Offering incentives for good behavior is appeasement!!!
Under the plan, outlined by American officials on Tuesday evening, in response to pressure from China and American allies in Asia, the aid would begin flowing immediately after a commitment by Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, to dismantle his plutonium and uranium weapons programs. In return, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea would immediately begin sending tens of thousands of tons of heavy fuel oil every month, and Washington would offer a "provisional’’ guarantee not to invade the country or seek to topple Mr. Kim’s government.
Being as North Korea is a country who hates us and has access to materials that can be used in WMDs, they clearly have terrorist ties. I say we send in inspectors and start a massive troop buildup to prevent North Korea from selling their nuclear secrets to their terrorist brothers.
Well you could send inspectors, but Kim Jong-il would simply turn them away. You could send massive numbers of troops to the North Korean border, but that might just tip the loon over the edge, and he might light up Seoul under a battery of missiles. Some of them might even be nuclear.
The really stupid part about this one is that after rejecting the Clinton policy and refusing to engage North Korea for three years, the Bushies flip-flop and essentially reinstate the old policy. If they were going to do this anyway, they might’ve started a few years ago and prevented NK from acquiring several nuclear weapons.
The Koreans were actually opening up towards the end of the Clinton administration. I know this because it was my job to cover it in a daily intel briefing.
Things were improving right up until Bush threw them in on the Axis of Evil speech. Unfortunately at the time, I was thinking, “Well, he couldn’t screw up international diplomacy any more than that”.
The Koreans were actually opening up towards the end of the Clinton administration. I know this because it was my job to cover it in a daily intel briefing.
By “opening up” you must mean “surreptitiously reprocessing plutonium in defiance of the Agreed Framework.”
Since you were privy, I’d be curious to hear from you about how “things were improving right up until…the Axis of Evil speech,” given some of the following assessments:
–In 1998, Special Advisor William J. Perry’s North Korea Policy Review advised the president: “…a fundamental review of U.S. policy [is] indeed needed, since much has changed in the security situation on the Korean peninsula since the 1994 crisis. Most important – and the focus of this North Korea policy review – are development’s in the DPRK’s nuclear and long-range missile activities.”
What did the adminstration have to say about all this? Well, as late as May 1999, the State Department was announcing that KEDO had been able to “verify North Korean compliance with the Agreed Framework.” (This rosy assessment is made all the more puzzling by the IAEA and Special Advisory reports cited directly above.)
I have to assume that Clinton’s intelligence chiefs sniffed out Kim’s violations of the Agreed Framework at least as early as did the IAEA. Was it our strategy to continue providing heavy fuel for LWRs while Kim was stocking plutonium and perfecting multiple-stage No-Dong missile technology? How could such a strategy be considered successful containment?
Maybe NK would have violated the framework anyway if we hadn’t reneged on the fuel oil and reactor Maybe not.
Jason: I’ll summarize my previous post, just for you. In 1994, the Agreed Framework was agreed to. By 1997, the IAEA was reporting that North Korea was in violation of the Framework. It was not until 2002 that the United States sanctioned North Korea (or, to use your term, “reneged” on its part of the Agreed Framework.)
I thought we stopped giving them fuel oil and hadn’t delivered that reactor before then, right? I remember reading that the timeline was “we hold out on them, they start up the nukes again”, but I can’t find anything at the moment.
