Beijing tries to read mixed U.S. signals in Korea diplomacy By John W. Lewis

For the past year China has led the quest for a negotiated solution to the Korean nuclear crisis. It facilitated and hosted three-way talks with the United States and North Korea a year ago this week and two sessions of the six-party talks (adding South Korea, Japan and Russia) in August and February. Its officials crisscrossed the globe to explore potential areas of common interest and compromise and this week hosted North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to explore options for the beleaguered Korean Peninsula. Yet, in each of the formal talks, the Chinese have been discouraged by the minimal results. They are now questioning U.S. intentions toward Korea and, in the longer term, toward China.

Beijing considers the unchecked expansion of North Korea's nuclear weapons to be a real possibility, and its reasoning starts with the record of U.S. policies toward nuclear proliferation. That record, the Chinese argue, is mixed and often contradictory. As a result, China worries that Washington might continue to tolerate the program so long as Pyongyang did not cross key red lines, such as the transfer of nuclear materials to terrorists.

Whatever Beijing's past position on nuclear matters, many senior Chinese now regard nuclear weapons on their border to be a direct threat to their national security and suspect Washington of downplaying that danger. For them, it is no great leap to the conclusion that the unfettered growth of the Korean program might embolden others in Asia, including Taiwan, to acquire nuclear weapons despite verbal opposition from Washington. Beijing's leaders can easily imagine how that nightmarish turn of events would undermine the nation's drive toward modernization and end strategic cooperation with the United States.

Despite the fact that all parties at the six-party meeting in February endorsed the dismantling of the North's nuclear weapons program, the Chinese fear that the talks may be dead in the water. Following that meeting, they began to debate other ways to resolve the crisis. They had already reorganized the leadership team responsible for North Korean affairs, and that team had begun acting to prevent the worst case, including offering further inducements to Kim Jong Il this week. Whereas last fall the talk of deepening U.S.-China cooperation on Korea pervaded the news, now, especially after Vice President Dick Cheney's uncompromising stand on Korea and Taiwan last week, the reverse is occurring.

What China can do in these circumstances is quite limited. Its influence on North Korea is largely determined by what the United States does or doesn't do. By refusing to negotiate on a staged process leading to the eventual dismantlement of Pyongyang's nuclear weapons, Washington has tacitly allowed the North's program to proceed. It has rejected proposals for a temporary freeze, technical talks and any interim steps short of the unconditional and complete ending of the program. The result is virtual paralysis.

Beijing has been able to work with North Korea only when it could find areas of potential compromise between Washington and Pyongyang. It cannot or will not act

alone to exert pressure because this would jeopardize its influence on the North. Contrary to a widely circulated story, Beijing did not cut off energy shipments to North Korea for three days in 2003. Beijing would not take such a counterproductive action when its main influence with the North lies in the kind of quiet diplomacy being practiced this week with Kim Jong Il.

Many in Beijing are beginning to question whether there might be a more promising approach with Pyongyang. Should the Chinese, South Koreans and Russians conclude that making progress toward the common goal of the North's complete nuclear disarmament is out of reach, for example, they reluctantly might translate their joint offer of aid in February into a quid pro quo for a partial agreement, such as a limited freeze, that would allow the situation to stabilize. China could worry that such an independent action could endanger the common front with Washington. At the same time, it could calculate that the United States would be sufficiently pleased with any solution that halted the North Korean nuclear program.

None of these developments may come to pass, of course, but who could have imagined a year ago that Washington would have permitted the situation to deteriorate to the present point?

After all the fashionable sneering at the United Nations for its lack of effectiveness in our new, dangerous world, what former U.S. chief weapons inspector David Kay's testimony to Congress makes crystal clear is that the U.N. system did work. It worked precisely where the need is greatest today, in finding out weapons of mass destruction and preventing their use. And it worked just as the derided French, despised Germans and chided Russians said it did -- effectively, without the loss of more than 500 Americans and thousands of others, and at a small fraction of the $200 billion cost of the Iraq operation so far.

Kay said that the combination of inspectors on the ground and intelligence assets overhead could not be beat for first detecting and then verifying -- and, if necessary, destroying -- nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. It's just what the U.N.-U.S. combination was providing when the Bush administration decided to disregard all intelligence to that point, which had shown no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and follow its prejudices to war. Saddam, in fact, had nothing, and the U.N. inspectors, assisted by intelligence assets, were on the way to prove it. Kay noted that Iraq was in disarray, with Saddam's key lieutenants disregarding his increasingly fanciful orders. Couldn't or didn't U.S. and British intelligence know that? Disarray at the top is manifested in a thousand ways, both to the educated observer and to the person in the street. Iraq before the war was not a closed country. Not only were hundreds of U.N. inspectors there, but also thousands of people from all walks of life and many Western countries were also in Iraq. Learning that the government was in disarray was not like penetrating the KGB.

Kay was polite in his testimony and pointed only to an intelligence failure. It clearly was a lot more. Both in the United States and Britain, analysts who knew there was no evidence of any weapons capability could not get their message past the lowest levels of the intelligence bureaucracy. The administration, or the dominant players in it, were determined to let no alternative story surface, except the one that would justify war. Under those circumstances, the truth, which is generally a messy thing that doesn't fit well into any story, had no chance of getting a hearing.

The "intelligence failure'' cost the lives and health of thousands of men and women, and left families in America and around the world grieving -- all for nothing. It has cost the American people $200 billion and counting. Saddam is gone, perhaps a few months ahead of when he would have been gone anyway, but the United States is saddled with an Iraq that will take a long time to find its way, assuming the United States does not desert it again. Heads should roll, but not just at the top of the intelligence community. Heads should roll also among those who would not hear the truth; who would not investigate the truth while they could; who preferred, and still prefer, to bad-mouth the U.N., the French, the Germans and many others who had continued to put their faith in the institutions the United States built to maintain world peace and who, sad to say, were entirely right.

Larry Diamond, coordinator of the Democracy Program at CDDRL and recently a political adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, spoke at SIIS on May 11. In his lecture, "Transition to What in Iraq?" he painted a grim picture of Iraq's future. He warned that, unless the violence in Iraq is brought under control and the political playing field is equalized, the likelihood of transforming Iraq into a democratic country is slim.

To produce an outcome in Iraq that is even vaguely positive, Diamond explained, a new, legitimate Iraqi state armed forces must be established, and the insurgency of the Mahdi army -- the militia faction most opposed to American intervention -- must be defeated.

Faced with the deadly menace posed by transnational terror organizations, the nations of the world must redouble their cooperative efforts. The tasks ahead -- to disrupt terror groups and preempt their attacks -- require intense coordination among a multitude of national intelligence, national law enforcement, and military organizations. Unprecedented cooperation among all of the nuclear powers is needed to prevent nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of terror groups.

Yet, paradoxically, the two nations that have suffered the worst terror attacks -- the United States and Russia -- are regressing more and more to national strategies. They have been unwilling to make the extra effort to reap the benefits of real international cooperation.

I believe that the United States' strategic vision of the war on terrorism is flawed. I fear it is following the isolationist path of the United States after World War I rather than pursuing the broad international programs it successfully undertook to protect its security interests after World War II.

The terrorists posing the greatest threat to the United States and to Russia are transnational, with cells in many different countries. To support their training and operations, they raise funds in many countries and maintain these in international bank accounts. They use satellite-based television as their principal means of propaganda, the World Wide Web as their principal means of communication and international airlines as their principal means of transportation. Their efforts to get weapons of mass destruction are based on penetrating the weakest security links among the nations possessing these weapons, and their successful guerrilla operations depend on their ability to get support from sympathizers among the more than 1 billion Islamic people around the world.

An international operation is clearly needed to successfully deal with this threat. But the United States is not making full use of other nations and international institutions to dry up the terrorists' funds in international bank accounts, to gain intelligence on their planning for future attacks, to penetrate their cells so that it has a chance of preempting these attacks, to organize all nuclear powers with effective security of their nuclear weapons and fissile material, and to conduct counterinsurgency operations wherever they are needed. Dealing effectively with transnational terror groups that operate with impunity across borders requires an international operation with the full cooperation of allies and partners in Europe and Asia.

This is not "mission impossible." In 1993, the United States was able to get all of the former members of the Warsaw Pact to join up with NATO in forming the Partnership for Peace to cooperate in peacekeeping operations. In 1994, the United States with the full cooperation of Russia was able to negotiate an agreement by which all nuclear weapons were removed from Uzbekistan, Belarus and Kazakhstan and by which substantial improvements were made in the security of nuclear weapons in Russia. In 1995, the United States was able to get an agreement under which NATO took responsibility for the peacekeeping operations in Bosnia, an operation that was believed at the time to be as dangerous and filled with religious and sectarian strife as Iraq today, and it was able to get dozens of non-NATO nations -- notably including Russia -- to join it in that operation.

Securing Russian cooperation required listening to Russian views and making accommodations wherever possible. As U.S. defense secretary, I had to meet with my Russian counterpart four different times before I came to understand how to structure the command in Bosnia in a way acceptable to both Russians and NATO. The general lesson from this example, which is still applicable today, was best expressed by Winston Churchill, who observed during World War II, "The problem with allies is they sometimes have ideas of their own." But in reflecting on that problem, he also said, "The only thing worse than fighting a war with allies is trying to fight a war without allies."

What lessons can we learn from Churchill today? Had the Bush administration understood better the dangers of the post-conflict phase, surely it would have worked harder to get the support of those countries before invading Iraq. In any event, after the war it would have reached out to them and tried to achieve an accommodation that would have allowed their support during the reconstruction phase.

Instead, the administration took the position that any nation that was not with the United States during the war would not have a role in the reconstruction. To compound the problem, the United States did not seek meaningful assistance from the United Nations. Today, in the light of the difficulties experienced in restoring security in Iraq, the administration is reaching out to the United Nations and requesting that it play a major role in the political reconstitution of Iraq, but it is still not working effectively with the governments of France, Germany and Russia.

Just as the United States erred in believing that it did not need more international support in Iraq, so did the Russian government err in believing that it did not need more international support as it reconstituted its government after the Soviet era. The Putin administration believed -- correctly -- that it could turn around the Russian economy without significant assistance from other countries, and it believed that it could deal most effectively with its terrorist threat without interference from other countries. It also apparently believed that moving toward a level of democracy conflicted with the controls necessary for economic recovery and for fighting its terror war. So today we see a Russia that has enjoyed a healthy 7 percent growth rate each of these past five years, but has stopped -- indeed reversed -- its move towards becoming a liberal democracy. This reversal over the long term will have profoundly negative consequences for the Russian economy and for the Russian people, and unquestionably it is setting Russia on a course that will alienate it both from the United States and the European Union.

Both the Bush administration and the Putin administration have apparently made the decision that they can achieve their goals without broad international support. Both governments have erred in that judgment. But it is not too late to correct the judgment, and I fervently hope that both of governments will do so. The most important step in that process is reviving cooperation between the United States and Russia.

When Larry Diamond left for Baghdad in January as an adviser to the U.S. occupation authority, he took all the equipment he believed he needed to help construct a hopeful new nation out of the ashes of dictatorship: the academic models he had crafted over the years as an authority on building democracies, and confidence those models would work.

But the jarring reality of Iraq, with its escalating violence and collapsing civic order, forced Diamond to look for a few new tools beyond those listed in the textbooks. When he speaks now of the models for building democratic countries, he stresses a different set of equipment, which he found in short supply: body armor, armor-plated cars, a huge military presence.

The story of Iraq, this onetime optimist believes, is a tale of missed opportunities.

"We just bungled this so badly," said Diamond, a 52-year-old senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. "We just weren't honest with ourselves or with the American people about what was going to be needed to secure the country."

Diamond was a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority and spent several initially hopeful months in Iraq -- lecturing on democracy, even in mosques, encouraging people to participate and helping shape laws that embodied his vision. He returned to Palo Alto in early April for a short break, then ran into an emotional brick wall, he said, when he contemplated the mess he had left behind.

Last Thursday, when it came time for Diamond to return, he did not get on the plane.

Instead, he was in his office at the Hoover Tower, disillusioned over the desperate turn of events he had witnessed and what he feels was a country allowed to spin out of control, in large part, he says, because of the Bush administration's unwillingness to commit a big enough force to protect Iraqis from militias and insurgents.

"You can't develop democracy without security," he said. "In Iraq, it's really a security nightmare that did not have to be. If you don't get that right, nothing else is possible. Everything else is connected to that."

Few people would seem better prepared for the job in Iraq than Diamond. He is coordinator of the Democracy Program at Stanford's Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and he has been co-editor since 1990 of the Journal of Democracy. He has done extensive fieldwork in Taiwan and Nigeria.

He said he had initially opposed the war in Iraq because he felt the United States needed broader international support before attacking, but after the main ground fighting ended last April, he was ready to help.

"Once the war was over, I felt we had a moral and political obligation to the Iraqis to try and help build something better," he said. "That was clear in my mind. I didn't agonize over that. I really had something to contribute."

So late last year, after the Bush administration and the provisional authority outlined their plans for writing an interim constitution and handing over sovereignty on June 30, Diamond said he began to speak with officials about playing a role and implementing some of the ideas he had spent his career developing.

Arriving in Baghdad in early January, he said, he was sober-minded about the challenges but encouraged by much of what he found.

"When I got there on the ground, I was actually hopeful as I met some of the young people, women, civic groups, and their eagerness for change," he said.

"It was mind-blowing, really,'' he added. "There were people who wanted to know how to make democracy work. There were so many positive signs. Civil society was very weak, as you'd expect, but it was beginning to reconstitute itself. There was a lot of energy, a lot of passion, a lot of creativity and a lot of desire to learn. I even had a good experience with some mullahs who supported us."

Diamond said that he had some successes. He said he sought to provide female representatives a guaranteed number of seats in the provisional parliament and helped secure for them a 25 percent stake.

He helped strengthen some of the provisions in the interim constitution supporting the development of civic groups to organize people at a grassroots level, and worked to make the new government structure somewhat decentralized as a way of giving minority groups more of a voice and providing opportunities for grassroots participation. And he instructed, while learning.

In January, he outlined the four basic principles of democracy in a speech at Hilla University, discussing such issues as checks and balances and the rule of law. In February, at a conference in Baghdad on decentralization, he presented a 12-point description of how civil society helps build a stronger democracy.

In another address to Iraqis in late March, Diamond called the transitional law, as the interim constitution is called, the right path to "a true democracy," praised the spirit of compromise he found and promised the Iraqis that their nascent democracy would lead the Arab world.

But Diamond said it was around that time that the insurgency grew bolder, that more Americans and Iraqis began to die and that security appeared to be collapsing. He said he shuddered as he began to see other advisers getting killed on the same roads he traveled.

And then he had what he describes as a painful, transforming experience.

"I had one of those moments when you cut through all the bull," he said. "I was speaking to this women's group, and one woman got up and asked, 'If we do all these things, who's going to protect us?' " Diamond recalled. "That was the moment when I said to myself, 'Oh my God, some of these women are going to be assassinated because they are here listening to me.' It just struck me between the eyes."

As the violence spread, Diamond said, he felt ever more painfully the mistake the United States had made by not sending in more troops to keep the insurgents at bay.

The American policies basically encouraged Iraqis to stand up -- only to face the threat of being mowed down for doing so, he said.

"It was totally hypocritical of us to do one and not the other," Diamond said of the lack of security.

As a result, he said, democratization suffered potentially fatal setbacks. He was angry, he added, not just because optimistic Iraqis were being killed, but because the downward spiral was preventable.

His recommendations for rescuing the situation run counter to some of the policies that the Bush administration insists it will not alter. Diamond said that, in his view, the United States must more than double its current military force of about 135,000 and confront the violent Iraqi militias consistently, while offering political benefits to those who lay down their arms and accept democratic institutions.

The best he can say about the prospects in Iraq now is that, as he puts it, "civil war is not inevitable."

Diamond said that, realistically, he never expected a flawless democracy to emerge in just months. It was more likely, he said, that the legacies of traditional Arab society and dictatorship would have produced some rigged elections, corruption and sporadic violence. But with greater security, there would have been, at the least, a constitution and a more flexible and responsive government.

None of that is likely to happen now, he said, without significantly more American troops and a more assertive military stance.

"The literature stresses the overwhelming need to get the security under control," Diamond said. "Nothing that happened could not have been anticipated. I don't think we were applying the lessons of the past as systematically as they should have been, to put it as politely as possible."