North Korean Nukes and Hillary’s Blame Game
By E.F. Winslow
4-29-2005
Thursday, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency said in Senate testimony that the U.S. intelligence community believed North Korea had acquired the technology for arming its missiles with nuclear warheads. If true, it means they are now capable of launching a nuclear strike on not only neighbors like Japan and U.S holdings in the Pacific, but even the Western United States. The claims came in dramatic testimony from the director Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, although he did not cite evidence to back up his view during the public session of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
In an interview later that day, Sen. Hillary Clinton segued the news into a partisan attack, calling Admiral Jacoby's statement "the first confirmation, publicly, by the administration that the North Koreans have the ability to arm a missile with a nuclear device that can reach the United States," adding, "Put simply, they couldn't do that when George Bush became president, and now they can."
The irony of her accusations deserve some examination. Particularly since it was her husband and herself in the Whitehouse while North Korea developed both the nuclear and missile technology. Worse still, it was the Clinton administration that essentially funded the North Korean arms build-up.
Through out the 1990’s, the North Korean ambition to build ICBMs with nuclear warheads was no secret. Kim Jong Il repeatedly made the statement publicly exactly what his goal was. What was the Clinton response? In a brilliant move taken out of the Neville Chamberlain playbook, Clinton appeased Kim Jong Il with BILLIONS of dollars of aid, with the promise that North Korea would not pursue that goal- a promise that they never kept.
Nevertheless, to keep alive the “containment” myth, the Clinton’s military strategist Paul Begala testified in 1998 that North Korea did not have an active ballistic missile program. One week later the North Koreans launched a missile over Japan that landed off the Alaska coast. Such a faux pas would even cause Bhagdad Bob to blush.
North Korea was the single largest recipient of foreign aid during the Clinton administration. And it was not only food and oil. In return for the promise not to continue development of their own nuclear reactor, Clinton authorized aid primarily for the construction of two nuclear reactors worth up to $6 billion. The U.S.-funded light water reactors in North Korea could accumulate plutonium in spent fuel at the rate of about 17,300 ounces per year, enough to produce 65 nuclear bombs a year. And in addition to this, Korea continued it’s a clandestine plutonium development program anyway, which they officially acknowledged in 2002.
We now know that their long-range missile, the Taepodong II, according to North Korean defectors, was ready for deployment in 1999.
So where does the blame lie? Was it George Bush’s fault that Bill Clinton was the primary underwriter and technology donor for North Korea’s now viable nuclear ICBM programs…one that now Kim Jong Il is promising to share and continue to develop with Iran? Sen. Clinton may have to look a little closer to home if she is looking for someone to blame. |
