Isn’t it amazing? Every day comes a new revelation about how moronic Bush’s axis of evil speech really was (via The New York Times):
For nearly five years, though, the Bush administration, based on intelligence estimates, has accused North Korea of also pursuing a secret, parallel path to a bomb, using enriched uranium. That accusation, first leveled in the fall of 2002, resulted in the rupture of an already tense relationship: The United States cut off oil supplies, and the North Koreans responded by throwing out international inspectors, building up their plutonium arsenal and, ultimately, producing that first plutonium bomb.
But now, American intelligence officials are publicly softening their position, admitting to doubts about how much progress the uranium enrichment program has actually made. The result has been new questions about the Bush administration’s decision to confront North Korea in 2002.
“The question now is whether we would be in the position of having to get the North Koreans to give up a sizable arsenal if this had been handled differently,” a senior administration official said this week.
Words have consequences. Especially the words uttered by US Presidents. Bush has never understood that, because he’s never had to face the consequences of his own actions his entire life. Someone has always been there to take the blame for him. Now it appears that his policy of confrontation, sparked by his ludicrous “Axis of Evil” reference in the 2002 State of the Union address, pushed North Korea to accelerate its plutonium bomb making program. Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration is claiming this was all the fault of “bad intelligence.”
Sound familiar? This is the same crew that made George Tenet (and collectively the CIA) fall on his sword in order to cover up the fact that it was their own bogus Office of Special Plans, overseen by Douglas Feith at the Pentagon, which was most responsible for the “poor quality of intelligence” regarding Saddam’s WMD capability, the primary reason advanced by the Bush administration for invading Iraq. Now we are being asked, once again, to blame the intelligence community for the failed foreign policy decisions of the Bush administration:
Two administration officials, who declined to be identified, suggested that if the administration harbored the same doubts in 2002 that it harbored now, the negotiating strategy for dealing with North Korea might have been different — and the tit-for-tat actions that led to October’s nuclear test could, conceivably, have been avoided.
… One former official said that it was Ms. Rice, in a meeting at the C.I.A. in 2004, who encouraged intelligence officials to soften their assessments of how quickly the North Koreans could produce weapons-usable uranium.
“She asked, how did we know about the timing, and they didn’t have answers,” said the former official. “Did they have Russians and Chinese helping them? No one was sure. It was really a guesstimate about timing.”
Different players in the 2002 debate have different memories. John R. Bolton, the former American ambassador to the United Nations, who headed the State Department’s proliferation office at the time of the 2002 declaration, said in an interview on Wednesday evening that “there was no dissent at the time, because in the face of the evidence the disputes evaporated.” Mr. Bolton, one of the most hawkish voices in the administration and a vocal critic of its recent deal with North Korea, recalled that even the State Department’s own intelligence arm, which was the most skeptical of the Iraq evidence, “agreed with the consensus opinion.”
This sounds like revisionist history to me. How convenient that Condoleeza Rice is being heralded as a voice of reason just when we have finally made some progress on a deal with North Korea, a deal we likely could have had 5 years ago. As for John Bolton’s claim of a consensus in the intelligence community, even among the State Department intelligence analysts, I have great doubt as to the veracity of that remark.
Bolton was put in charge of the non-proliferation office at State by Bush, and he continually pushed the most aggressive line toward the North Koreans. Furthermore, he had the constant support of Vice President Cheney, a known hawk when it comes to “rogue nation states” not named Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. And lets not forget the Bush administration’s SDI initiative, which largely was hyped on the potential threat of North Korean ballistic missiles tipped with nuclear warheads.
So color me highly skeptical of any claim that “bad intelligence” is to blame for our foreign policy blunders regarding North Korea. This is the administration that sees what it wants to see, hears what it wants to hear, and suppresses any dissenting voices. They wanted to paint a picture of North Korea as a dangerous nuclear threat to the United States, so that is the picture they got. When you name a country part of the “axis of evil” evoking images of the original “axis powers,” Nazi Germany, Militarist Japan and Fascist Italy, from WWII, the intelligence tends to get fixed around the policy, not the other way around.
