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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (381365)	3/29/2003 11:48:31 AM
From: RON BL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Clinton and Jimmy Carter gave them the nuclear technology and bribed them to be good. They weren't.

To: American Spirit who wrote (381365)	3/29/2003 11:50:12 AM
From: RON BL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Carter, we should note, has been cozying up to North Korea for years. He helped the U.S. and the communist country come to agreement during the Clinton years to defuse a tense situation over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. Under the wacko deal Carter arranged, the U.S. would stop complaining about Korea's nuclear weapons program as long as the U.S. gave aid to North Korea and helped the communists build more modern nuclear reactors. The U.S. was well on the path to doing this when the new Bush administration sounded the alarm and immediately stopped the cockamamy plan dead in its tracks. North Korea was not cooperating with the U.S. to stop its weapons program, but we should continue helping them to build nuclear reactors. Make sense? Of course not. But that's Jimmy Carter for you. It's also Jimmy Carter the hypocrite. Carter has always claimed to be the champion of human rights worldwide. Yet North Korea is one of the most, if not the most, repressive regimes on the planet. The Stalinist nation is headed by a young madman named Kim Jong-il. Kim likes to watch American movies like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and then act out his fantasies on his own citizenry. Millions of North Koreans are starving at any given time. Does Carter have much to say about this? Of course not. North Korea is an enemy of the U.S., so Carter goes easy on them. When he met Kim, Carter didn't criticize him – he kissed him! But there is nothing new here. The media would have us forget Jimmy Carter's presidential record. But I won't. Remember Carter's human rights program, where he demanded the Shah of Iran step down and turn over power to the Ayatollah Khomeini? No matter that Khomeini was a madman. Carter had the U.S. Pentagon tell the Shah's top military commanders – about 150 of them – to acquiesce to the Ayatollah and not fight him. The Shah's military listened to Carter. All of them were murdered in one of the Ayatollah's first acts. By allowing the Shah to fall, Carter created one of the most militant anti-American dictatorships ever. Soon the new Iranian government was ransacking our embassy and held hostage its staff for over a year. Only President Reagan's election gave Iran the impetus to release the hostages. I believe Carter's decision to have the Shah fall is arguably the most egregious U.S. foreign policy mistake of the last 50 years. [Former President Bush's decision to allow Saddam Hussein to stay in power is a close second.] With the Shah gone, the whole region was destabilized. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan; no doubt a direct link to the rise of the Taliban can be traced to this invasion. Iraq also took advantage of the Shah's departure to invade Iran. A long war followed that helped make Saddam's Iraq a great Middle Eastern power. And decades after Carter's ignominious act, Iran is still bent on destroying America. President Bush named it one of the three nations in the "axis of evil." Iran is developing both nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver these weapons to its enemies. We can thank Jimmy Carter for all of this. Since Carter left the presidency, he has had little to say about the human rights abuses in Iran. Why should he? Iran opposes the U.S. Instead, he has focused his attention on Israel, America's lone democratic ally in the Mideast. Recently, Carter suggested that the U.S. should cut off aid to Israel, so angry was he after Israel sought to defend itself in the wake of suicide bombings. Fair enough. But what has Carter said about Arab or Muslim countries that have had long records of human rights abuse – Syria or Libya or Iran or Iraq? Not much. One reason may be money. As NewsMax's Dave Eberhart reported recently, Carter and his Carter Center foundation are recipients of millions of dollars of Arab money. (See: Carter's Arab Funding May Color Israel Stance.) So I give Carter his due. At least he is not a hypocrite in one sense. He is good to the dictators and butchers who give him money

To: American Spirit who wrote (381365)	3/29/2003 11:51:24 AM
From: RON BL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Carter Gets His Peace Prize and North Korea Develops Nukes -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jonah Goldberg October 18, 2002 Of all the reactions to North Korea's admission that it has been secretly defying its promise not to develop nuclear weapons -- shock, fear, etc. -- the one most in order is some good old-fashioned finger-pointing. Let's start with the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. On Oct. 11, the Nobel committee announced it would award its Peace Prize to Jimmy Carter. It was really an un-Peace Prize for George W. Bush, whom the Nobel crowd believes is a foolish warmongering meanie. "In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power," intoned the Nobel press release, "Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must as far as possible be resolved through mediation and international cooperation based on international law, respect for human rights and economic development." Translation: Bush should be more like Carter. Well, one of the conflict-resolutions that supposedly put Jimmy over the top for winning the prize (over the more-deserving Afghan president, Hamid Karzai) was the one between the United States and North Korea in the early 1990s. When Bill Clinton and Kim Il Sung were squaring off over Pyongyang's nuke program, Carter jetted off to the world's last Stalinist nation to compliment the mass-murdering North Korean dictator as a "vigorous and intelligent" man. He declared of a government that has imposed famines on millions: "I don't see that they are an outlaw nation." And it was brother Jimmy who had the bright idea of lavishing the North Koreans with aid in exchange for their "cross-our-hearts-and-hope-to-die" promise that they would stop pursuing nuclear weapons technology. Of course, many argue it was Carter's mollycoddling of the North Koreans during his presidency that encouraged them to start their nuclear program to begin with. But hey, that's heavy water under the bridge. In 1994, when Carter went to North Korea to strike a deal, he didn't have the support or authority of the U.S. government to agree to anything. That didn't stop him from announcing on television that he'd made a deal. And the fact that the Clinton administration was out of the loop didn't stop Al Gore from persuading Bill Clinton to leap on the proposal, even though it basically surrendered every major American demand, starting with our insistence that North Korea completely and immediately stop its nuclear weapon program. The final agreement, which Clinton dubbed "a very good deal indeed," called for the United States to provide the North Koreans with $4 billion worth of light-water reactors and $100 million in oil in exchange for a promise to be good and an assurance that inspectors would be allowed to poke around at some indeterminate point down the road. At the time, Kang Sok Ju, the chief North Korean negotiator, bragged that "the complete elimination of the existing nuclear program will only come when we have the light-water reactor in our hands." In other words you pay first, we stop later. The problem with this deal, which prompted The New York Times to declare, "Diplomacy with North Korea has scored a resounding triumph," is the problem with all such deals: It was based on the assumption that evil men willing to murder their own people would never presume to lie to someone like Jimmy Carter. Just as so many thought Hitler wouldn't deceive Chamberlain. The founding Soviet dictator, V.I. Lenin, called the pliant liberals of the West "useful idiots," and the label still has resonance today. There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam's useful idiots will cite the threat of a potentially nuclear-armed North Korea to argue that we should put Iraq on the back burner and deal with North Korea first. That would be a better argument if it weren't made by precisely the sort of people who allowed North Korea to become such a threat to begin with. And that's why a little finger-pointing is a good thing -- not because it's fun (it is), but because those who believe laws and treaties will stop murderers and madmen would have us strike a similar deal with Iraq. The Clinton administration, the gray beards of the Democratic Party, the editors of The New York Times and the "enlightened" thinkers of Europe represented by the Nobel committee: They all believe that George Bush is a fool or a warmonger for not approaching Saddam Hussein the way Clinton and Carter approached North Korea. And if they win the day, we'll be debating what we should do about Iraq's nuclear weapons in no time at all.