It certainly does seem that bad intelligence combined with the Bush administration's bellicose foreign policy has done us no favors in North Korea. But is the assumption that North Korea only built nukes after the Bush administration scuttled the "agreed framework" in October 2002 clearly true? That same month I wrote a piece about the Senate Iraq debate with this passage about a Ted Kennedy floor speech:

"What about North Korea?" he roared. "They've already got nuclear weapons!" Kennedy presumably recognized his error after the fact. Thanks to an apparent airbrushing, the Congressional Record now renders Kennedy saying, "They may have nuclear weapons." (Even that isn't likely.)

After the piece ran, a friend in another Democratic senator's office emailed to question my parenthetical aside. He said his office had the same understanding that Kennedy did--that Kim Jong Il had very likely already built a bomb or two. So it seems this was was at least an open question at the time, and one that could cast the Bush approach in a slightly less idiotic light. But I haven't been following this in great detail. Can anyone shed further light? Was what I wrote correct, or did Teddy have it right the first time? Am I missing something? P.S. Maybe what I'm missing here is this: That the belief of Kennedy and my staffer friend that Kim Jong Il already had a bomb was simply derived from bad intelligence (perhaps, I'm not sure). I guess the point then would be that we were even more wrong about North Korea's capabilities than today's Times story indicates. Update: See comments for some useful clarification. --Michael Crowley