North Korea: A Brief History
Fred Kaplan has an excellent article on Slate today that details the magnitude of Bush's failed North Korea policy, or lack there of...
"A little history to explain what's going on. In 1993-94, the North Koreans threatened to reprocess their nuclear reactor's spent fuel rods into plutonium—the fastest way to get nuclear weapons. After a tense standoff, Kim Jong-il and President Bill Clinton signed an "Agreed Framework." The rods were locked in a pool and placed under continuous monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency. In exchange, the United States promised to furnish North Korea with two light-water reactors for fuel and, eventually, to establish full diplomatic relations. By the end of the decade, the deal was collapsing. The United States never came through with the reactors or the relations; Kim secretly pursued nukes through enriched uranium. But those fuel rods, which could have processed enough plutonium for more than 50 bombs by the time Clinton left office, stayed locked up.
In December(2002), the North Koreans tried to replay the crisis of 1993, threatening to unlock the fuel rods, kick out the IAEA's monitors, and reprocess plutonium unless President George W. Bush supplied fuel aid and promised not to invade. Bush didn't go along, saying that even sitting down with North Koreans would reward "bad behavior." Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted to topple Kim's horrible regime. To negotiate with the regime would legitimize and perpetuate it.
So in January 2003, the North Koreans carried out their threat. U.S. spy satellites spotted a convoy of trucks moving from the reactor to the reprocessing facility. Bush did nothing in response. Despite urgings from Secretary of State Colin Powell, he refused to negotiate. Briefings from his military advisers indicated the attack options were too risky. Intelligence agencies didn't—and still don't—know where all the nuclear targets are. And the North Korean army has thousands of artillery rockets—some loaded with chemical munitions—deployed near the South Korean border, a five-minute flight from the capital, Seoul. A U.S. attack would miss some of those rockets; a North Korean retaliation could kill hundreds of thousands of South Koreans. Every U.S. ally in the region has said a military option is out of the question.
Not until last June did Bush authorize James Kelly, then the assistant secretary of state, to put a specific offer on the table. Yet the offer was nearly identical to a deal that the North Koreans had proposed 18 months earlier, before they started reprocessing the plutonium. They would need a much more attractive bargain to cash in the chips, once they had them.
In June 2003, Rep. Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican, led a delegation to Pyongyang and proposed a specific 10-step timetable for implementing such an exchange. North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun endorsed the plan.
Was he sincere? Who knows? There was only one way to find out, and Bush didn't go there. Would any disarmament proposal be feasible and verifiable now—two years after the North Koreans started reprocessing all 8,000 of their fuel rods and at least 18 months after they might have started producing nuclear weapons? When Pyongyang first proposed a deal, which explicitly included an offer to put the rods back under IAEA control, there was still a chance to stuff the genie in the bottle. Now nobody knows where the plutonium and enriched uranium are stored, how many bombs there are, or, if they exist, where they're stored.
In short, President Bush may well have blown it."
John Kerry tried to sieze on this issue in the last months of his campaign, but the story never got legs. Its amazing that the most dangerous threat America faces has been left unchecked for four years by this administration, and the press largely steered clear of criticism. All of the things Bush and Rummy said Iraq might some day develope....i.e. WMDs....GUESS WHAT...North Korea has all of them...and a history of illegal trade on the Nuclear black market. Bush's North Korea policy has been a collosal failure that has threatened the safety of this nation.
posted by ian @ 7:36 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
This 2003 National Review piece rebuts nicely Kaplan's laughable premise that North Korea's nuclear threat is George W. Bush's fault. Once again, an example of a liberal trashing President Bush - while offering no constructive solution of his own.
Kaplan probably would suggest we go back to appeasing Dictator Kim Jong Il. He'd probably have us believe that if Kerry were President we'd go back to something like the Agreed Framework. There'd be a nice photo-op with President Kerry and Dictator KJI shaking hands and North Korea would "agree" not to pursue a nuclear program" all the while still pursuing a nuclear program.
Yeah, that'd work well.
-BB
North Korea Revisionism
How soon we forget.
By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
Suddenly, with the stealthiness of man-made bio-warfare virus, there are signs of an ominous outbreak of revisionist history.
According to a surprising chorus of former Clinton-administration officials, legislators, and pundits, President Bush is responsible for the present crisis with North Korea over the latter's nuclear-weapons program — not the weird, Stalinist ruler of Pyongyang, Kim Jong-Il.
For example, Senator Joseph Lieberman, a presumptive Democratic candidate for Mr. Bush's job, wrote this week in the Washington Post:
...One of our most vital security interests is to keep North Korea from developing into a nuclear power. This was the impetus behind the Agreed Framework, negotiated in 1994 by the Clinton administration in close partnership with our Asian allies, which closed off the most likely and dangerous road to a nuclear North Korea: the development of weapons-grade plutonium. And, in fact, the North Koreans kept that central part of the 1994 agreement. The framework, in turn, opened doors to improved relations between the Koreas and even between the North and the United States.
According to a number of others who were authors or admirers of the "Agreed Framework," the Bush administration spoiled everything by conducting a review of the Clinton legacy in this area and then, last year, by citing North Korea as a member of the "Axis of Evil."
There are several things wrong with this line that suggest it is little more than a nakedly partisan effort to conceal the shortcomings of the Agreed Framework — and the reckless naïveté of those who trusted in it.
For one thing, by its own terms, the Agreed Framework was supposed to effect "an overall resolution of the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula." Pursuant to its terms, both the U.S. and North Korea strove to "achieve peace and security on a nuclear-free Korean peninsula." Pyongyang also pledged that it "will consistently take steps to implement the North-South Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean peninsula."
What is more, President Clinton declared the day after the Agreed Framework was signed that: "This agreement will help to achieve a longstanding and vital American objective: an end to the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula."
In short, the explicit purpose of this agreement was to prevent North Korea from pursuing nuclear weapons of any type, through any technique. If President Clinton and his negotiators had an expectation that the North was only prescribed from pursuing nuclear weapons via "the most likely and dangerous road," but that it would be free and entitled to take other paths (for example, the uranium-based approach the Communists ultimately chose), the American people were not apprized of that view. To the contrary, they were led to believe exactly the opposite.
Then, there is the matter of the timing of the North Korean cheating on the Agreed Framework. U.S. intelligence believes that Kim Jong-Il started up his covert uranium weapons program sometime between 1998 and 2000. In other words, they began to violate the "object and purpose" of the accord as much as two years before President Bush came to office — and three years before his reference to the North's standing as a member of "Axis of Evil."
One would think that this inconvenient fact would make it difficult for President Bush's political foes and other critics to blame him for causing North Korea to break out of the oh-so-promising Agreed Framework. The truth of the matter is that the evidence of Kim Jong-Il's bad faith became so palpable on the Bush administration's watch that it had little choice but to confront the North.
In fact, President Bush and his national-security team deserve credited for doing so. This is particularly true insofar as the all-too-common practice with these sorts of arms-control "processes" is for American diplomats and lawyers to respond to the other party's noncompliant behavior with excuses and prevarications, lest public complaints complicate relations between the two sides. In this manner, agreements tend to be — as a practical matter — rewritten, to the advantage of the transgressor and to the detriment of the United States.
An honest debate is in order about what to do now that North Korea has admitted that it pursued nuclear weapons after promising, repeatedly, not to do so. Those who argue that the United States should enter negotiations with the North once again in the hope of securing yet another promise to forego such activities bear the burden not only of explaining why this is likely to work out any better than previous pledges. They must also be scrupulously honest about the historical record concerning those earlier, ominously fraudulent undertakings.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is the president of the Center for Security Policy and a contributing editor for NRO.
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