by Cheryl Rofer
So I click to the New York Times, and there is Sig Hecker checking out stuff in Yongbyon. Looks like that might not be happening again soon; the North Koreans have banned the IAEA inspectors from their reprocessing plant and say they will be starting it up again.
Their stated reason is that the United States is dragging its feet in removing North Korea from its list of states that sponsor terror. I may be missing something, but I thought that that was supposed to be done when North Korea handed over all those documents about their plutonium program.
This could be one more move by the folks in the Bush administration who want to continue to press for more about that seemingly mythical uranium enrichment program in North Korea. It could be that North Korea is making one of its usual histrionic negotiating moves.
Or it could be that Kim Jong Il is much more incapacitated than has been said, and the newbies in charge feel they need to be conservative. Conservative in case the Dear Leader comes back from a coma, say, and wants to know how they've been protecting the country. Conservative means protecting their one negotiating chip, the nuclear program. So they're rolling back their cooperation with those outsiders. It could be, too, that a harder-line faction has taken back some control from those who might be considered in North Korea to be liberalizers. And whatever the harder-line faction in the American adminstration has managed to wrest back from those they consider to be liberalizers gives the harder-line North Koreans exactly the excuse they need.
Kim's health is the wild card here, and I suspect it's playing a significant role in these latest moves. Jeffrey Lewis has a nice suggestion for diplomacy under normal conditions, but I've got my doubts as to whether it would work now.
