OOPS!

Sometimes these things are just too good to overlook. In the current issue of Foreign Affairs Selig S. Harrison, Director of the Asia Program and Chairman of the Task Force on U.S. Korea Policy at the Center for International Policy, argues that the Bush administration misrepresented and distorted facts when it accused North Korea of having a secret nuclear weapon development program in violation of the 1994 agreement negotiated by the Clinton administration. He writes:

the Bush administration presented a worst-case scenario as an incontrovertible truth and distorted its intelligence on North Korea (much as it did on Iraq), seriously exaggerating the danger that Pyongyang is secretly making uranium-based nuclear weapons.

He further argues that the technical difficulties made it highly unlikely that North Korea had any coherent nuclear weapons program, and that, while we cannot ignore the worst case scenario, we cannot make it the basis of our Korea policy. He concludes:

Only after a relaxation of tensions with Pyongyang, through step-by-step mutual concessions, is the full truth about its uranium capabilities likely to be known, and only then can definitive action be taken to put the North Korean nuclear genie back in the bottle.

It's a nice article, tightly argued and moderate in tone, tainted by only a tinge of Bush loathing.

BUT!

Last Thursday North Korea abruptly announced that it had nuclear weapons and was withdrawing from the six-power talks on nuclear disarmament. This must have come as quite a surprise to the Selig Harrison but not to people who were actually talking to the North Koreans. Maurice Strong, Kofi Annan's special advisor on Korea, said Friday:

“Very few people close to the situation are surprised at anything but the timing perhaps of the announcement” because North Korea has made it clear for some time that it was continuing its program to develop nuclear weapons, he said.

“They have not explicitly said in public, but they have said certainly in their private discussions with the six parties that they do have nuclear weapons, and this has simply been affirmed now more publicly in the statement that they made,” he said.

Sorry, Mr. Harrison, it looks as though you were talking to the wrong people and maybe, just maybe, the Bush administration knew what it was talking about.