute as Villepin and others once feared. The Administration still acts as if it runs the planet, but everything from the antics of Hugo Chavez to the defiance of North Korea and Iran, and the quiet but firm push-back from China, Russia and the Europeans on a number of diplomatic fronts suggest that, unfortunately for Bush, the secret is out.