To: GST who wrote (150982 ) 12/24/2002 10:53:20 PM From: Bill Harmond Read Replies (1) | Respond to You know everything. You are awesome.Q: Is our rhetoric in any way responsible for pushing them to the point where they feel like they have -- the only option that they have is to pull these restrictions off and start going down a road again of building nuclear weapons? Rumsfeld: That's an interesting question. One of those, like, "Stop me before I kill again"? (Laughter.) That type of thing? I mean, really, their actions are result of decisions by the leadership of the country. The leadership of the country is currently repressing its people, starving its people, has large numbers of its people in concentration camps, driving people to try to leave the country through China and other methods, starving these people. Their economy is in the tank. People at all levels are unhappy with that leadership. It is a government that has made a whole host of decisions that have nothing to do with us [the United States of America]. I don't know why they decided they wanted to have those concentration camps. I have no idea why they decided that they wanted to end up, after a relatively few years, with an economy that's 1/36th the size of South Korea's. Think of that. Here, the same people on different sides of a line, and the GDP in South Korea is 36 times, or something like that -- it's close enough for government work -- that of North Korea. Why would they do anything they do? Do you think -- the idea that it's the rhetoric from the United States that's causing them to starve their people or to do these idiotic things, or to try to build a nuclear power plant. They don't need a nuclear power plant. Their power grid couldn't even absorb that. If you look at a picture from the sky of the Korean Peninsula at night, South Korea is filled with lights and energy and vitality and a booming economy; North Korea is dark. It is a tragedy what's being done in that country. And the suggestion that it is a result of rhetoric from outside I think is -- misses the point. We have a very strange situation in that country.
