Well, you see, it's really quite simple: North Korea is a dictatorship that isn't very friendly towards the West. That means the Beeb needs to bend over backwards as far as is necessary (helps not having a spine) to characterise anything it does as the rational and reasonable actions of a, and here's the important bit, sovereign state. This means no criticisms, and definitely no interfering in the sovereign state's internal affairs. Of course, the bunch of occupying Jews in Palestine, and the uppity ex-colonies in America, are not, and cannot ever be, considered sovereign states (except in the most narrow, technical sense), and so must be interfered with as much as possible, to make up for the lack of interference elsewhere and give them the feeling that they are proper journos.

I think the best policy with regard to the license fee was invented by the US military: don't ask, don't tell. Of course the licensing officers sometimes have problems with the first bit, so it's best to help them by tearing up all their nasty letters, hanging up as soon as they phone, and not answering the door when they call. It's better in the long run.

I don't think the Korean War ever properly finished. Does that make the DPRK actually soveriegn I wonder?

"the North has been feeling under pressure and ignored in recent months" I love that. Aw diddums. Oh look there's Laos gregarious as ever. Not like that Sri Lanka, daytime drinking in an effort to get over the time Malawi pointed and laughed.

"Aren't you glad that those men of peace, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, did so much for peace?"

As compared to George Bush's impressive record of, um, stern words?

Also: "Its nuclear plans [...] involve threatening other states with nuclear missiles in order to extort and probably invade them. Which bit should the US negotiate over, do you think?"

What's the alternative to negotiation? Seriously, I'm curious what your suggestion is. As far as I can see there really is only one other option - war - and I don't think an invasion would be a good idea. A lot of people live within the range of North Korea's missiles, and the regime seems mad enough to start nuking things if it looks like everything's going pear shaped for them.

I wasn't criticising Clinton and Carter for taking insufficient action; I was criticising them for taking the wrong action. Carter went and negotiated a deal with NK that involved giving them well over $4bn in exchange for nothing more than their promise that they wouldn't build nuclear weapons. When he announced the deal, what Clinton should have done was to point out that Carter was no longer president and had no authority to offer the deal, and apologise to NK for their being effectively hoaxed by an ex-president. Instead, he signed it, amidst much fanfare of how great it was, and proceeded to honour the US side of it: giving NK half a million tons of fuel every year, building light water reactors for them, promising never to use nuclear weapons against them, etc. Whatever criticism one might wish to make of Bush or any other president over NK, he didn't pay them to start a nuclear war.

NK have since announced that they have no intention of keeping their promise, as any idiot could have predicted. ("The problem with this deal ... is the problem with all such deals: It was based on the assumption that evil men willing to murder their own people would never presume to lie to someone like Jimmy Carter.") Regardless of what the alternatives might be or even whether there are any, you can't negotiate with a party who have previously not only broken contracts with you but openly crowed about doing so. Contracts rely on honour.

I don't think war is the only alternative, though. And I suspect the fact that the US haven't been negotiating indicates that they have some other alternatives in mind. Missile defense, for instance, has come on leaps and bounds.

I also think you may be conflating negotiation with diplomacy. It's perfectly possible to tie up the other party in talks while refusing to actually negotiate over anything. That is, after all, what NK have been doing for the last few decades.

'Diplomacy' under your definition sounds a lot like doing nothing, which is an option. The problem is that the situation gets worse the longer we leave it, because the NKs have more time to build nukes.

I don't really trust the current US government to have something up it's collective sleeve. The Iraq war has been such a huge cock-up that I really don't have much faith left in their foreign policy skills. I certainly wouldn't want to bet on their competence, and I'd guess that other governments don't either.

Missile defence might be an option for making an invasion less suicidally dangerous, or for making the threat of nuclear missiles irrelevant, but my impression is that those systems aren't reliable enough to trust againsts a nuclear attack. We can't really wait a decade or two for the technology to mature.

On Carter and Clinton: Whether or not the specific deal they struck was a bad one, I think that kind of deal is the only plausible way to get the NKs to give up nuclear weapons. They may be mad, but the NK government still wants things that we have, so we could negotiate with them to get the things we want. This approach doesn't depend on 'honour' btw - just a strict regime of checks, and a staged deployment of the cash / aid / investment depending on continuing compliance.

> I think that kind of deal is the only plausible way to get the NKs to give up nuclear weapons.

When it has already failed completely, in what way does it remain plausible? Remember, the problem with the deal wasn't in the details: it was the fact that NK had no intention of keeping their side of the bargain, and have since said as much. Changing the details can't solve that problem.

> They may be mad, but the NK government still wants things that we have, so we could negotiate with them to get the things we want.

Yes, and we did, and now they have the things that they wanted from us, and we have nothing that we wanted from them.

> This approach doesn't depend on 'honour' btw - just a strict regime of checks, and a staged deployment of the cash / aid / investment depending on continuing compliance.

But we had a strict regime of checks. Hans Blix declared NK to be nuke-free shortly before they announced they had nukes (and he wondered why some people didn't trust him over Iraq). Checks only work on people who are willing to be checked.

The point of international inspections is for a regime who are choosing to comply to prove to the world that they are complying. They are incapable of forcing anyone to do anything. If you think otherwise, feel free to give some examples.

In other words, checks presuppose honour.

As for the staged deployment, NK insisted that they wouldn't do a damn thing until after they'd got their light water reactors, and Clinton agreed.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that, while a war is a very very bad idea, it's a less bad idea than most of the alternatives. And the two reasons we've got to the stage where war is becoming the least bad option are Clinton and Carter.

I sincerely hope that the US are working on assassinating Kim Jong-Il.


> my impression is that those systems aren't reliable enough to trust againsts a nuclear attack.

I am not a weapons expert, but there are quiet murmurings that it is now incredibly reliable. The big threat from NK (and Iran) is a suitcase nuke.


> The Iraq war has been such a huge cock-up

I'm never quite sure what people are comparing it to when they say this. Tea parties? Staff briefings?

"The point of international inspections is for a regime who are choosing to comply to prove to the world that they are complying."

I agree with this of course. If NK choose to comply, then the inspections will show it. I don't see how this is a big gotcha for the case for negotiation. If you mean that we wouldn't be able to tell if NK wasn't complying, then I'd point you to the case of Iraq, where weapons inspectors were able to root out and destroy a hidden WMD program quite effectively in the mid nineties.

Could you point me to Hans Blix declaring NK to be nuke-free? I haven't been able to find it with google.

I also disagree that the North Korean government have everything they want from us. Everyone in North Korea, including the elite, lives in a crappy hell-hole of a country, and the only way they're going to improve things is with outside help. They need things we have, and that gives us leverage for negotiation.

"there are quiet murmurings that it is now incredibly reliable."

Yes, well, I'd like to avoid a live test of that if at all possible.

"I sincerely hope that the US are working on assassinating Kim Jong-Il."

I don't think that would stabilise NK.

"I'm never quite sure what people are comparing it to when they say [Iraq is a cock-up]."

A large section of the country is now run by pro-Iranian theocrats. In another large section we're fighting against a pretty successful insurgency which is showing no signs of dying down. The electricity supply is stuck at pre-war levels. At least 40,000 Iraqi civilians and 2,500 coalition troops are dead. We have no visible exit strategy. Etc etc.

It looks like a cock-up to me, especially compared to the predictions made by advocates of the war. If they were expecting all of this, then they probably should have said before the war -- I think it would have made it more difficult to sell it to the public though.

Is that the "pretty successful" insurgency that just lost its leaders? Is a very successful insurgency one that loses all its men, like the one led by Comrade Che?

Steven: If you're referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, he was the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, not the insurgency in general, and his level of influence over the wider insurgency is disputed. We'll have to see if his death makes a difference. I hope so obviously, but we've been here before with 'turning points' like the elections, capture of Saddam etc, none of which have made much of a dent in the levels of violence.

> I'd point you to the case of Iraq, where weapons inspectors were able to root out and destroy a hidden WMD program quite effectively in the mid nineties.

The jury's still out on whether the program was destroyed. If it was destroyed, it was destroyed by Saddam for reasons of his own or by Saddam's lieutenants for reasons of their own, not by the inspectors. The inspectors failed to detect Iraq's nuclear program during their inspections in the 80s, not discovering the program's existence till the end of the Gulf War in 91. The inspectors, you may remember, walked out of Iraq in the 90s on the grounds that they could not and did not believe they could do their job in the face of Saddam's obstruction.

> Could you point me to Hans Blix declaring NK to be nuke-free?

I have the same resources as you — Google — and I can't find it either. Tarnation. I was relying on my memory, but it looks like that may have been a tad faulty in this instance — in fact, the Web is telling me that Blix was the guy who alerted the world to NK's nuclear development, so I'll happily retract the statement and I apologise for it. Still, the above facts about Iraq in the 80s are a perfectly good substitute for illustrating the same point. Furthermore, what isn't in doubt is that we had an inspection program designed to stop NK going nuclear, yet they went nuclear.


> Everyone in North Korea, including the elite, lives in a crappy hell-hole of a country

There is a lot of evidence that their ideology is so entrenched that they regard that crappy hell-hole as a paradise. One man's luxury is another man's self-destructive corrupting decadence. Of course, I'm sure this applies more to the public than the elite, but I'm equally sure the elite don't have it anything like as bad as the public.


> I'd like to avoid a live test of that if at all possible.

Me too. I'd also like to avoid a live test of the efficacy of inspections and negotiations. Thing is, if negotiation fails, it leaves zero chance of stopping the warheads; if inspections fail, they leave zero chance of stopping the warheads; if missile defense fails against one weapon, it still has a chance of stopping the next one. Not ideal, no, but still.


> I don't think that would stabilise NK.

NK is stable right now. It is a stable crappy hell-hole of a country with ambitions to nuke surrounding areas, invade South Korea and probably Japan, and spread its poisonous ideology worldwide. Stability is the last thing we want there.


> It looks like a cock-up to me

Yes, but compared to what? Other wars? Other invasions? No. Compared to, say, German denazification (which was arguably still going on in the 70s and unarguably still going on in the 50s), it's been incredibly quick and had relatively few casualties. Compared to Soviet destalinification (a fair comparison, I think, since Saddam was an open admirer and emulator of Stalin) or Russian desovietisation, it's been, again, very very quick and relatively painless, and doesn't look like it's heading for anything like the same sort of utter disaster. Compared to a typical civil war (again, a fair comparison, what with the opposing home-grown factions), it's very very safe. It started with the fastest and most effective sustained assault in the history of mechanised warfare. Coalition casualty rates are unprecedentedly low by military wartime standards. The number of attacks on US military and civilians outside Iraq has plummetted — which was one of the aims. It appears to have led to Gaddaffi's abandonment of terrorism and Syria's ejection from Lebanon.

Many people have suggested — correctly, I think — that part of the cause of the size of the post-invasion insurgency was the accuracy of the smart bombs and the policy of not aiming for anyone without being fairly sure that they were a legit military target. (No, I'm not saying that the policy was always enacted perfectly, but that it was genuinely aimed for.) A lot of people who in a conventional traditional war would have been killed by the initial slaughter were left alive to fight another day. The flip-side of that is that a lot of people who would traditionally have been killed were left alive not to fight, and a lot were left alive to fight on our side.

None of which is to say that it's all gone swimmingly. I just think the truth lies somewhat more inbetween perfection and cock-up than you imply. There have been disasters and incredible successes both.

"I just think the truth lies somewhat more inbetween perfection and cock-up than you imply."

Well possibly. The main problem is that the situation there seems to be getting generally worse rather than better. I'd be pretty surprised if Iraq emerges as a functioning democracy in ten years time, and I wouldn't be especially surprised if it degenerates into a full-scale civil war.

"I'd also like to avoid a live test of the efficacy of inspections and negotiations."

There's an asymmetry here -- if negotiations fail we can still use our missile defence, but if the missiles fail all you'll have is big crater and 300,000 dead japanese people.

I think that destabilising NK would be a bad idea because it could put the elite in a position where they didn't have anything to lose, which is when they'd be most likely to use their nukes.

"If it was destroyed, it was destroyed by Saddam for reasons of his own or by Saddam's lieutenants for reasons of their own, not by the inspectors."

As a point of fact, the inspectors in Iraq did detect and destroy quite a lot of WMD-related equipment. Whether they got all of it we don't know -- one of the problems they had was that Saddam had apparently destroyed some of the program himself and then denied ever having it.

Anyway, inspections and negotiation aren't perfect obviously, but I still think they're preferable to a war and occupation. I still don't see any alternative to those two options.

> The main problem is that the situation there seems to be getting generally worse rather than better.

How the situation seems depends on how it's portrayed. Have you read Chrenkoff's blog? I doubt it gives a 100% accurate picture, but I have the same doubt about all other media. Nice to get some balance against the unremitting pessimism of the Western news establishment, though.


> There's an asymmetry here -- if negotiations fail ...

Yes, but there's another asymmetry, which is that your statement shouldn't start with "if": negotiations have already failed.

> ... if negotiations fail we can still use our missile defence

Yes. I think that's what I suggested.


> I think that destabilising NK would be a bad idea because it could put the elite in a position where they didn't have anything to lose

Not if you destabilise NK by wiping out the elite.


A similar dilemma was had in 1945. A lot of people believed that, especially in the wake of WW2, immediately starting a new war against the USSR was an appalling idea. And they were right: it was an utterly appalling idea. However, not doing it led to the nuclear arms race, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, Pol Pot's killing fields, the USA's nastily pragmatic actions in South America, the USSR's nuclear fallout tests on thousands of live soldiers, and hundreds of millions of East Europeans living in slavery for forty years. War is never the best option, but is sometimes the least bad. Like I said, I think NK is reaching that point, if it hasn't already.

> the inspectors in Iraq did detect and destroy quite a lot of WMD-related equipment. Whether they got all of it we don't know

That's the point. If we don't know, then inspections are useless.

You're right that it's difficult to judge a complex situation from media reports. If you're interested in trends in Iraq, the Brookings Institution's Iraq index is a useful resource. Crudely, it looks like the economy is growing, but infrastructure hasn't really recovered (several metrics are stuck at around their pre-war level), and insurgent attacks are increasing.

"If we don't know, then inspections are useless."

Iraq was successfully disarmed through a combination of negotiation, those inspections, threats and sanctions. Not so useless.

"your statement shouldn't start with "if": negotiations have already failed."

Negotiations are still possible -- we aren't at war with them yet. In fact even the current US administration isn't talking about an invasion -- partly I'd guess because their military is tied up in Iraq -- so I'm afraid you'll have to put up with the jaw-jaw for a while longer.

I didn't say diplomacy had failed; I said negotiation had failed.


> Iraq was successfully disarmed through a combination of negotiation, those inspections, threats and sanctions.

Does anyone still believe that sanctions did anything to disarm Iraq?

"Does anyone still believe that sanctions did anything to disarm Iraq?"

To quote the Duelfer Report:

"Saddam’s primary goal from 1991 to 2003 was to have UN sanctions lifted, while maintaining the security of the Regime. He sought to balance the need to cooperate with UN inspections—to gain support for lifting sanctions—with his intention to preserve Iraq’s intellectual capital for WMD with a minimum of foreign intrusiveness and loss of face. Indeed, this remained the goal to the end of the Regime, as the starting of any WMD program, conspicuous or otherwise, risked undoing the progress achieved in eroding sanctions and jeopardizing a political end to the embargo and international monitoring."

Ah, I see: you mean "disarm" as in what was done to Germany after the Great War. Well, in that case, yes, you're quite right: Iraq was quite thoroughly disarmed through sanctions.

"you mean "disarm" as in what was done to Germany after the Great War."

What I meant by 'disarm' was 'cause to get rid of their banned arms'. Nice weaselly response though, and I especially like the implied analogy with Hitler's germany.

Nothing weaselly intended. I was making a perfectly valid point, thank you.

> Saddam’s primary goal from 1991 to 2003 was to have UN sanctions lifted, while maintaining the security of the Regime. He sought to balance the need to cooperate with UN inspections—to gain support for lifting sanctions—with his intention to preserve Iraq’s intellectual capital for WMD with a minimum of foreign intrusiveness and loss of face.

According to the Duelffer Report, which you quoted, what sanctions may have achieved was a postponement of weapons programs. I wasn't making an analogy between Saddam and Hitler (though there are plenty to be made). I was making an observation about what is achieved by postponing armament.

If you're not happy with the German analogy, how about the IRA? "Lay down your arms to fight another day." It's not disarmament.

Between 1991 and 2003, the Iraqi regime was found on many occasions to be developing weapons programs in violation of their agreements and in violation of what sanctions were supposed to be achieving. That's not even a controversial statement, since the regime admitted it on several occasions. Aflatoxin warheads are one example of something Saddam admitted to having had developed while under sanctions.

On the BBC licence fee, I like this:

"BBC World Service is funded by Government grant and not your TV licence. Profits from separate BBC commercial services help to keep the licence fee low."
[Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/licencefee/]

I mean, Government grant is our money too... It's like the FREE NHS, and FREE education, and FREE dentists...

1) They are not free, not even at the "point-of-use".

2) They are not usually very good... assuming, especially in the case of dentists, you can gain access.

Good point. It's not funded through tax; it's funded through, er, another tax.