Today’s Washington Post has an opinion piece, “North Korea’s Rising Urgency; Not Engaging Is Not an Alternative,” by Carl Levin (D-MI) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY). This is not an important article in that is says nothing new, it is not insightful, and only regurgitates the same left-wing, U.S. Democratic Party rhetoric. It gets mention here due to some of the misleading and incorrect statements and assertions it makes.

While I do not agree with everything the Bush administration has done with North Korea, the general direction is correct; talks that do not include, and obligate, all six nations will not succeed. The talks probably will not succeed even if the U.S., South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia can see eye-to-eye long enough to put pressure on North Korea. At any rate:

Levin-Clinton: … North Korea [may have] many times the number of nuclear weapons it did before the Bush administration took office. Thus, while the [Bush] administration wrangled internally about whether to negotiate seriously with North Korea, Pyongyang was using the time to break out as a nuclear power. Indeed, in February the North Koreans declared that they have a “nuclear weapons arsenal.” [emphasis added]

This incorrectly implies that there were no negotiations because the Bush administration did not want to negotiate, when in fact the administration has been calling for the continuation of Six-Party talks, for a “lasting solution,” since North Korea withdrew from them, while rejecting only direct talks (reasons noted above) with North Korea outside the Six-Party framework. For its own part, North Korea continually rejected talks - except bilateral ones - and set ridiculous preconditions (e.g. this, this, and this).

The truth of the matter is that neither the U.S. nor North Korea are offering ‘unconditional’ talks; the U.S. is insisting on multi-lateral talks, while the North only wants to negotiate with the U.S., or bi-lateral talks. For Levin & Clinton to ignore this is dishonest.

Levin-Clinton: Why is it that a war to address a nuclear weapons program that we now know had been dismantled can be pursued with great urgency by this administration…

Some extremely tired rhetoric. When Levin-Clinton refer to the ‘we now know’ concerning Iraq, what part do they not understand about how 20/20 hindsight works?. It is more than slightly hypocritical as well, for both of them; this page offers a wealth of direct quotes about the dangers of WMD in Iraq, from the very people now criticizing the Bush administration, while this paper, by a Clinton-era CIA analyst, explains why the analysis went the way it did.

Levin-Clinton: [sentence continued from above] …while diplomacy to eliminate a growing arsenal in North Korea is carried on in an almost lackadaisical fashion, captive to pride and preconditions?

This appears to be the tactic of say it often enough and people who do not know better will believe it. For the sake of backing statements up, here a link on U.S. policy towards talks with North Korea. This link, this one, and this one all drive home the same point. When it comes to engagement, sometimes an idiom makes especially good sense; it takes two to Tango (and North Korea is a bit shy).

Levin-Clinton: According to former defense secretary William J. Perry (in a 1999 book) it was the threat of U.N. sanctions that led to negotiations concluding in the Agreed Framework, which froze the North Korean plutonium-based nuclear program for nine years.

Perry was wrong. What UN sanctions, specifically, did North Korea worry about? None. Kim Jong-il has shown many times over that he is ready and willing to starve his people to death before backing down to the UN. Sadly, the creators of the comedy film ‘Team America‘ seem to understand this better than Perry, the Democrats, or the UN.

Perry also set aside rational policy making and succumbed to partisan politics when he departed from his own 1999 Perry Report recommendations. Specially his report called for two paths for North Korea, the first being cooperation on the nuclear issue, the second a veiled threat to take unnamed action should North Korea ultimately not comply:

We have to deal with the North Korean government not as we wish they would be, but as in fact they are. Based on these findings two policy alternatives are available to the United States and its allies. The fist and better one is to normalize relations gradually as the DPRK relinquishes its nuclear weapons programs. The other one, in case North Korea fails to do so, is to take necessary actions against North Korea to contain the threat. [emphasis added]

Yet when North Korea blatantly did not comply, and in fact was found to have pursued a Uranium-based program in addition to the Plutonium program, Perry backed-down and did not stand by his own conclusions made during the Clinton administration.

No end in sight for this issue.

Update: NK Zone had this to say.