North
Korea May Negotiate on Nuclear Weapons: The
Washington Post Isn’t Reporting That
By Jon
Schwarz
September 07, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- No normal human being should ever have to read
the Washington Post’s op-eds and unsigned
editorials. But the Post’s words have a huge
impact on the hive-mind of America’s foreign
policy apparatus — and hence where we’re going
to war next — so it’s important that someone
normal pay attention and report back.
So as a quasi-normal person, I recommend you pay
close attention to this, from a
recent column
by the Post’s deputy editorial page editor,
Jackson Diehl, about North Korea:
[North Korean
dictator Kim Jong-un] has shown no interest
in talks — he won’t even set foot in China,
his biggest patron. Even if negotiations
took place,
the current
regime has made clear that “it will never
place its self-defensive nuclear deterrence
on the negotiating table,” as
one envoy recently put it.
[emphasis added]
Here’s
why that matters:
1. While the Post’s link is dead, it’s meant to
take you to
this Associated Press story.
This is
what the envoy, North Korea’s Deputy UN
Ambassador Kim In Ryong, actually said,
according to a transcript from North Korea’s UN
Mission quoted in the AP article:
“As
long as the U.S. hostile policy and nuclear
threat continue [emphasis added],
the DPRK, no matter who may say what, will
never place its self-defensive nuclear
deterrence on the negotiation table or
flinch an inch from the road chosen by
itself, the road of bolstering up the state
nuclear force.”
There’s
of course a significant difference between North
Korea saying it will never negotiate to
halt or eliminate its nuclear weapons program,
and that it will never negotiate as long as
the U.S. continues to threaten it.
Moreover, many North Korean officials, including
Kim himself, have used
precisely this formulation over and over again
since July 4, when North Korea launched what
appeared to be its first genuine
intercontinental ballistic missile.
And Diehl’s column is by no means the only
example of this misrepresentation. As long as
North Korean officials have been saying this,
the U.S. media has frequently been
cutting the qualifier.
It’s
also worth noting that Diehl likely knew he was
making this important elision. North Korea’s
qualifier appears both in the article’s headline
and its first paragraph:
Finally, Diehl clearly read North Korea’s
statement, since he cut and pasted its language.
It’s hard to imagine he didn’t consciously or
unconsciously decide to leave that crucial part
out.
So does
North Korea’s current rhetoric mean it would
ever agree to halt, roll back, or even eliminate
its nuclear weapons program? If they did agree
to it, would they follow through? North Korea
observers disagree on the likelihood of this.
But it
does in fact matter that debates among foreign
policy elites in the pages of the Post and
elsewhere be based in reality. The reality is
that North Korea is saying that, under certain
conditions, it will put its nuclear weapons on
the table.
2.
Jackson Diehl’s title obscures his importance at
the Post’s editorial page.
It’s long been reported that
Diehl is a primary force
behind the Post editorial page’s drift to
constant belligerence on foreign policy – which
can be seen in its unsigned editorials, the
writers chosen to be regular columnists, and its
guest op-eds. When Colbert King, one of the few
African Americans on the Post’s editorial board,
decided to step down, he
wrote a memo
criticizing Diehl’s influence.
Unsurprisingly, Diehl was a supporter of the
2003 invasion of Iraq (although he urged the
Bush administration to make its case more on
human rights than unconventional weapons). And
just as with North Korea today, Diehl made basic
factual errors, such as referring to “the 1998
expulsion of the inspectors” from Iraq. In
reality, the UN weapons inspectors were
withdrawn from Iraq by the UN itself ahead of
the U.S. Desert Fox bombing campaign. Iraq then
refused to allow the inspectors to return,
citing the fact that the inspectors had been
used to spy on the Iraqi regime and that Desert
Fox was a clear violation of the UN charter.
According to
Fred Hiatt, the
overall editor of the Post’s editorial page,
Diehl is “rigorously honest, and I have never
seen him reluctant to engage in an argument to
defend his position.” Diehl didn’t respond to an
email asking him why he failed to portray North
Korea’s rhetoric accurately.
This
article was first published by
The Intercept
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