DETROIT -- President George W. Bush is talking to our enemies and making significant progress. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is salvaging a shred of accomplishment she hopes will cloak her long parade of diplomatic failures. Vice President Dick Cheney is seething, locked in his bat cave, sipping bourbon and wishing he could personally torture someone -- Condi Rice, for starters.
North Korea got scratched from Bush's Axis of Evil litany and removed from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terror by agreeing to declare its nuclear program to the outside world, paving the way for negotiations aimed at keeping the entire Korean peninsula nuclear-free.
Since Bush has long scoffed at diplomacy, and Cheney -- his master and commander -- would rather bomb than talk any day, the deal with North Korea marks a seismic shift for the administration's foreign policy. Though time is running out in the final year of his presidency, Bush has finally done something right. Hooray for Bush! There, I said it.
Of course, the talks should have begun eight years ago as a continuation of the negotiations President Bill Clinton and his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, initiated. Then there might have been a chance of dissuading Kim Jong Il from building the nukes he now has and the missile capability to deliver them.
The North Koreans, perhaps with choreographic counseling from Americans, provided the conspicuous visuals television news just laps up. A cooling tower used for a reactor extracting plutonium for its nuclear weapons was demolished with a blast.
It was more symbol than substance, and I wonder how many people watching the event realized that, as part of the deal, the North Koreans, for now, get to keep the nuclear weapons they've already produced.
That concession -- dare I say, appeasement -- was granted in spite of Bush's 2003 statement "We will not tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea. We will not give in to blackmail. We will not settle for anything less than complete, verifiable and irreversible elimination of North Korea's nuclear weapons program."
Bush also despises Kim Jong II, the madman Marxist who rules North Korea with brutality Stalin would find excessive. "Look, he's a dangerous person," Bush said in 2005. "He's a man who starves his people. He's got huge concentration camps."
True enough. So why would we warm up to a man who stated his nuclear weapons intentions, built them, set one off, and lobbed a missile over Japan? And at the same time start a war in Iraq and go after Saddam Hussein, who dismantled his nuclear program and permitted U.N. weapons inspectors to verify he did not have reconstituted nuclear weapons?
The proximity of U.S. troops in South Korea and naval and air bases in the Far East made North Korea a logistically more desirable military target than Iraq. And who in their right mind could possibly suggest Saddam was a greater threat than Kim Jong Il? It's all about resources. No oil in North Korea, lots of oil in Iraq.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, who had the guts to introduce impeachment resolutions for Bush and Cheney, noted the oily truth and slimy greed in a speech on the House floor last week.
"In March of 2001, when the Bush administration began to have secret meetings with oil company executives from Exxon, Shell and BP, spreading maps of Iraq oil fields before them, the price of oil was $23.96 a barrel," Kucinich said. "Then there were 63 companies in 30 countries other than the U.S. competing for oil contracts in Iraq."
Kucinich pointed at the bloody obvious spoils of the war, a resource grab for the ages: "Today, the price of oil is $135.56 per barrel, the U.S. Army is occupying Iraq and the first Iraq oil contracts will go without competitive bidding to -- surprise! -- among a few others, Exxon, Shell and BP."
The pact with North Korea does, however, demonstrate a direction of realism and pragmatism long overdue in an administration where ideologues and fanatics have dominated foreign policy.
Cheney, with his Jabba the Hutt-like antagonism toward the rest of the galaxy, is on a well-deserved sabbatical, and he's not happy. He would have preferred some kind of military confrontation with North Korea, or at very least a public humiliation of Kim Jong Il. The Cheney doctrine -- linked to his dark-side view of nearly everything -- requires threats, intimidation, bullying and violence. For Cheney and his neocon comrades, anything that deviates from dominance and unilateralism represents weakness, failure and surrender.
Britain's Telegraph reports Cheney fought furiously to scuttle any pact with the North Koreans, using all his considerable powers to dominate on the issue. A Pentagon adviser present at some of the discussions set the scene, as the newspaper described how "the exchanges between Cheney's office and Rice's people got very testy. But ultimately Condi had the president's ear and persuaded him that his legacy would be stronger if they reached a deal with Pyongyang."
Rice, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Christopher Hill, assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs, set the course and guided the delicate negotiations with the North Koreans, and they did it in concert with five other nations.
The multinational talks will continue and North Korea will be getting money and international assistance to try to do something to boost the nation's basket-case economy. Also, future negotiations will attempt to dismantle North Korean nuclear weapons and end the proliferation of the technology.
Cheney -- who has his dirty hands in everything -- suddenly pulled a Pontius Pilate on the anticipated North Korean deal. The New York Times reports Cheney showed his contempt for the negotiations last week at a private, off-the-record meeting with some foreign policy experts.
Cheney fielded questions for half an hour "without missing a beat," according to the Times, until someone dared to bring up reports of an impending move to yank North Korea from the terrorism blacklist. Asked to "set the context of this decision," Cheney sat "for several long seconds ... unsmiling" pointing to himself and saying, "I'm not going to be the one to announce this decision." And then, tellingly, he said, "You need to address your interest in this to the State Department," and he then huffed out of the meeting.
When do you suppose Cheney last placed a call to Rice? When did he last speak to Colin Powell, either when he was secretary of state or afterward? When did he last consult George Schultz or Jim Baker, Ronald Reagan's and George H.W. Bush's boys at Foggy Bottom? Cheney's disdain for diplomacy is legendary.
Now he finally lost a major foreign policy debate, a moment of historic consequence. Rice's diplomatic approach prevailed. Had one of the participants at the meeting with Cheney asked him about the threat from North Korea, the vice president would have delayed his cocktail hour and rambled on in his solemn, ominous tones about the imperative to isolate the nation and prepare for another one of Cheney's ecstasy moments -- military action that presents no personal risk to him.
Perhaps now Rice and the State Department can press on. She recently criticized Israel for building more settlements on the West Bank, impeding the peace process. Cheney and his cronies -- many of whom are staunch supporters, some even on the payroll, of Likud extremists in Israel -- would never have approved speaking such bold truth.
The approach to North Korea may offer a lesson on how to approach Iran and deal with its nuclear ambitions. Maybe trying a little gentle conversation could help there, too. Cheney will be slurping more bourbon and putting his pacemaker on overdrive if Rice dares to move in that direction.
The presidential candidates were predictably cautious about the rapprochement with North Korea, neither daring to step out too far and risk seeming soft.
Sen. John McCain offered a bland, unenthusiastic comment that he is "interested in hearing all the details." McCain's disposition toward negotiations is more Cheney than Rice.
Sen. Barack Obama has been busy hugging Sen. Hillary Clinton, picking up her campaign bills and adjusting his principles to serve his immediate political needs. But he cleverly invoked the Republicans' civic saint when addressing the North Korea deal, saying, "In the words of Ronald Reagan, we have to trust but verify."
Lately, Obama has been twisting, contorting and flipping on some core issues -- public campaign financing, government spying without warrants, immunity for the giant telecom companies that broke the law, the death penalty, and surely more to come.
The Democratic candidate's willingness to use cunning and duplicity to win the election inspired a Slate magazine reader to coin the word "Barackiavellian." Nonetheless, the young prince showed enlightenment early on in the campaign, when he said he was willing to sit down and talk with Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea.
Obama brings fresh eyes to America's role in the world. McCain has morphed into Cheney lite, and perhaps worse. He's becoming increasingly hard-line and stuck in old, failed thinking.
Whoever wins this election will inherit an awful mess, with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the distrust of most of the world. But a breakthrough with North Korea and a diplomatic framework in place to follow give the next president a little breathing room and an important opportunity.
Thanks to Rice and her staff, and to Bush for giving her the chance and daring to talk to our enemies.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | July 1 2008 |