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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Win Smith who wrote (53165)	10/19/2002 11:21:21 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

but it almost reminds me of the anthrax guys, I think of him, or them, as the "Mad Scientist" type. If the sniper is not a terrorist, then I would have to go with the standard "Red Neck" image out of "Deliverence."

To: Win Smith who wrote (53165)	10/19/2002 11:31:39 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

It is really ironic that in the same month that Carter gets his Peace Prize he is exposed as a "Useful Idiot" for the World's Dictators. We are now paying for eight years of the craven Clinton Foreign Policy. From WSJ.com Pyongyang's Nuclear Blackmail Appeasing North Korea is no longer an option. Saturday, October 19, 2002 12:01 a.m. North Korea's admission that it has a secret program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons seems to have startled people who like to think better of totalitarians. We view it as a U.S. opportunity to revise the now-obvious failure of its decade-long policy of appeasing nuclear blackmail. One mystery is why Pyongyang has decided to come clean now. The U.S. recently presented North Korean officials with new intelligence gathered over the summer, but their first reaction was to persist in lying. After a day and half they finally fessed up, adding that the 1994 Agreed Framework in which they had promised not to have such a program is now nullified. The suspicion has to be that the North now wants to sell the same horse twice, this time threatening to build actual bombs unless the U.S., Japan and South Korea pay an even larger bribe. Maybe it's time for the U.S. to take yes for an answer instead. The Bush Administration's harder heads have always thought the Agreed Framework was folly, an illogical attempt to stop the North from building nukes by giving it two nuclear reactors. Pyongyang had never allowed in the nuclear inspectors it promised as part of that deal, and now we know why. But every time President Bush has raised doubts, he's been pummeled by the Clintonites who negotiated it and their media friends. With the North Koreans now renouncing the deal, Mr. Bush has an excuse to accept their offer. Then the U.S. can begin to construct a new policy of pressure and containment aimed at changing the rogue regime. Now, let's be clear we aren't suggesting the U.S. go to war; the showdown with Iraq is a higher priority and will itself be instructive to the North. Any scary rhetoric about war, which we expect to hear a lot of, will come from the left and is designed to force the U.S. back toward the Clinton appeasement. The U.S. has other ways to apply pressure, starting with a cutoff of foreign aid and remittances. Some of this is food aid intended to help the starving Korean people, but the regime already steers much of that to the military or trades it for hard currency. At a minimum, the U.S. should stop delivering the 500,000 tons of heavy oil as part of the Agreed Framework. America's frontline allies will also have to rethink their bribery plans. Tokyo has been planning to give $10 billion in war reparations, while South Korea is estimated to have given $1.3 billion in cash and goods as part of its "sunshine policy" of trying to encourage goodwill. With a South Korean election scheduled for December, Seoul will be reluctant to change policy. But it has to consider the consequences now of rewarding Pyongyang's behavior. The likeliest outcome will be even more rogue behavior of the kind North Korea has just admitted. This is the lesson that the Clinton White House never learned. When the North pulled out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1993, it discovered that its nuclear threats cost nothing and that in fact it won ever more international aid. Kim Jong Il's Stalinists also learned that no matter how they behaved, the U.S. would always back down. Even in their last days in office, Clinton officials were scrambling to conclude a new bribery payment, this time with space-launch vehicle technology. Only this year Wendy Sherman, an architect of Clinton policy, told PBS's "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" that the North has "principally kept to that agreement" and that "they do and can follow through." This despite years of growing CIA evidence, albeit piecemeal, that North Korea was attempting to build nuclear weapons. No wonder Pyongyang now thinks it can replay its bribery game. For the U.S. and the world after 9/11, however, the costs of that game are much higher. The North Koreans have now admitted doing what we accuse Iraq of intending to do. If Mr. Bush's inclusion of the North in his "axis of evil" means anything, Kim Jong Il and his government have to learn that their dangerous behavior won't be rewarded. The world's terrorists, and especially Saddam Hussein, will only be emboldened if they see the U.S. appeasing North Korea's blunt attempt to use nuclear weapons to blackmail the world. In the end, the only sure nonproliferation policy toward regimes like North Korea's is to change the government. We've tried appeasement for a decade and all it's accomplished is to give the dictatorship more time to build a bomb. Now's the opportunity to get serious.