Word: pyongyang
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...would be easier for Bush to be patient with the liars in Pyongyang and contemptuous of the liars in Baghdad if he hadn't set himself up as being morally allergic to deals with the devil. But the Administration has long seen distinctions among the evils in its axis. The North Koreans confessed, which implies a willingness to keep talking. Saddam continues to dodge and deny, which to the Bushies implies that only force can work. "North Korea isn't an imminent threat to anyone," says former CIA Director Bob Gates. "They haven't attacked anyone in 50 years." Iraq...
...admission, which suggests they wrestled with the potential complications. Inside the Bush wheelhouse, the hard-liners will debate among themselves: Should we isolate North Korea--or just bomb its reprocessing facilities? Cooler heads are likely to prevail, and Bush will team up with China and Japan to force Pyongyang into another give-up-the-nukes-for-aid agreement--but only after enough time passes so that no one can accuse the men who model themselves on Churchill of looking like Chamberlain...
Whatever happens, they can--and probably will--argue that their hard line is working and that messages sent in one direction are being heard in another. Administration officials suggest Pyongyang was worried that Bush's doctrine of pre-emption might eventually be pointed in its direction. For most of the past two years, Bush hard-liners have refused to even talk to North Korea, believing that the Clinton policy of engagement was for suckers. Having confessed, the North Koreans are now subject to diplomatic pressure. "This is an Administration that was determined not to get into a dialogue with them...
Mistrust of North Korea has been a bedrock U.S. policy since war on the Korean peninsula ended in 1953. Pyongyang's erratic behavior consistently confirms such skepticism. The latest confrontation was quite deliberate, says a senior Bush aide. For more than two years, the CIA had been collecting shards of information suggesting that North Korea was secretly pursuing nuclear weapons, despite the 1994 Agreed Framework requiring Pyongyang to freeze its program to extract plutonium from reprocessed reactor fuel. (The CIA has long thought that North Korea made--and kept--one or two plutonium-based bombs from before...
...dismantle its weapons of mass destruction, North Korea admitted it had for several years been conducting a clandestine program to develop nukes. Washington said the revelation came earlier this month, after Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly presented evidence in Pyongyang that North Korea had a program to enrich uranium - which is a prerequisite for nuclear weapons. Confronted with the proof, North Korean officials conceded they had "nullified" a 1994 deal with the U.S. to stop developing such warheads. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he believed Pyongyang had a "small number" of nukes. But North Korea has not admitted...