Bush's Plea for Attention

"[T]he Bush administration is under growing bipartisan pressure to try a version of the Clinton approach and engage North Korea directly. Some U.S. allies have also suggested that the United States has little to lose and potentially much to gain from sitting down alone with the North. . . .

"'Bilateral talks' is State Department speak for old-fashioned one-on-one diplomacy, and it is a plum that the Bush White House has recently withheld not only from North Korea but also from what it considers thuggish regimes in Iran and Syria.

"Drawing a bright line against engagement with bad guys has the value of purity. But it also leaves little room to negotiate -- there is no fallback position and any shifting of position, as the U.S. did earlier this year on Iran, risks being painted as capitulation."

Former Clinton defense secretary William J. Perry writes in a Washington Post op-ed: "North Korea's declared nuclear bomb test... demonstrates the total failure of the Bush administration's policy toward that country. For almost six years this policy has been a strange combination of harsh rhetoric and inaction."

Jimmy Carter writes in a New York Times op-ed: "Washington's pledge of no direct talks could be finessed through secret discussions with a trusted emissary like former Secretary of State Jim Baker, who earlier this week said, 'It's not appeasement to talk to your enemies.'"

Christopher Dickey writes in his Newsweek column that the Bush administration has been "so obsessed with its glorious fight against evil that it failed to contain the burgeoning dangers in the real world all around us."

Who Cares What Bush Says?

Alice Miles writes in an op-ed for the Times of London that "the 43rd President of the United States of America has squandered the political authority of a great country. Never mind whether world leaders still feel the need to check in with the US; ordinary people no longer expect from Washington international leadership of any use. So spent is the authority of the United States that even a foreign affairs ingénue such as myself recognises that there is little constructive it can do any more. So it doesn't really matter what the President thinks."

Oversight (Non) Watch

Charles Babington of The Washington Post interviews Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, authors of the new book, "The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track."

Babington: "Congress is meant to check and balance the other branches, especially the executive. How have members' attitudes changed in recent years about Congress's institutional role?

"MANN: It is striking, the extent to which the Republican majority in Congress deferred to the president in the face of one of the most aggressive and ambitious assertions of executive authority in American history. . . . They are now paying a political price for the policy consequences of their inattention. In Iraq, for example, it has meant flawed planning, poor implementation and no midcourse corrections."

How Many Dead?

David Brown writes in The Washington Post: "A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred....

"It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December."