Continuing last night's rant about Martin Peretz:

 

Peretz's claim that there just aren't any more great liberal thinkers writing books reminded me a great deal of another opinion piece I read last week. In the February 13 Los Angeles Times, Charlotte Allen wrote that there are no great women intellectuals ready to step into the late Susan Sontag's shoes.

 

"When I think of female intellectuals today, only Camille Paglia comes to mind," she wrote, which I agree is pretty damn pathetic. Paglia is to thinking what Thomas Kinkaid is to painting. If that's the best you've got, civilization truly is in decline.

 

But Allen's agenda is all too transparent. Although Sontag was a "woman of the left" whose opinions "can make you wince," at least Sontag "refused to embrace ideological feminism." In Allen's view, this was Sontag's saving grace.

 

A letter writer to the LA Times has Allen's number:

Allen is part of the Independent Women's Forum, which, as MediaTransparency.org puts it, "is neither independent nor a forum." It is funded by extreme right-wing foundations, such as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation and the Scaife family foundations.

The IWF website states that the forum wants to counter "the influence of radical feminism in the courts." But it has a history of being against mainstream policies that might empower women, such as the Violence Against Women Act, Title IX and the Women's Educational Equity Act. It is against gender equity, period.

It was no surprise that on Jan. 19, the CEO of the IWF claimed that the president of Harvard was right when he said that women have less success in science because of their genes, not discrimination or other social factors. The IWF is consistently anti-feminist. It's no surprise that the forum can't find any women who qualify as public intellectuals, not even themselves. [Sherryl Kleinman, Chapel Hill, NC]

Armed with the knowledge that Charlotte Allen is an ideological whore, let us now consider her arguments. She makes a distinction between academic intellectuals and public intellectuals, who "pitch their ideas to the general reading public," but then manages to write off popular authors like Barbara Ehrenreich as "professional feminists," which means they don't count, somehow. ("Ehrenreich similarly has branched out into socioeconomic topics ('Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America'). Even then, Ehrenreich looks mainly at the plight of female workers. ...")  Real intellectuals don't bother themselves with the plight of female workers, I suppose.

 

And if Nickle and Dimed is an "ideologically feminist" book, isn't Allen defining as "ideologically feminist" just about any book written about the lives of women (except those that advise women to be stay-at-home, home-schooling moms, which tend to be written by men)?

 

Further, a man could not have written Nickle and Dimed, because a male writer attempting the same experiment probably could have gotten better jobs. The bottom-of-the-food-chain employment Ehrenreich wrote about is still a largely gender-segregated world. What Allen is really saying is that the whole issue of the exploitation of workers is unworthy of intellectual consideration.

 

"Ideological feminism has ghettoized and trivialized the subject matter of women's writing," Allen says. "As a successful ideology, it has foreclosed debate — and debate is the hallmark of the public intellectual." Actually, there are many points of contention within feminism. In fact, I've long maintained that the once relatively unified feminist movement that sprang up in the 1960s splintered apart by the 1980s, to the point that there are now a whole lot of feminisms with different points of view. The evil cabal of "ideological feminists" who so upset Allen is only a bugaboo living in her mind. Maybe she should see a shrink.

 

Other reactions, in no particular order:

 

When I graduated journalism school in 1973, it still was a given that the boy graduates would be hard news reporters and the girls would write for the "women's pages" -- recipes, fashion, etc. So when I hear someone argue that too many women writers are only writing about women (who are, after all, half the population), I wonder if it still isn't true that it's easier for a woman to be recognized as an authority and get published if she's writing about women's issues.  Conversely, it's still probably true that a lot of men don't notice women's issues, leaving mostly women to notice them and write about them.

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Although Sontag was not primarily a feminist writer, I suspect that without the ground-breaking of the feminist movement she would not have been taken as seriously.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Another letter writer, Scott Banks of Claremont, California, says,

Yet when she gets around to making lists of male and female public intellectuals, her list of males is no more copious than her list of females, and arguably more obscure. By her own count, she has discovered a cause without an effect.

There is indeed a problem here, but not with feminists. Ours is not a country with a particularly healthy interest in intellectuals, public or not. Our president clearly exemplifies this attitude, so perhaps we will discover together, over the long run, the wisdom or folly of this indifference.

My addition: The days in which the publishing industry was run mostly by people who loved literature and ideas are long gone. Now, the publishing industry is run mostly by CEOs who care only about quarterly earnings. For this reason, the manuscript aquisition editors (whose jobs depend on how many dollars their books bring in) are looking for variations on what's been successful before, not for innovation.

 

As I wrote last night, there's not much in the way of fresh, breakthrough political thinking getting published by either the Left or the Right. (And the Right has its own publishing house cranking out a lot of its stuff, so it has less of an excuse.)

 

That's why I believe the next wave of breakthrough thinking is going to come from the Web. It may go from the Web to books, but it will start on the Web.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Allen didn't mention Karen Armstrong, one of my favorite public intellectuals who doesn't write about feminism.

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I think it was John Kenneth Galbraith, speaking in the early 1960s, the high point of post-New Deal liberalism, who pronounced conservatism dead. Conservatism, he said, was "bookless," a characteristic Galbraithian, which is to say Olympian, verdict. Without books, there are no ideas. And it is true: American conservatism was, at the time, a congeries of cranky prejudices, a closed church with an archaic doctrine proclaimed by spoiled swells. William F. Buckley Jr. comes to mind, and a few others whose names will now resonate with almost nobody. Take as just one instance Russell Kirk, an especially prominent conservative intellectual who, as Clinton Rossiter (himself a moderate conservative) wrote, has "begun to sound like a man born one hundred and fifty years too late and in the wrong country." 

At this point in history, it is liberalism upon which such judgments are rendered. And understandably so. It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying. The most penetrating thinker of the old liberalism, the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, is virtually unknown in the circles within which he once spoke and listened, perhaps because he held a gloomy view of human nature. However gripping his illuminations, however much they may have been validated by history, liberals have no patience for such pessimism. So who has replaced Niebuhr, the once-commanding tribune to both town and gown? It's as if no one even tries to fill the vacuum. Here and there, of course, a university personage appears to assert a small didactic point and proves it with a vast and intricate academic apparatus. In any case, it is the apparatus that is designed to persuade, not the idea. 

Ask yourself: Who is a truly influential liberal mind in our culture? Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire? Whose books and articles are read and passed around? There's no one, really.

What animates American conservatism is the future of the regulatory state and the trajectory of federalism. The conservatives have not themselves agreed on how far they want to retract either regulation or the authority of the national government. These are not axiomatic questions for them, as can be seen by their determined and contravening success last week in empowering not the states against Washington but Washington against the states in the area of tort law. As Jeffrey Rosen has pointed out in these pages, many of these issues will be fought out in the courts. But not all. So a great national debate will not be avoided.   

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"It's exactly the wrong way to go," said Richard Lessner, executive director of the American Conservative Union, which is hosting the annual Conservative Political Action Conference that started Thursday. Attendees were buzzing about the concession by a president whose tax-cutting agenda has made him a hero.

"If you're looking to rally the American people around a reform plan, you don't lead off with a tax increase or benefit cuts," Lessner said. "Those are both political losers."

I guess it's also a political loser to explain to people that there's no free lunch. But like it or not, the privatization scheme will cost trillions, and we're already way over our heads in deficits. Exactly what does Mr. Lessner propose we do? Does he believe in a Government Revenue Fairy?

John Lott, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a supporter of private accounts, said the fact that Bush was discussing a tax increase suggested the White House had veered off course.

"Bush has backed himself into the corner on a false issue," Lott said Thursday. "This tells me that the White House hasn't made the strongest argument that they could make."

It worries me when I agree with Lott about anything, but he's right -- Bush has backed himself into a corner on a false issue. The false issue is that Social Security is in crisis -- it's not (see this also).

In fact, I've heard arguments that whatever problems there might be with Social Security funding could be solved entirely by raising the cap. Thus, some say, any shortfalls projected for many years down the road could be avoided, and the program could trip along its merry way, unchanged, for the rest of the 21st century.

But (say the righties) noooooooo ... we can't do anything simple to keep the program as it is. We must overhaul it entirely in order to destroy it. That's the plan.

Righties explain their tax fetish by arguing (against much real-world experience) that raising taxes always hurts the economy, and lowering taxes always helps it. Therefore, one must never raise taxes, but should keep lowering taxes, until (I assume) there are no taxes at all and the government is living on air.

In the case of raising the cap, however, only those making more than $90,000 (where it's capped now; income above the cap is not taxed) to wherever the cap is raised would be affected. It could be a pretty thin slice of the economic demographic. It's irrational to suggest that such a tax shift would be more disasterous to the economy that another few trillion dollars in deficit.

But of course, if you still have faith in supply-side economics that's the argument you will make. Supply-side economics means believing in the Government Revenue Fairy.

Bush has boxed himself into a corner. He sold the privatization scheme to the Right with pie-in-the-sky promises that it would return more money to individuals than the old accounts. But to persuade moderates he's having to actually cough up some detail and the devil therein. Moderates are demanding that Bush show how he's going to pay for this nonsense. Hence, the cap suggestion. As explained on Liberal Oasis:

Polls not only show that Bush is clearly struggling to sell his plan, but also that the prospect of lifting the cap is more popular than you’d might expect.

So by re-floating this trial balloon, Bush can test if he could win support from the Democratic “Fainthearted Faction” without losing too much conservative support.

For example, Fainthearted Faction member Sen. Kent Conrad says he could support partial privatization if the plan wasn’t financed by “massive borrowing” or “drastic benefit cuts.”

But Bush may find that, while picking up a few moderates, he could lose some of the more extreme righties for whom "taxes are always bad" is gospel. In a corner, indeed.

Let's keep him there.

I'm still mystified by this story. I was rejected for a White House press pass at the start of the Bush administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion problem and Internet pictures where he posed like the "Barberini Faun" is credentialed to cover a White House that won a second term by mining homophobia and preaching family values?

At first when I tried to complain about not getting my pass renewed, even though I'd been covering presidents and first ladies since 1986, no one called me back. Finally, when Mr. McClellan replaced Ari Fleischer, he said he'd renew the pass - after a new Secret Service background check that would last several months.

In an era when security concerns are paramount, what kind of Secret Service background check did James Guckert get so he could saunter into the West Wing every day under an assumed name while he was doing full-frontal advertising for stud services for $1,200 a weekend? He used a driver's license that said James Guckert to get into the White House, then, once inside, switched to his alter ego, asking questions as Jeff Gannon. ...

With the Bushies, if you're their friend, anything goes. If you're their critic, nothing goes. They're waging a jihad against journalists - buying them off so they'll promote administration programs, trying to put them in jail for doing their jobs and replacing them with ringers. [emphasis added]

"Even the Nixon White House didn't do anything this creepy," La Dowd says at the end.  

Frank Rich weighs in:

"Jeff" has now quit Talon News not because he and it have been exposed as fakes but because of other embarrassing blogosphere revelations linking him to sites like hotmilitarystud.com and to an apparently promising career as an X-rated $200-per-hour "escort." If Mr. Guckert, the author of Talon News exclusives like "Kerry Could Become First Gay President," is yet another link in the boundless network of homophobic Republican closet cases, that's not without interest. But it shouldn't distract from the real question - that is, the real news - of how this fake newsman might be connected to a White House propaganda machine that grows curiouser by the day. Though Mr. McClellan told Editor & Publisher magazine that he didn't know until recently that Mr. Guckert was using an alias, Bruce Bartlett, a White House veteran of the Reagan-Bush I era, wrote on the nonpartisan journalism Web site Romenesko, that "if Gannon was using an alias, the White House staff had to be involved in maintaining his cover." (Otherwise, it would be a rather amazing post-9/11 security breach.)

Rich then brings up the subject of journalists on the White House payroll, à la Armstrong Williams and Karen Ryan.

The money that paid for both the Ryan-Garcia news packages and the Armstrong Williams contract was siphoned through the same huge public relations firm, Ketchum Communications, which itself filtered the funds through subcontractors. A new report by Congressional Democrats finds that Ketchum has received $97 million of the administration's total $250 million P.R. kitty, of which the Williams and Ryan-Garcia scams would account for only a fraction. We have yet to learn precisely where the rest of it ended up.

Mr. Guckert has at times implied that he either saw or possessed a classified memo identifying Valerie Plame as a C.I.A. operative. Might that memo have come from the same officials who looked after "Jeff Gannon's" press credentials? Did Mr. Guckert have any connection with CNN's own Robert Novak, whose publication of Ms. Plame's name started this investigation in the first place?

The "Jeff Gannon" story got less attention than another media frenzy - that set off by the veteran news executive Eason Jordan, who resigned from CNN after speaking recklessly at a panel discussion at Davos, where he apparently implied, at least in passing, that American troops deliberately targeted reporters. Is the banishment of a real newsman for behaving foolishly at a bloviation conference in Switzerland a more pressing story than that of a fake newsman gaining years of access to the White House (and network TV cameras) under mysterious circumstances?

How is it that more than 40 percent of Americans still believe Iraq has weapons of mass destruction even though President Bush personally has admitted there are none? ...  It's because overall, mainstream media reportage in the United States about the occupation in Iraq is being censured, distorted, threatened by the military and controlled by corporations that own the outlets.

Most Americans also don't know there are four permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq, with the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root diligently constructing 10 others.

I'm a libertarian -- I've got no problem with gay male prostitutes. Or even gay female prostitutes (they have those, right?). Heck, I'd legalize prostitution -- gay and straight -- if it was up to me, and think of its practitioners as every bit as respectable as other professionals like lawyers, lobbyists and journalists. (Maybe moreso, as I suspect the client satisfaction rate is higher . . . .)

What I don't quite get is when the Left became such a bunch of obsessively puritanical, curtain-peering Gladys Kravitz types. Lighten up, guys! It's only sex, and as we all know, especially post-Clinton, sex, and lying about sex, is no big deal!

Paraphrasing a comment I read somewhere yesterday (apologies to the author) "pay no attention to the naked gay conservative male prostitute sitting in the middle of the family values white house living room." Goldberg affects a jocular dismissiveness for a reason. He knows what a real story is and he knows how they work. And he is trivializing this one because it is actually quite dangerous.

Meanwhile, on the left we have much handwringing by commenters over this not being a "gay" story and how we should concentrate on the national security angle and how it's really about access etc, etc. We too are ignoring the naked, gay conservative prostitute in the middle of the family values white house living room. And this is where they get us.

I hear endless braying about how the Democrats have to "fight back." And yet... we just don't seem to to have the heart to play the raw political game they play.

A Republican's political instincts would tell them instantly that this Manchurian Beefcake story presents an amazingly fertile opportunity to take the Bush White House off message in a way that they clearly despise, sow dissension within the GOP coalition, mitigate a growing moral hazard and most of all, make Republicans around the country examine once again whether their attitudes about gays are really what they think they are. 

None of this does Mr. Jordan credit. Yet the worst that can reasonably be said about his performance is that he made an indefensible remark from which he ineptly tried to climb down at first prompting. This may have been dumb but it wasn't a journalistic felony.

It is for this reason that we were not inclined to write further about the episode after our first report. For this we have since been accused of conspiring on Mr. Jordan's behalf. One Web accusation is that Mr. Stephens is--with 2,000 others--a fellow of the World Economic Forum, thereby implying a collusive relationship with Mr. Jordan, who sits on one of the WEF's boards. If this is a "conflict of interest," the phrase has ceased to mean anything at all.

Sorta like the Paris mob turning on Robespierre, huh?

Some rightie bloggers are miffed because WSJ doesn't support their belief that the Jordan scandal was worthy of several billion gigabytes of blog commentaries and the hateful email mobbing the Right is so good at; see, for example, Professor Bainbridge and Captain's Quarters.

 

Back in the 1970s a lot of leftist movements went on an ideological purity kick that just about tore the American Left and much of the Democratic Party apart. It seems to me the Right is now on the brink of the same precipice. They've pushed their extremism and obsession with ideological purity about as far as it will go. From here, they can either pull back from the brink or self-destruct.

 

Of course, there's a third option, which is to continue to push us all in the direction of totalitarianism. I don't think everyone on the Right is ready to go there, but some clearly are. And I think it's only a matter of time before the virtual mobs become literal ones. Eventually, somebody's going to be severely injured, maybe killed.

 

Over on Hullabaloo, Digby says, "I think that the Right is making a mistake if they think that they'll be able to hang on to power if they shut people up." Please read the comments to this. Really good analysis from a lot of people.

 

I hadn't noticed there was an Eason Jordan scandal until last week, when I was surveying the Right Blogosphere looking for comments on the Middle East cease fire. And all I was finding was one blazing-hot post after another about Eason Jordan. You'd think he was behind the 9/11 plot. You'd think he was caught stewing babies. You'd think nothing else was going on in the world -- no Social Security debate, no North Korean plutonium weapons crisis, no continued violence in Iraq, no Middle East cease fire, no new information about Condi Rice's lies and incompetence regarding 9/11. The Right Blogosphere was All Eason Jordan, All the Time.

 

And for what? Some second-hand news (no direct quotes available) about unsubstantiated offhand remarks that may have some factual basis. At best, it was worth a tut-tut. Maybe a finger wag. That's about it.

 

But the Right Blogosphere went on a screaming rampage about it. As Avedon Carol says at The Sideshow:  "The moral of the Rather and Jordan stories is that if right-wingers suspect even for a moment that you do not worship at the alter of right-wing group-think, they will use any meagre excuse they can inflate or invent to drive you out of the news business."

 

I think there's one more moral. For years, the extreme Right has been brilliantly exploiting every tool available -- think tanks, talk radio, the Web, cable television, etc. -- to shape "public opinion." And they've been remarkably successful. A big chunk of the American population has been conditioned to run screaming from the word liberal. To equate disagreement with treason. Eventually, to give George W. Bush unconditional love and support, no matter what he does.

 

In other words, WSJ helped create this monster. As you sow, dear righties, so shall you reap.  

 

See Jay Rosen's comments for a more in-depth and much less snarky look at the "MSM" v. Blogs issue.

 

Update:  "The Republicans know the America they want, and they are not afraid to use any means to get there." Must read.

 

Via The Left Coaster, from the Chicago Tribune:

... the media are facing a blizzard of lies and propaganda from corporations and the government. But journalists at mainstream news organizations don’t feel free, under the conventions of “fair and balanced” journalism, to call a lie a lie, Hall said.

“Too many of us have become too passive,” Warren said. Journalists are scared of angering administration sources and losing access to Washington officials, which he mocked as “access to get lied to.”

Update update: Good commentary on press bias from Charles at Mercury Rising (thanks, Charles!)

 

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North Korea's collapsed economy gives the United States and its allies the diplomatic leverage to convince the communist regime to abandon its nuclear ambitions, [Condoleezza] Rice said.

"North Korea has been signaling and saying that it wants to break out of its economic isolation," Rice told CNN's "Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer." "It has to break out of its economic isolation.

"This is a regime that in terms of its economic condition is going down for the third time. Its people are starving." ...

U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, told CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday that he considered North Korea's nuclear ambitions and missile capability a bigger threat to the United States than Iraq.

Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, urged the White House to rethink its priorities.

But Rice said Iraq's history shows the Baghdad regime is harder to contain than North Korea.

"These are not comparable situations," she said. "They're dangerous, both of them dangerous. But we believe that we have different methods that will work in North Korea that clearly have not and will not work in Iraq." [Kelly Wallace, CNN, October 21, 2002]

In December 2002, oil shipments to North Korea were stopped. Just over two years later, North Korea announced it has nuclear weapons. See how well Condi's plan worked?

 

Also in December 2002, the people of South Korea elected a new President, Roh Moo Hyun, who favors continuation of the Sunshine Policy and greater autonomy from the United States. For a good analysis of this election and Korean-U.S. relations in general at the end of 2002, please see "Korea: Another Big Election Defeat for Bush" by Jim Lobe, TomPaine.com, December 20, 2002.

 

Also in December 2002, Bush was handed a clue that the world does not neatly sort itself into good guys and bad guys:

In early December, the U.S. National Security Agency tracked the movement of 15 Scud missiles and 85 drums of chemicals from a factory in North Korea to the freighter So San. Then the NSA monitored the unflagged ship around the world to the Arabian Sea.

Were these missiles going to Iraq? The U.S. asked the Spanish Navy to stop and board the So San. But the dictator of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, claimed the cargo, thereby putting the Bush Administration into a nice ideological pickle. Saleh is an ally against Iraq, part of Bush's beloved "coalition of the willing"; therefore, Saleh is a "good" guy.

The Yemeni insisted he had bought the missiles years before he made his promise to us [to buy no more scuds from North Korea] and just never got around to telling us about it. Nobody believed that, but Saleh lets us kill Al Qaeda leaders on his territory, and our knowledge of this shipment means he won't be able to re-sell it easily.

So President Bush decided to sacrifice the principle of the interdiction of terror weaponry entering a war zone on the altar of practicality. Instead of suggesting a fair compromise -- "We'll reimburse you for your $41 million purchase, and we'll impound the cargo" -- he chose to appease an unreliable ally and turned the 15 missiles, with the unidentified chemicals, over to the man who had made the U.S. look foolish. [William Safire, "Bush's Stumble: The So San Affair," The New York Times, December 19, 2002]

But perhaps the most critical thing that happened in December 2002 was that North Korea announced it was going back into the plutonium production biz. Years of careful multinational diplomacy were thereby flushed, thanks to Bush and his foreign policy team.

 

I believe I'm finally done with 2002, and will go ahead to 2003 in Part 3.5. I'm trying to break these posts into smaller bits without leaving out anything critical. Eventually I'll put them all in one place for easy reference.

 

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Lebanese Broadcasting Co.'s satellite television news is reporting that the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), comprising Shiite religious parties, has won an absolute majority (141 seats) after adjustments were made in accordance with electoral procedure. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the list leader, expressed his pleasure at this 51 percent outcome for his coalition. The UIA still needs a 2/3s majority, and therefore a coalition partner or partners, to form a government (which involves electing a president and two vice-presidents, who will appoint a prime minister). But it can now win votes on procedure and legislation without needing any other partner.

Allawi's political ticket, which had said it expected to finish strong, ended up a distant third with about 1.2 million votes, far behind the Shiite cleric-led United Iraqi Alliance, which got about 4 million. A coalition of Kurdish parties nearly doubled Allawi's ticket's total.

What happened? Many Iraqi politicians think that Allawi, a longtime exile who was once a member of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, spent so much time with Americans, behind barricades, that he never connected with the people of Iraq.

Allawi's gamble was that Iraqis wanted a strongman willing to call for U.S. tanks to suppress uprisings, a leader who rode around in expensive armored sport utility vehicles, even a leader whose followers had once taken CIA money

When the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq two years ago, it envisioned a quick handover to handpicked allies in a secular government that would be the antithesis of Iran's theocracy -- potentially even a foil to Tehran's regional ambitions.

But, in one of the greatest ironies of the U.S. intervention, Iraqis instead went to the polls and elected a government with a strong religious base -- and very close ties to the Islamic republic next door. It is the last thing the administration expected from its costly Iraq policy -- $300 billion and counting, U.S. and regional analysts say.

How to deal, for example, with Kurds who are proud of the progress that women have made in their region and Shiite clerics who want religious law written into the constitution — law that includes provisions for daughters getting only half as much inheritance as sons? Even more problematic, Kurds and Arabs do not share a commitment to the idea of Iraq. Sunni Arabs have always been nationalistic, and the Shiites may become nationalists now that they are rulers. But the Kurds do not want to be Iraqi at all and will not accept a constitution that restores any central government authority over their region.

The Bush administration, which already held the world record as the most deluded government in history, has now taken denial to unprecedented highs by blaming Syria and Iran for its "Iraqi problem." Why didn't Americans realize that it is dangerous to put a buffoon in charge of the US government who hasn't a clue about the world around him, what he is doing or the consequences of his actions?

Iran suspended uranium enrichment and all related activities in November, hoping to build trust and avoid U.N. Security Council sanctions. The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria, is monitoring the suspension.

It is much easier to make low-enriched uranium (LEU)--the fuel needed to power light-water plutonium reactors--than it is to make weapons-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU), as Washington has accused Pyongyang of doing. A relatively small number of centrifuges is needed to make LEU, but the production of HEU in quantities sufficient for nuclear weapons requires the continuous operation of hundreds--or thousands--of centrifuges over a long period. Richard Garwin, a respected nuclear scientist, has estimated that 1,300 high-performance centrifuges would have to operate full time for three years to make the 60 kilograms of fissile material needed for a basic ("gun-type") nuclear weapon. Accomplishing that would require an enormous sustained input of electricity, without fluctuation or interruption. Moreover, the operation of a multi-centrifuge "cascade" requires a high-powered motor with a speed twice that of a MiG-21 jet engine. North Korea cannot produce engines even for its Russian-supplied MiGs, and it has only limited, highly unreliable electricity capabilities. It is therefore unlikely that the country is able at present to build or operate the equipment needed, over a long period, to produce weapons-grade uranium.

American anxieties only grew, however, when, on September 17, 2002, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited Pyongyang to discuss the normalization of relations--a visit that Japan had been quietly exploring for more than nine months without telling the United States. Washington, in fact, found out about the trip only three weeks before it occurred, when Koizumi presented the upcoming visit as a fait accompli to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Koizumi did not ask for U.S. permission to go to North Korea, and he refused to call off the trip even after Armitage revealed Washington's suspicions about a secret North Korean uranium program.

Faced with the prospect that the North Korea policies of South Korea and Japan had slipped out of its control, the Bush administration "saw a real possibility that its options on the [Korean] peninsula would increasingly be driven by the policy agendas of others," wrote Jonathan Pollack, chairman of the Strategic Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College in the summer of 2003. Plans for Kelly's visit to Pyongyang were accelerated, and his showdown with North Korean leaders came less than three weeks after Koizumi's meeting with Kim Jong Il.

The administration's underlying mistake--in the case of the North Korean uranium mystery, as in Iraq--has been treating a worst-case scenario as revealed truth. In October 2004, when Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, was challenged to justify her government's mistaken assessment about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, she explained that "a policymaker cannot afford to be wrong on the short side, underestimating the ability of a tyrant like Saddam Hussein." Similarly, General James Clapper, who was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) during the 1994 North Korean nuclear crisis, has said that "personally as opposed to institutionally, I was skeptical that they ever had a bomb. We didn't have smoking gun evidence either way. But you build a case for a range of possibilities. In a case like North Korea, you have to apply the most conservative approach, the worst-case scenario." The 1994 U.S. estimate (by the CIA and the DIA) that North Korea had "one or two" nuclear weapons at that time remains unchanged--although it has yet to be proved or disproved.

In December 2002 North Korea was suspected of having one or two nuclear weapons that it had acquired before agreeing in 1994 to freeze its known nuclear program and to allow it to be monitored.

More than a year later, North Korea may have quadrupled its arsenal of nuclear weapons. During the intervening period, the Bush administration has relied on intelligence that dismissed North Korean claims that it restarted its nuclear program at Yongbyon with the express purpose of reprocessing previously sealed and monitored spent fuel to extract plutonium to make a ''nuclear deterrent.''

Now there are about 8,000 spent fuel rods missing -- evidence that work on such a deterrent may have begun. It is just the most recent failure in a string of serious North Korea-related intelligence failures. [Jack Pritchard, "What I Saw in Korea," The New York Times, January 21, 2004]

In a curious twist, the United States has shrugged off the first outright declaration by North Korea that it has nuclear weapons. Here is a nation with one of the most erratic leaderships in the world declaring that it has weapons of mass destruction and the US response - at least that of new Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice - is glib dismissal. Saddam Hussein must be wondering where he went wrong. Of course, with North Korea there is no telling whether the declaration of nuclear power is true or simply a flight of Dear Leader Kim Jong-il's imagination. The unremitting propaganda that emanates from the official Korean Central News Agency is not noted for either its accuracy or sparkling prose. Suffice to say, however, after United Nations monitors were expelled from North Korea in 2002 the US claimed it had been told privately by officials in Pyongyang that the country already had nuclear weapons. The fact that North Korea has already been implicated in the illegal trade of nuclear weapons and traded missile technology with other rogue states suggests there may be more than bluff to the claim.

 

 Dr Rice is gambling on the fact that the North Korean declaration is no more than an attempt to raise the stakes in the six-nation nuclear program talks. For good measure she has declared that the US and its allies "can deal with any potential threat from North Korea". Having declared North Korea an "outpost of tyranny" last month, Dr Rice has made her position clear enough. It is a long way from the more hopeful scenes just four years ago when then secretary of state Madeleine Albright sat at the table in Pyongyang with Kim Jong-il to negotiate in person. The US appeared to have a plan at that point. It no longer does.