In a report to Congress last week, the Central Intelligence Agency said it believes North Korea has the necessary technology to produce nuclear weapons using fuel obtained from its nuclear fuel sources.
This intelligence report is another indication that the country will seek to make weapons the United States wants to outlaw the rest of the world from producing. For the rather hawkish Republican wing that has strongly influenced Bush’s foreign policy, a political statement such as this – especially to an administration touting the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive self-defense – means action.
What action will be taken regarding North Korea cannot be yet known. The president has been relatively open-minded about multi-national talks to possibly offer security to the country if it disarms. But he has said previously that he will not tolerate a nuclear North Korea, especially not if the nation continues to break treaties and develop weapons of mass destruction openly.
Too, the South Pacific has been a tricky region for the United States for nearly six decades – a place of the United States has come to know mostly through combat. Now with regional economic and militaristic superpowers China and Japan looming large in the region, a U.S. military already overstretched and the possibility of another hefty price tag for drastic action, the situation gets trickier.
But what Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s erratic, bespectacled leader, can and will do – with technology he may or may not have – is only part of the dilemma Bush will face in the coming months. As North Korea’s nuclear capability continues to become more visible, the question for the Bush administration will be this: Even if the threat is real, how will the administration shape the intelligence to a public made skeptical by the misinformation about the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
For most, the “intelligence community”- where these weapons reports originate – has always been a mythical, mysterious entity. Analysts are involved, as are computers and satellites, but how any information is processed and transmitted is largely a secret and tangled web.
For many during the past year, that mystery has turned from mystique to the potential to be misinterpreted. Though deceit has always been a part of the American presidency, how a president can willingly manipulate intelligence is one of the lasting legacies of the war in Iraq.
Critics of the war point to the White House’s deliberate tinkering with intelligence; most who still support Operation Iraqi Freedom realize the claims about WMDs were false.
Whatever action is taken abroad will be preceded at home by a different battle, in which George Bush must act using a bag with many fewer tricks. Once it was a bag that was untested and, therefore, not mistrusted. It is now a bag many feel was used to legitimize an invasion that has yielded more chaos than democracy and more deaths of U.S. soldiers than weapons of mass destruction.
And pitching policy without many of his old tricks to a people weary over death tolls and an uncertain future abroad – a people who realize they had been lied to from the start – will be difficult.
John Ross is a senior in English. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
