Why Six Party Talks seemed doomed to failure

When President Bush laid out the logic for multilateral talks to resolve the North Korean nuclear Crisis in his Wednesday News Conference it seemed so reasonable: It's far more difficult to break your word to multiple parties than with just one. Fair enough. However, when all of the parties have, to put it mildly, competing interest and one is seen by at least two of the parties as an interloper from across the seas it gets complicated to the point of paralysis, which is kind of where we are at in the U.N. it seems. When news of the "test" broke, I posted that negotiations can be done from strength and some sort of direct talks may be the answer.

Having worked in both politics and the legal field, I understand that sometimes negotiations are as follows: "Do A and you will be rewarded in some fashion; Do B and we will bury you." Simple thinking? Perhaps. But I've seen it work in microcosm many, many times. Negotiation is not always a multifaceted dance through endless permutations of the situation at hand. Sometimes it is the gift of a choice, nothing more.

North Korea, in previous talks has demanded concessions by the United States that even such an isolated, parochial regime could not expect to attain. These included our abandoning our military commitment to South Korea and endless supplying of a dictator who starves, murders, tortures and imprisons his own people on a level matching Joe Stalin in ferocity and numbers in proportion to its population. We should not and cannot give in to these demands.

Should we be prepared to act if we know for sure the DPRK and that little fart of a dictator has nukes and they keep threatening us? You bet. Not quickly, not rashly, not with any joy, but we live in the world as it is.

Both Japan and the Clinton administration flirted with the idea of an Israeli style preemptive strike on NK in 1993-94. Former Clinton Administration officials advocated preemption this year as a reasonable course of action (Though their Tom Clancy-like scenario is a bit rosy). I'm not cheering for this outcome. I have no desire to see tens of thousands of dead on the Korean peninsula; nor in Tokyo, Sydney or Los Angeles.