Evicted

Three months ago, someone who should have known better declared a landmark diplomatic victory for the Bush Adminstration over the communist regime of Kim jong-IL's North Korea and its supposed agreement to give up its nuclear weapons program.  Somebody who DID know better bellowingly dissented, and made a prediction:

We gain nothing of any substance from this twenty-sixth agreement with the Kim regime, which will be riven by them just like all twenty-five of its predecessors, and the NoKos and Red Chinese gain breathing room for the rogue regime's next round of nuclearization and consequence sabre-rattling and mischief-making.

Three weeks ago the NoKos announced to the world that they were going to reverse course and rebuild their Yongbyon nuclear fuel facility right in front of ourselves, the Japanese, and the South Koreans, all of to whose faces Pyongyang had agreed to dismantle it in the first place.  Ourselves, the Japs, and the SoKos didn't so much as yawn.  The only thing the Kim regime hadn't done was formally throw out Ourselves, the Japs, the SoKos, and the Internatonal Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and monitors.

You can check that detail off the list:

North Korea has expelled U.N. monitors from its plutonium-making nuclear plant and plans to start reactivating it next week, rowing back from a 2007 deal to scrap its atomic bomb program, officials said on Wednesday.

The Stalinist state said on Friday it was working to restart the Yongbyon atomic complex it had been dismantling since last November under a disarmament-for-aid agreement with five powers.

Olli Heinonen, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s head of non-proliferation safeguards, told a closed meeting of the IAEA’s 35-nation board of governors that monitors were forced to leave the plutonium facility this week.

“There are no more seals and surveillance equipment in place at the (plutonium) reprocessing facility,” IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said, referring to the most proliferation-sensitive installation at Yongbyon.

So...doesn't that put us right back to square one?  Yongbyon reassembled and back on-line by the end of the year?  Fresh, and perchance successful, nuclear tests next year?  Japan, South Korea, and the U.S. west coast under threat of North Korean nuclear attack just as Europe and the U.S. eastern seaboard will be under threat of Iranian nuclear attack?  And terrorist network customers lining up to buy warheads like harried mothers at Toys-R-Us the week before Christmas?

No, Ed, it's not a "negotiating ploy."  We'll still give 'em the economic aid we promised, because we don't break OUR word to lying, meglomaniacal, murderous dictators.  And you know damn well that President Hussein will tear up the "terror-supporting-nations" list altogether.  And no, Ed, the NoKo military doesn't fear a war with Ourselves, the Japs, and the SoKos, because they know that (1) they could and would clean the latter two's clocks and (2) they know we have utterly no stomach for an(other) armed conflict in Northeast Asia when we're still pacifying Iraq AND have Iran to deal with AND have to worry about a revival of the Cold War AND have to worry about a ChiComm grab for Taiwan AND keep an eye on Hugo Chavez's Latin American ambitions, etc., etc., etc.

All of that is wishful thinking, Ed.  Remember your Occam's Razor.  The truth is a lot simpler: the NoKos, just like the Iranians, want nukes, and they're going to get them, and then they're going to use them against us and our allies.  And President Hussein will let them do it.

Sad to say, but George W. Bush completely wasted his time with this six-party-talks five-knuckle-shuffling.  The only thing left to do now is deliver an ultimatum: honor the agreement or else.  Starting with cutting them off completely from any and all aid until they let the inspectors back in and put Yongbyon back in mothballs - even better, destroy the plant equipment outright so it can't be reassembled. 

Diplomacy is fine, diplomacy is great, but without a commitment to national interest and the hard-headed, realistic mettle that goes with it, it's nothing more than a suicidal fetish.  If we let North Korea so openly and brazenly renege on an agreement they've already signed, there is utterly no point in saying another word to them - any more than there ever was in the first place.