A development on the global security scene today underscored just how many disasters President Bush, in his arrogant ignorance, has piled upon our nation - his removal of sanctions against North Korea and pending removal of them from the State Department list of terrorism sponsors.

To what do they owe this jaw-dropping generosity?

North Korea is planning the televised destruction of a 65-foot-tall cooling tower at its main nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. The cooling tower is a key element of the reactor, but blowing it up - with the world watching - has little practical meaning because the reactor has already been nearly disabled.

In case you’re not so intimately familiar with the history of the Bush administration’s relationship with the North Koreans and their nuclear weapons program that your skin crawls to hear of this, here’s a quick summary:

Clinton followed the lead of the South Korean government in dealing with North Korea, slowly dismantling sanctions as the North Koreans visibly dismantled their WMD and rocket program.

Bush rolled in and cut off the civilian nuclear technology that had been being sent to Korea under the “Agreed Framework,” as it was called. Then he spouted off about North Korea being part of the infamous and utterly incomprehensible “Axis of Evil.” He swore up and down about North Korea’s wicked deeds, and North Korea promptly kicked every form of surveillance out of their country, cranking the WMD programs up to full speed. Bush did nothing but bluster.

For six years.

Six years passed with Bush insisting on multi-lateral talks and sanctions and in essence just yelling over the 38th parallel as the North Koreans sped their development of missiles that could hit America and nuclear weapons to completion. Then, amazingly, right after the nuclear test, North Korea said it was open to nuclear disarmament talks with the UN and the parties the US had brought to the table.

Time to rejoice? Not exactly. Inspectors are back in North Korea, being directed where the Koreans want to direct them. In return, the Koreans have received aid and a lifting of financial restrictions.

And surprisingly, about this time, North Korean nuclear components started showing up in other countries - Syria, namely.

The Bush administration’s reaction? Give North Korea more concessions than even Clinton did by removing sanctions and taking them off the terrorism sponsor list. In his own words:

“I’m pleased with the progress. I’m under no illusions. This is the first step. This isn’t the end of the process. It is the beginning of the process.”

Actually, Dubya, it’s at a place even further back than the beginning. It’s the beginning of the process to get back to somewhere near the beginning of the process: A point where North Korea didn’t have nuclear weapons, didn’t have inter-continental missiles, wasn’t selling nuclear programs to unstable Middle Eastern nations and was actually held accountable for their deeds by the watch list.

I sometimes wonder if the President makes decisions entirely counter to reality. Before, North Korea was getting the big carrot of light-water reactors from the US, and could be observed, and so he cut them off and antagonized them as much as possible. Now, North Korea has the ability to make nukes and is selling them to other countries, so they get a stamp of approval from the State Department and we open trade with them.

It’s such typical behavior by the coterie in the White House today - and of the man who, in pursuit of the White House, so slavishly and irrationally parrots them, John McCain. Meaning, it’s typical bully behavior; picking on the weak and talking tough, but simpering and crawling as soon as someone shows a little muscle.

McCain’s all too ready to sound off about takin’ the fight to the terrorists in Iraq indefinitely, but ask him if he’s willing to go the whole hog and actually look for Osama where he lives, and suddenly the Admiral’s son is puling about how it’s just too complicated.

Bush puts all of America’s strategic chips in his cash cow of an anti-ballistic missile program, fanning the fires of an arms race just at the time the USSR’s old stockpiles are crumbling and Pakistan’s selling country-killing tech to anyone who’ll buy, but then has the gall to suck up to Russia and North Korea.

Both men need to learn a basic tenet of warfare: Do not talk the bloody talk unless you are prepared to walk the bloody walk.

Where does their kind of behavior get us? Taking one step forward at a place leagues worse than the beginning we started at.

As an update on the edgey events in the broader Middle East, it has come out that Israel really was after nuclear materials in Syria. September 6th was a busy day for Israel, who both flew a raid over Syrian airspace with a live munition drop on the Syrian border /and/ dispatched commandos that destroyed a North Korean-fostered Syrian nuclear facility. This once again proves that Israel is at the top of their game for multi-tasking regional conflicts.

According to “high level sources”, the raid was a less-than-tidy affair:

Diplomats in North Korea and China believe a number of North Koreans were killed in the strike, based on reports reaching Asian governments about conversations between Chinese and North Korean officials.

This likely means a significant setback for Syria’s plutonium-related plans; President Assad will have to wait on taking out that reverse mortgage on the Golan Heights. And this is an unqualified good thing, as Syria - like North Korea but unlike Iran - is truly an unstable state ruled by a crackpot junta that has far too many terrorist irons in the global fire to do itself any good. Syria has a much better chance of getting its act together than North Korea, but it is still a long way from being a responsible regional leader.

Once was the time that the US and a starving, belligerent North Korea were working directly to satisfy the ailing nation’s energy needs without giving North Korea the opportunity or incentive to develop nuclear weapons.

Now, seven years and seven North Korean nuclear warheads later, we are almost back to that point. North Korea remains a fugitive from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has made no binding agreements as to working towards a non-nuclear Korean peninsula, and has only just today set a date to allow the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) back into the country. There’s no telling what they’ll find or, rather, what their unsmiling handlers will allow them to find.

What happened in the intervening years? What dismantled the hard-won “Agreed Framework” of the Clinton era that had kept North Korea without a weapon or effective delivery system?

Not to point fingers or anything…

The Agreed Framework got tossed out the window little after Clinton’s successor took office. Things went rapidly downhill from there, with the US Administration speaking with censure against the DPRK and then sitting around, doing nothing to back it up. What commenced was a tete-a-tete with the North Koreans creeping closer to their weapons program ways and the White House waving its finger while still refusing to talk.

Vice-President Cheney allegedly summed up the policy well by saying “We don’t negotiate with evil. We defeat evil.”

North Korea is really evil. Its enormous army - nearly the size of our entire armed forces combined - is designed for the sole purpose of conquering the Korean peninsula. It has huge counterfeiting organizations, kidnaps people for the sexual delight of its autocratic leader and maintains a seedy presence in classic espionage settings such as Macao. And yes, it aids and abets terrorists. If there actually had been an Axis of Evil - and give it time; could happen - it surely would have been the “Dr. No” of the organization. However, shutting it out and refusing direct talks with it - the only kind of talks that have ever worked to achieve something of dire significance with North Korea - only isolated its mighty resources for nasty deeds. It kicked out inspectors, enriched uranium, developed a delivery system that could strike the US, and sold all manner of this weaponry to such “rational actors” as Libya. And the fact is that with weapons inspectors there, with the incentive of being able to prop up its hellish robot state with foreign-financed energy, these things might have been prevented. Limited oversight was still better than no oversight. Limited incentive to comply with international will was still more than no incentive.

And as for “defeating evil”? And “not negotiating with it”? Well, after North Korea’s downplayed nuclear test, talks resumed mighty fast, and now the beginnings of another assistance “framework” have been formed.

The point of this is not that inspections in the 90s were foolproof - or autocrat-proof. Surely the IAEA was deceived. It was not until the dismissal of inspectors that the DPRK undertook its boldest acts, at a pace now unrestricted, but the IAEA presence alone may not have been enough to keep the Korean Peninsula nuclear-free. The point is that the US forgot a basic principle of foreign relations - as with Iraq, with Afghanistan and with the ABM Treaty:

Do not break something before you know how to rebuild it.

Now, seven years and seven warheads on, we are returning to the North Koreans with an even more limited, more sweetened offering in order to get them to restore what, a long time back, was not really working in the first place.