I’ll admit, I was rather shocked to read the headline “North Korea Says It Will Drop Nuclear Efforts for Aid Program” in this morning’s New York Times. Could I have been wrong all this time, I wondered, in my assumption that the Bush administration and its negotiators weren’t terribly interested in honest-to-god negotiations? Could they have actually done something right for a change?
Then I looked into the actual details of the agreement (and I used the word “details” reluctantly). It would seem that the agreement, such as it is, was arrived at by postponing nearly all of the issues over which there was any dispute to a later date.
Let’s see… the White House needs some good news to distract from all this hurricane business, and suddenly we have a big announcement of “progress” in the six-party talks with the North Koreans. Big headlines, but there’s not really any meat here. You’ll forgive me if I say this all seem oddly similar to the big, exciting announcement of the new Iraqi constitution that doesn’t actually address any of the issues about which anyone is upset.