By Claudia Rosett, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Saturday, March 3, 2007
It would be wonderful to feel warm and happy about the diplomacy now breaking out all over. Five years ago America was confronting the axis of evil. Today we are offering access to envoys. After years in the cold, North Korea's Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan is on his way to New York for talks involving U.S. promises of aid and diplomatic normalization if Pyongyang just stops making nuclear bombs.
Later this month, at a "neighbors" conference convened by Iraq, America plans to sit down with Syria and Iran, whose leaders, in the grand tradition of Tony Soprano, are sending delegates to ponder ways of "stabilizing" the region they have been destabilizing with terrorist networks and bombs.
From global superpower and world cop, America is now recasting itself as feel-good therapist for rogue regimes - seeking to know what's really on the mind of Kim Jong Il, and ready to break bread with the ayatollahs. It all sounds so civilized.
But I am more worried now than I have been since that clarifying and awful morning of Sept. 11, 2001. While America's policy may be shifting, the nature of our enemies has not. We are now seeking good-faith deals with governments that rule by terror, and lie and cheat with an impunity that our own leaders cannot afford.
Diplomacy has its own impetus toward promises, treaties and frameworks that depend on good faith from both sides. America, when making a pledge, is under tremendous pressure - by the very nature of our democratic system of transparency and law - to keep it. A Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, or a President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Bashar al-Assad, is not.
North Korea cheated on its 1994 nuclear freeze deal not only according to U.S. diplomats, but by its own belligerent admission. Syria and Iran have escaped any direct redress for the terror they have bred in Iraq and Lebanon - while tut-tutting about the turmoil. Instead, time goes by while politicians in Washington study and debate and discuss whether or not the lying we have seen already is serious, and the cheating is real, and whether yet another feckless resolution from a United Nations Security Council fundamentally divided between democratic and dictatorial systems of government might somehow bring harmony.
Having dismissed military options, America is preparing to bargain away even the financial leverage we might wield. This is a talk-talk phase of what these tyrants have already effectively declared as war-war.
It is desperately unfashionable these days to use the phrase regime change. The model now seems to be Libya, where Moammar Gadhafi in 2003 agreed to give up his nuclear program in exchange for safety and diplomatic ties. But Gadhafi at the time had just seen Saddam Hussein toppled from power by a military invasion, and then pulled from a spider hole. The result of the terror campaign fomented since then in Iraq by Syria and Iran, and the nuclear blackmail racket run with such high-wire skill by North Korea, is that America, instead of confronting such threats at the source, has backed off. Membership in the axis of evil is no longer a one-way ticket to history's graveyard of lies; it is becoming a bargaining chip at America's high table.
But with terror-based governments, regime change remains the only real answer. And if America is now living in a dream world in which there is no war unless we choose to declare it, our best hope remains that these regimes - like the former Soviet Union - will collapse from within. On that score, our real allies are not the tyrants who now deign to haggle with us over "stability" while pursuing weapons of mass murder and supplying roadside bombs to terrorists.
Our natural allies are the people living under such tyrants; people who desire not a false dtente while their despots build bombs, but the genuine rights and freedoms that America not so long ago was promising to support. These people include the millions in Iran now angry at their government over such daily matters as the rising price of tomatoes, and the millions in North Korea who over the last decade have watched family members starve to death while Kim has poured resources into maintaining one of the world's largest armies.
When we sit down to negotiate deals with their tyrants, we dignify and strengthen and buy time for the bomb-building Kims and Ahmadinejads, and the terrorist-backing Assads. We betray our own principles and our real friends. America is at core better than that, and if we are not honest with ourselves now, we are at high risk of getting hit - like it or not - with the much more costly and dangerous realities right down the road.
Claudia Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. George Russell is executive editor of Fox News.
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