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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (1759)	5/2/2005 9:45:13 PM
From: lorne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224704

as. You said...."Wrong. North Korea was in a box under Clinton. Bush let them out of the box."..... LOL. Are you interested in a few facts?? John Kerry’s North Korean Lie Blaming Bush for Pyongyang. October 22, 2003 John Kerry was on MSNBC's Hardball college tour the other night, and retailed one of the great liberal lies of contemporary political discussion: that President Bush caused the North Korean crisis (the president is apparently a very busy man). Kerry said of this administration's performance in North Korea: "They've handled it miserably. Abysmally. This has been one of the greatest abdications of foreign policy that I've seen in all the years that I've been in the Senate. And it began with a disastrous decision by the president to reverse the decision of Colin Powell to engage the North Koreans and pick up where Secretary Perry and Bill Clinton left off. "We should have been engaged in bilateral negotiations from the get-go, from the beginning. And it was obvious that when you announce a policy of preemption and you invade another country, and you begin to build bunker-busting nuclear weapons, that Kim Jong Il was going to find a way to get the attention of this administration and he did." Kerry clearly was creating the impression that North Korea's cheating on the 1994 Agreed Framework came about because of Bush's Iraq policy and the administration's interest in studying — nothing has been built yet — new bunker-busting nukes. The problem with this scenario, as I demonstrate in my new book Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years, is that the North Koreans were cheating during the Clinton administration. The secret North Korean uranium-enrichment program — to which they confessed in October 2002 — had been in operation since 1997 or 1998. If the North Koreans were cheating in 1998 because they already knew that Bush would be elected and invade Iraq, maybe Kim Jong Il really is the bizarre paranormal being he sometimes seems. Actually, the North Korean cheating wasn't the least bit surprising. The CIA had thought North Korea wouldn't comply with the agreement all along. "Based on North Korea's past behavior," the CIA reported in 1995, "the [intelligence] community agrees it would dismantle its known program, [only] if it had covertly developed another source of fissile material." The U.S. came to believe in 1997, for instance, that North Korea had built an underground nuclear facility in Kumchang-ri. The administration still dishonestly maintained that all was well with the Agreed Framework. On July 8, 1998, Albright told Congress, the Agreed Framework had "frozen North Korea's dangerous nuclear-weapons program." When intelligence about the suspect site at Kumchang-ri became public in August 1998, Albright told frustrated senators at a hearing that she hadn't known about the information until later in July. The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, present at the hearing, had to interrupt her: "Madame Secretary, that is incorrect." She had been told many months earlier. It was clear by the late 1990s to honest observers that North Korea still had a nuclear-weapons program, while it was spreading missile technology far and wide and battening itself on U.S. support in keeping with the Agreed Framework. In response to congressional outrage, the administration tapped former defense secretary William Perry in late 1998 to review its North Korean policy. He said in March 1999, "What they're doing is moving forward on their nuclear weapons." He added, "We believe this is very serious. The long-range-missile program itself suggests in parallel the development of a nuclear weapons program." Now, maybe John Kerry didn't mean to mislead about when North Korea started its cheating, and instead is arguing that the North Korean cheating became more flagrant because of its fear of Bush. This is a more plausible claim. But if a rogue state is cheating on a deal, isn't it better that it be flagrant so you can know about it? If you don't want to know, you're just papering over the truth in order to pretend that an agreement is working. This is exactly what Clinton administration did. Its food aid to North Korea, for instance, served an important ulterior purpose: creating the illusion of progress with the North. "Officially a humanitarian gesture, American food aid has become a bribe for North Korea to attend meetings that create the impression U.S. diplomacy is working," wrote former diplomat Robert A. Manning in 1998. This was the Clinton approach. To return to it, as Kerry advocates, would be foolish and dangerous. If Bush does have to cut a deal with North Korea, let's hope it's an honest and strict one, and not just for show.