Losing the Right

If W has lost Bill Kristol, it's buh-bye Neocons.

William Kristol: Bush's red line sadly off-colour
What price will the North Korean dictator pay, Mr President, asks William Kristol
July 11, 2006

What was unacceptable to Bush a week ago (a North Korean missile launch) has been accepted. In retrospect, according to a draft Security Council resolution, the missile launch turns out merely to have been regrettable. As the end of last week US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Christopher Hill visited China, where he was rebuffed by Beijing on sanctions for Pyongyang. He settled for an agreement that we should all return to the six-party talks.

China has refused to use its leverage to change Pyongyang's behaviour (North Korea continues to function only because China provides most of its energy). Yet Bush praised China as "a good partner to have at the table with us". Japan, with a ringside seat for the missile launches, looks on in horror, seemingly alone in actually being provoked by the North Korean provocation.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, at the centre of our global war against jihadist terrorists, Iran, perhaps the prime state sponsor of terror, is sitting pretty. The pursuit of nuclear weapons by the clerical regime in Iran has also been deemed unacceptable by the President. Yet, as the Iranian regime has resumed uranium enrichment, threatened to obliterate other nations, and scorned offers to negotiate, it has been rewarded with gestures by us that certainly seem to be concessions.

Now, watching North Korea, the mullahs must be feeling even less intimidated. And despite Syrian and Iranian complicity in killing US soldiers in Iraq - detailed by US generals - neither has paid a price.

The one red line the President seems to be holding to is that we will not cut and run in Iraq. But even there, there seems to be no interest in rethinking a counter-insurgency strategy (or non-strategy) that is not working.

Indeed, the President took pains at his press conference on Friday to reiterate that he would not insist on changes: "General (George) Casey will make the decisions as to how many troops we have there ... I told him, I said: "You decide, General."' So we have a Rumsfeld-Casey decision to plan for a not-too-embarrassing withdrawal from Iraq, rather than a Bush decision to insist on a strategy for victory in Iraq.

But hey, the US is in sync with the EU three (Britain, France and Germany) and the UN 192. And the Secretary of State is more popular abroad than ever. Too bad the cost has been so high: a decline in the President's credibility across the world and sinking support for his foreign policy.

Some commentators say Bush's second-term foreign policy has taken a Clintonian turn. But to be Clintonian in a post-9/11 world is to invite even more danger than Bill Clinton's policies did in the 1990s. The real choice isn't Kim's. It's Bush's.

UPDATEJosh Marshall calls a spade a spade:

Now, the premise of the Bush administration's North Korea policy was that North Korea was a bad acting state that had to be dealt with through force, not negotiation. That didn't necessarily mean going to war. The goal was to intimidate the North Koreans into better behavior if possible and resort to force if necessary.

Yet, when the North Koreans called the White House's bluff and starting reprocessing plutonium, the White House's response was ... well, nothing.

That was three years ago.

Rather than talk softly and carry a big stick it was a policy of talk tough and do nothing.

The bomb making plutonium keeps coming of the conveyor belt. And the White House policy is to say they won't negotiate and also ask the Chinese to get the North Koreans to behave.

The remaining conceit of the Bush administration is that the Clintonites met with the North Koreans in bilateral talks while they insist on multilateral talks.

That's the policy, which is to say, they have no policy. The salient fact is that under Clinton plutonium reprocessing stopped and under Bush it restarted. The Bushies angle was that you don't coddle bad actors like the North Koreans. You deal with them in the language they understand: force. But the NKs called their bluff, they weren't prepared to use force. So they decided to forget about the whole thing.

That's the record. That's the policy. A total failure.