A Horribly Familiar Cycle

So let me make sure I've got this straight: Top Bush administration officials driven by long-standing resentments used bad intelligence to achieve their foreign policy objectives, which then ended up backfiring spectacularly? And we're not talking about Iraq?

No, we're talking about that other dismal "Axis of Evil" failure of the Bush era: North Korea.

It now appears that the White House in 2002 used dubious claims of North Korean uranium enrichment as an excuse to break a Clinton-brokered deal, thereby allowing North Korea's poisonous dictator to build up a stockpile of plutonium, which in turn led to the building of as many as a dozen nuclear weapons, one of which he exploded in a nuclear test last year.

And consider the incredible irony of the timing.

News about how unfounded those uranium-enrichment claims were may be emerging now because North Korea's renewed willingness to admit international arms inspectors threatens to expose to public view all the evidence to the contrary.

Something like 140,000 American troops are in harm's way in Iraq. And the entirely unchastened White House is making familiarly dire -- and maybe familiarly unfounded -- intelligence disclosures about Iran.

It's enough to make you scream.

The Coverage

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Glenn Kessler writes in The Washington Post: "The Bush administration is backing away from its long-held assertions that North Korea has an active clandestine program to enrich uranium, leading some experts to believe that the original U.S. intelligence that started the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions may have been flawed. . . .

"The administration's stance today stands in sharp contrast to the certainty expressed by top officials in 2002, when the administration accused Pyongyang of running a secret uranium program -- and demanded it be dismantled at once. President Bush told a news conference that November: 'We discovered that, contrary to an agreement they had with the United States, they're enriching uranium, with a desire of developing a weapon.'

"The accusation about the alleged uranium program backfired, sparking a series of events that ultimately led to North Korea's first nuclear test -- using another material, plutonium -- nearly five months ago.

"In 2002, the United States led a drive to suspend shipments of fuel oil promised to Pyongyang under a 1994 accord that froze a North Korean plutonium facility. The collapse of the 1994 agreement freed North Korea to build up a stockpile of plutonium for as many as a dozen nuclear weapons."

And what motivated all this? "When Bush took office in 2001, a number of top administration officials openly expressed grave doubts about the 1994 accord, which was negotiated by the Clinton administration, and they seized on the intelligence about the uranium facility to terminate the agreement."