A little history of N. Korean diplomacy:
Back in 1993, North Korea reneged on a 1991 promise to allow international inspections of its nuclear facilities, which aimed at ensuring that the bizarro communist dictatorship was not seeking nuclear weapons. President Clinton tried various inducements to cajole Pyongyang into cooperating. In a 1993 editorial, The Wall Street Journal was dismissive of such efforts: "In the end, the only certain nonproliferation policy toward nasty, closed regimes such as North Korea's is to change the government. . . . We fear that Mr. Clinton's all-carrot diplomacy will fare no better in North Korea than a similar policy once did in Iraq."
In a 1998 article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Leon Sigal, a former New York Times editorial board member, explained how the crisis was supposedly solved:
Three and a half years ago, the United States very nearly blundered into war with North Korea. Neither the Bush nor the Clinton administrations wanted that outcome; but few senior officials were willing to take the domestic political risks to avoid it-by making a nuclear deal with North Korea. It took a former president, Jimmy Carter, to defuse the crisis. . . .
Carter . . . obtained Kim Il Sung's personal pledge to freeze North Korea's nuclear program, to allow the inspectors to remain in place and monitor compliance, and to discuss dismantlement of the reactors and the reprocessing plant in high-level talks with the United States.
The June 1994 crisis was a turning point in American nuclear diplomacy with North Korea. For three years the United States had tried to coerce North Korea into halting its nuclear arming, and failed. Then it tried cooperation and succeeded. It was a triumph of Track II diplomacy.
Carter won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Last Friday to be exact.
So, here's the result of this "triumph of diplomacy": "The North Korean government has acknowledged for the first time that it has been secretly developing nuclear weapons for years in violation of international agreements--and that it possesses "more powerful" weapons, as well," today's Washington Post reports.
A United Press International analysis says North Korea appears to have adopted what is called a "nuclear bee sting" strategy:
It means that Third World or "rogue state" leaders believe the threat of having a single nuclear weapon that could destroy an American city or of kill tens or hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops in the field would be sufficient to deter any major U.S. military action against them.
This seems an opportune time to put aside once and for all the silly and dangerous notion that being kind to dictators--including Saddam Hussein, who surely is eager for a "bee sting" of his own--is the way to peace.
But hope springs eternal: The lead story in today's New York Times reports on the North Korean nuke deception--but over on the op-ed page the paper gives space to Mohammad Aldouri, Iraq's ambassador to the U.N., who risibly claims: "We have no intention of attacking anyone, now or in the future, with weapons of any kind. . . . We have no nuclear or biological or chemical weapons, and we have no intention of acquiring them."
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