We can agree that anybody who sold nuclear reactors to North Korea as recently as six years ago committed treason. Right?
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Open source, procurement, and gov tech.
We can agree that anybody who sold nuclear reactors to North Korea as recently as six years ago committed treason. Right?
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It’s not treason, it’s a Republican business opportunity……..
Just like all the other stuff that isn’t treason or a war crime.
You understand that we comitted to providing NoKo with light water nuclear reactors under the Agreed Framework, right?
Do you also know that a Clinton administration official called Jimmy Carter a “treasonous prick” — his words, not mine — for running to the media and preventing the Clinton administration from ensuring sanctions and oversight was a part of the deal?
Given that the Clinton Administration approved this deal, that’s pretty pathetic, Waldo.
It was sarcasm, actually.
With so many Republicans claiming that the North Korea situation is, in fact, President Clinton’s fault, my point is that anybody who believes that must also blame Donald Rumsfeld for actually supplying the reactors.
Funny Waldo, because a lot of the finger-pointing towards Clinton have been in response to the massive amount of blame being thrown at President Bush for North Korea’s current state.
If President Bush hadn’t invaded Iraq, and had stuck by his “we’re not an interventionist nation” schtick that got him elected in 2000, I’m not sure I’d blame the man. But he invaded Iraq because they had “WMD-related program activities” and because of human rights abuses on the part of Saddam Hussein, yet he’s all but ignored South Korea. The attention he has paid to the nation has been about negotiating. Yet he gave little mind to negotiating with Iraq, and they didn’t have anything but conventional weapons.
He’s knowingly let
SouthNorth Korea develop nuclear weapons and let the nation starve its people while spending billions invading Iraq for…what, comparatively speaking?There’s more than enough blame to go around on South Korea, but President Bush gets the lion’s share. He’s based his six year presidency on preventing renegade nations from becoming a threat to the U.S., and yet he hasn’t done shit on this one. It’s a colossal failure.
It may be churlish to quibble, but I think you mean North Korea in the rant above. Now, moving on…
What what is it that happened in between Bush’s campaign schtick and the invasion of Iraq? I know there was something, but I just can’t put my finger on it. I’m sure it’ll come to me.
You’re not saying we ought to have invaded N. Korea, are you? I think this country has had enough of land wars in East Asia.
No serious people dispute that it was the galactically stupid Clinton-Albright-Carter Axis of Incompetence that led us to where we are today vis-a-vis N. Korea. To attempt to blame Bush for this is to demonstrate that you’re wearing partisan blinders.
Well, do tell us. Because I sure can’t figure it out.
I have no idea what we should have done or should do now. But I do know that it’s not nothing, which is what the Bush administration has done. Given the threshold for invading Iraq, anybody who supports an invasion of Iraq ought to agree that we should have invaded North Korea. The bar was set extremely low for Iraq. Why is it so high for North Korea?
No serious people dispute President Bush is a robot powered by energy generated by nuclear fish working for the Illuminati.
See? Anybody can be right by beginning a point with “no serious people dispute”!
I don’t think you’re being fair. Were we talking about Iraq, I would admit that the post-war occupation has gone very poorly – in large measure due to the lack of planning and competent execution by the Bush administration, including, but not limited to, Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc. The President’s party is about to be punished for this.
That having been said, for you to argue that Bush deserves the lion’s share of the blame for NK going nuclear strains credulity. It was the Clintion administration that traded 2 light water reactors + attendant technology, massive amounts of fuel oil, and massive amounts of grain to Kim in ’94 all in exchange for a promise not to develop nukes. A promise we now know he didn’t keep for a second.
Can you really assign the lion’s share of the blame for this to Bush?
The problem with the Agreed Framework was not that we entered it in the first place. It may have been the best available option. The problem was that it was all carrot, no stick. There were virtually no inspections and consequences built into it.
Unfortunately, a lot of the blame for that falls on Carter for cowboying off to announce a deal without letting the WH approve the specifics.
As for what we should have done with NoKo? Frankly, there’s not a hell of a lot we *could* do. They worked on their nuclear program during the 90s when they had promised not to do so. They’ll continue now. We can either (a) let them have nukes, (b) attack them, (c) attempt some sort of bilateral negotiation or (d) attempt multilateral negotiations.
Since NoKo is far more of a regional problem than a threat to the US, our interest lies in forcing them to negotiate with their regional neighbors and in allowing their regional neighbors to bear a lot of the cost of the eventual solution rather than trying to solve their problems for them.
Iraq really has little to do with it. We’re not sending 150,000 troops into NoKo, so their disposition is largely irrelevant.
Just finished listening to the Bush press conference; of course, all questions revolved around the issue of N.K. and Iraq. I thought that the President said the right thing when questioned about Clinton’s dealings with N.K. He simply said that we tried bilateral talks (and concessions) in 94 and they simply didn’t work. He was very clear in NOT blaming Clinton for the failings of those talks. He DID lay the blame directly on the maniacal leader of N.K. for the failings of the bilateral talks with Clinton and the Six Party talks that came later.
This is used as a political football in many ways, but the bottom line will always remain the same- N.K. seems to respect only those who are strong. Inolving the military is surely what KJi would like because this would be tantamount to stepping on China’s toes. My guess is that if the President (now, and whoever that might be in ’08) continues to include China as a strategic partner in the effort to isolate the N.K. government, the nuclear threat will be lot of KJi’s hot air versus a long-term strategic threat. I would tend to think that if Iraq was bordered by the old USSR, the US policy would look a great deal more like the policy we’ve followed with N.K.
Myself, I would place the lion’s share of the N.K. problem in China’s lap.
Uhm, because the United States already got it’s ass handed to them once by North Korea and doesn’t want a repeat?
:)
There’s no question that a) the NK problem is a long-standing one b) KJi is insane and thus NK cannot fit into any IR model that depends on a state being a “rational actor” (which is to say all of them) and c) there’s plenty of blame to go around.
That said, I do think that President Bush took his eye off the ball in invading Iraq. We went into a nation with no capacity to harm us and virtually no capacity to harm our interests, and now our military is totally occupied there and will be for years to come, if “stay the course” remains the mantra. In the meantime, NK has become the country that Bush claimed that Iraq was. If Bush was being honest in his rationale for invading Iraq, then surely NK is far more deserving of our attention.
Let’s imagine that the United States is a business, and North Korea is a competitor. This competitor has been working on a competing product for decades. No prior CEO of USA, Inc. has properly handled the competitor’s development attempts by buying them out, finding out more about what they’re up to, siphoning off their top talent, etc. The current CEO has been at the helm for six years, his mantra being that he’s not going to let any other business get close to releasing anything like this product. Finally the competition does it: they come up with an explosive new product. Yeah, you can blame the CEOs for the past few decades, but, really, the blame needs to be laid squarely at the feet of today’s top man, because he’s been the guy in charge for a long time now and he ain’t done shit.
Unless there’s some secret six-year grace period, in which case Clinton gets off the hook for everything he did wrong from 1993-1999 and Bush Sr. and Reagan get the blame. Right?