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October 27, 2008
Exclusive: Obama's Pet Conservatives: Do They Stand with Obama, Bush on Appeasing North Korea?
As the presidential campaign enters the home stretch, one of the more bizarre developments has been the decision of a tiny group of conservatives, including Kenneth Adelman, talk-show host Michael Smerconish and former Reagan Justice Department official Douglas Kmiec, to endorse Barack Obama. To be sure, conservatives have reason to be leery of John McCain, but those are tiny by comparison with the honest differences that most people on the right have with Barack Obama, an orthodox left-wing Democrat.
As I read some of the weird political contortions a few Right-of-center types are going through to explain their support for Obama, I wonder if any of these people are aware of what has been happening lately with regard to North Korea – a brutal, despotic communist tyranny – and its nuclear-weapons program. It just so happens that Barack Obama and the Bush Administration (and Condoleezza Rice's State Department, in particular) are on the same side of the issue – arguing for what I would call a "neo-appeasement" stance toward Pyongyang. Obama and the Bushies both support North Korea's removal from the terror list despite its refusal to negotiate in good faith over verification of North Korea's nuclear "disarmament." By contrast, John McCain (a politician I have been sharply critical of in this column) has taken a strong stance on principle against the Bush Administration's cave-in.
McCain is absolutely right. The administration is sending a terrible message to Pyongyang's longstanding rogue-state ally Iran: Cheat, retreat and delay long enough and you can pry new concessions out of the United States and its fellow democracies. And Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, whose former nuclear-weapons program was surrendered years ago and sits today in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is probably wondering why he ever gave it up.
It should hardly come as a surprise that the mainstream media ignore the issue. It has long been in the tank for Obama, and these people are perfectly happy to lead their newscasts (as CNN did last Wednesday) with "scoops" about the fact that Sarah Palin takes her children on taxpayer-funded political trips (something that is perfectly legal under Alaska law). The Obama political propaganda narrative is that McCain is a veritable clone of the evil George W. Bush, and the media dutifully laps it up. But how does one explain the fact that a few conservatives are ignorant of (or find it convenient to ignore) the Obama-Bush collaboration on supporting concessions to the North Korean Stalinists – or the fact that John McCain says forthrightly that this is wrong?
The unpleasant truth is that during President Bush's second term, his policy toward the Stalinist Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) regime has been dominated by dovish State Department types, mainly Rice and her North Korea point man, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill. Nowhere has this been clearer than on the issue of taking North Korea off the terrorism list. Former Undersecretary of State John Bolton argues persuasively that so long as Pyongyang is engaged in missile-development and nuclear-weapons-related collaboration with Iran and Syria, two of the world's leading state sponsors of terrorism, it should remain on the terror list. Another good reason is that a prominent U.S. ally, Japan, wants a tougher stance so long as North Korea refuses to come clean about its role in kidnapping scores of Japanese civilians in the 1970s and 1980s.
But in the six-party talks on North Korean disarmament, (the other five participating countries are the United States, Russia, China, South Korea and Japan) the Bush Administration's approach since September 2005 had been as follows: For Pyongyang to achieve its longstanding political goal of removal from the terrorism list, it would need to reach agreement with the United States on procedures for verifying North Korean nuclear disarmament. U.S. officials repeatedly emphasized to the North Koreans that a verification deal was essential for removal from the list. But Washington's resolve eventually weakened. In April, Rice suggested that the Bush Administration wanted to remove Pyongyang from the terror list before verification was even completed. More recently, North Korea started to insist that its declaration of its nuclear activities in June was sufficient for removal. When U.S. negotiators challenged this false assertion, North Korea threw out international weapons inspectors, declared its intention to reopen its Yongbyon nuclear reactor and prepared for a series of missile tests.
Unfortunately, North Korean thuggery and duplicity worked. The other participants in the six-party talks (with the exception of Japan) pressed the United States to be more accommodating and try to work something out with Pyongyang, and Washington did so earlier this month. This resulted in a loophole-ridden "compromise" that will give North Korea plenty of room to continue cheating. Victor Cha, deputy head of the U.S. delegation for the six-party talks and director of Asian Affairs on the National Security Council from 2004 to 2007 former senior U.S. negotiator in the six-party talks is cautiously supportive of the new agreement removing North Korea from the terrorism list. But, in a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, Cha admitted that under the agreement, access to undeclared North Korean nuclear sites is possible only with mutual consent, effectively giving Pyongyang a veto over U.S. inspections. Moreover, it is unclear whether North Korea's uranium-enrichment program or Pyongyang's proliferation activities with Syria would be covered by the agreement.
The Pyongyang-Damascus link is particularly important. On Sept. 6, 2007, an Israel Air Force raid destroyed Syria's Al Kibar nuclear facility. The Bush Administration publicly tried to downplay the connection between the Syrian plant and North Korea, but under intense pressure from Capitol Hill (most of it coming from Republicans) the Bush Administration briefed Congress in April about the North Korean-Syrian connection. The U.S. intelligence community noted that Al Kibar had no means of producing electricity for civilian purposes; its purpose was to produce plutonium. One indication that nuclear links between Pyongyang and Damascus were less than benign was the presence in Syria of Chon Chibu, who oversees the Yongbyon facility and participated in the six-party talks. U.S. intelligence agencies showed reporters and senior congressional representatives film of Chon meeting in Syria with the head of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission. But it is uncertain what – if anything – North Korea will be required to reveal about its military nuclear links with Damascus in exchange for its removal from the terrorism list.
But even if it turned out that the deal required Pyongyang to come clean, it isn't clear whether such a condition would survive the next artificial crisis created when Pyongyang decides to cheat yet again and make new demands, as it certainly will. As Cha, a supporter of these negotiations, acknowledges, every time North Korea engages in such blackmail, the other countries in the six-party talks (except for Japan) lean on the United States to accommodate its demands.
In this context, it is fascinating to compare the way in which McCain and Obama have reacted to the latest chapter of the Bush Administration's soft approach to Pyongyang. Obama, the great leader who is supposed to save us from four more years of George W. Bush (disguised as John McCain), praises North Korea's removal from the terrorism list, calling it "an appropriate response" and a "modest step forward." By contrast, McCain, supposedly a Bush lackey, says forthrightly that appeasing Pyongyang is wrong. In an interview with the Weekly Standard, he sharply criticized the agreement and likened to the Clinton Administration's 1994 Agreed Framework agreement with North Korea (negotiated by Jimmy Carter.). Of course, we know what happened: Pyongyang trashed the agreement and went on to build a small nuclear arsenal.
In his Weekly Standard interview, McCain added that engaging North Korea in face-to-face talks at the presidential level, as Obama has promised to do, would present serious risks. McCain spoke contemptuously about Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's trip to Pyongyang in 2000. "She had a very nice experience with children dancing while the gulag....continued to function," he noted.
So, in this context, I'm curious: Are Barack Obama's pet conservatives ignorant of the differences between their main and John McCain on North Korea? And if they are aware of these important substantive differences, how can they explain voting for Obama?
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Joel Himelfarb is an editorial writer for The Washington Times. The views expressed here are his own.
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