Bush sends personal letter to N. Korean leader

A diplomatic exclamation point
“I think a presidential letter is a fairly restrained version of direct communication and appropriate to the stage of the negotiations,” he said. “I think it’s better for this sort of letter to be written than for the president to jump on a plane to Pyongyang.”

The Bush letter is a diplomatic exclamation point because North Korea has been hearing the same message from Hill. The correspondence also serves a domestic political purpose — signaling to conservative critics of the North Korea deal that the United States will not roll back its requirements or accept less than a full declaration of the North’s nuclear program.

The question of proliferation has taken on greater significance, and become a political hurdle for the Bush administration, since Israel’s air strike on a suspected Syrian nuclear site Sept. 6. Intelligence reports suggested Syria was cooperating in some fashion with North Korea in building the site.

The news that North Korea may have been working with others as recently as this year, after it had agreed to give up its weapons, reinvigorated U.S. domestic opposition to what some conservatives in Congress see as an overly generous deal with an unreliable country.

Under the deal, North Korea was promised 1 million tons of fuel oil or the equivalent, plus political concessions such as its removal from a U.S. list of terrorism-supporting nations, in return for disabling its nuclear program and making other moves.

Loose deadline
U.S. officials have acknowledged the Dec. 31 deadline is likely to slip. Better to have the complete document in hand a couple of weeks late than to have a half-baked version by the Dec. 31 deadline.

“It is going to take a monumental effort to get all of this done by the end of the year,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking to reporters as she flew to Brussels on Thursday for NATO meetings. “And I am not too concerned about whether it’s December 31st or not. They seem to be on track. Everybody believes the cooperation is very good.”

South Korean Foreign Minister Song Min-soon sounded a gloomier note, saying, “There has not been progress on the declaration yet.”

A Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman expressed disappointment that North Korea was likely to miss the year-end deadline, but that it is unlikely to affect the overall agreement.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said the six countries were consulting on whether to hold another round of meetings before the end of the year.

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