North Korea's Nuclear Revelations
by Austin Bay
October 23, 2002
So North Korea admits it lied to the Clinton Administration and continues to pursue nuclear weapons despite promises, promises, promises.
Who’s shocked, other than the perpetually shifty Clinton foreign policy scrum that assured us –in hot yet self-righteous tones– that North Korea was a Clinton success?
On PBS’ News Hour last February 20, Wendy Sherman, Clinton’s special advisor on Korea, dissed President Bush’s inclusion of Korea on "the axis of evil."
"What I think was wrong about it in terms of North Korea," Sherman opined, "is North Korea has negotiated successfully with us. We have a 1994 framework agreement that stops the production of fissile material...needed to build nuclear weapons...They have principally kept to that agreement and taken the steps that were necessary for it to take. It's not finished yet. We still have a ways to go, but they do and can follow through." (www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/jan-june02/korea_2-20.html) This wasn’t Ms. Sherman’s first trip into a diplomacy of words trumping a diplomacy of deeds.
Describing the North Korean agreement’s benefits (News Hour, March 7, 2001), Sherman said: "...what have we got in return, we have gotten a moratorium on missile testing...There was an underground site that we were all concerned about - the intelligence community was very concerned about. We have had access to that site twice." (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/jan-june01/korea_3-7.html)
Hey Wendy, beam up from Never Land. The US didn’t get a moratorium, it got rooked.
Do we get a retraction? Does Ms. Sherman get bumped from the PBS rolodex? Don’t bet on it. The American left’s Iron Triangle of big media, one-party academia, and government bureaucracy deftly avoids accountability. All that matters are good intentions.
Jimmy Carter also put a finger in the plutonium hole, assuring Clinton in 1994 that North Korea’s hereditary Communist government was a reliable peace partner. Hello, Nobel Prize committee? May I monitor a re-call election? |
