Robert Scheer sums up the Bush administration’s failed policy on North Korea.
Five years and an outlaw nuke test after President Bush blew up the peace process with Pyongyang so he could look tougher than his predecessor, he capitulated completely earlier this month in accepting a negotiating framework that tacitly accepts the huge surge in the communist state’s estimated nuclear arsenal. Bush blinked big-time. The carrot replaced the stick, and that is a good thing, carrying the hope that through diplomacy North Korea will end its isolation and follow the modernizing path of communist China. But six years of presidential haranguing about rogue regimes derailed previous efforts at arms control, allowing the dangerously unstable North Korea to join the nuclear club.
In particular, Bush’s rejection of the Clinton administration’s alleged pandering to North Korea gave that country’s erratic rulers a believable rationale to cut the international monitoring seals on their super-dangerous plutonium stores. Now Bush has had to go back, hat and heating oil in hand, to beg for a restart to negotiations with a nuked-up Pyongyang, which now is in an exponentially better bargaining position.
The right wing is largely silent on the North Korean issue. Even former Nork watcher, the Marmot, has declared that he does not care about North Korea – a topic that once crowded his hole. Perhaps years of beating up on the Clinton policy only to see Bush kowtow to a now nuclear-armed Dear Leader was too much for many rightie bloggers. Heads exploding and all that.
The deal with Korea, involving massive economic aid and political legitimacy, is basically the one negotiated by the Clinton administration back in 1994 that was shrilly derided by the Bushites until last week. It is also probably a smart move, a la Richard Nixon’s historic trip to Beijing, to attempt to end North Korea’s dangerous isolation.
What was not smart was jettisoning the agreement Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, had worked out to prevent North Korea from developing and testing a bomb in the first place. By that standard, we will only have peace with Iran, or Cuba, after it possesses the ability to kill lots and lots and lots of us — a lesson not likely to be ignored by other “rogue nations.”
The Bush/Cheney administration has been a disaster. Yet, dealing with North Korea is better than maintaining obstinate hard-line position of the last six years.
