Syria and North Korea had nuclear ties, says U.S.

What happened

A Syrian nuclear reactor, built with the aid of North Korea, was within weeks of completion before it was destroyed by Israel last September, the Bush administration announced last week. In its first year, the finished plant “would have produced enough plutonium for one or two weapons,” said CIA Director Michael Hayden. Officials presented Congress and the media with previously classified satellite images, photos from inside the plant, and a picture of the head of North Korea’s Yongbyon reactor meeting with the head of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission. The evidence showed that the Syrian plant was “not intended for peaceful purposes,” said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.

President Bush said the intelligence was not released at the time of the Israeli strike because the situation in the Middle East was too volatile. It was being made public now, he said, to give the U.S. leverage in future negotiations with North Korea. The intent is to send the message that “we may know more about you than you think,” Bush said.

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What the editorials said

At last we have evidence for what we’ve known all along, said National Review: Kim Jong Il can’t be trusted. This information proves that North Korea was working with the rogue Syrian regime for at least five years, including during the entire course of the six-party talks. Those discussions resulted, in October 2007, in North Korea’s agreeing to dismantle its nuclear facility in exchange for Western aid. But it appears Kim was merely “promising to shut down Yongbyon while secretly outsourcing his nuclear-fuel operation to a client state.” If the U.S. is to maintain any credibility, it must immediately withdraw from this fraudulent pact.

North Korea clearly can’t be fully trusted, said the Chicago Tribune, but it would be a mistake to walk away in anger. The Syrian reactor project began years ago, and there’s no evidence that North Korea provided any help to Damascus after signing the October agreement. America should respond by demanding step-by-step verification of Pyongyang’s pledge to disarm. If the agreement is canceled, Kim will simply go back to producing fissile material, building nuclear bombs, and selling know-how to other rogue countries.

What the columnists said

The timing of the Bush administration’s revelation is “highly suspicious,” said Dan Froomkin in Washingtonpost.com. For seven years, the White House has selectively disclosed intelligence findings to achieve political ends—most famously, to create fear of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” in the run-up to the war. This time, the information dump may have been ordered by Dick Cheney and other administration hawks, who want desperately to derail the State Department’s talks with North Korea, and to ratchet up tensions with Iran. Their agenda, obviously, is to prove that it’s useless to negotiate with any rogue regime.

You don’t have to be a hawk to think it’s a bad idea to let Kim Jong Il off the hook, said Winston Lord and Leslie Gelb in The Washington Post. It is often necessary to negotiate with our enemies, but not if they won’t negotiate in good faith. Under the agreement signed in October, Pyongyang had until the end of 2007 to provide a full accounting of its nuclear activities, something it still hasn’t done. “If the administration accepts North Korea’s hedging and reneging once again, it will increase, not decrease, the likelihood of confrontation down the line.”

Have we learned nothing from the WMD debacle? said Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com. An objective look at the material declassified last week shows very little to back up the official interpretation that Syria was close to completing a nuclear reactor, or that North Korea was assisting it. Rather than subject these ambiguous images to independent analysis, the media has once again merely parroted the Bush administration’s explanations of them. “There are all sorts of reasons for extreme skepticism here.”

What next?

Negotiators hope to resume the six-party nuclear talks soon, but the revelations about the Syrian reactor may complicate matters. The increased aid that the U.S. is offering North Korea as an incentive requires congressional approval, which has now been jeopardized, said Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. The information released last week, Hoekstra said, “is going to make it more difficult for them to reach an agreement that will be supported by Congress and the American people.”