The fact that Clinton’s plan WAS appeasement doesn’t change the fact that he had inspections going, the North Koreans were dismantling their existing reactors, and spent fuel was being shipped out of the country.* I find it extremely hard to imagine that the North Koreans would have felt the need for yesterday’s attention-grabbing bullshit if not for six years of hollow threats and la-la-la-can’t-hear-you from Bush.
*Okay, so there was also the ocassional missile over Japan.
I love how this is all Bush’s fault.
Bush deserves the blame for so many things. You don’t need to overstate your case and start blaming him for, e.g. my friend’s dog being deaf, OU losing to Oregon, or North Korea getting nukes.
Of course, taking the blame for everything, including my friend’s deaf dog, is one of the reasons only an imbecile will run for president anyhow.
This is exactly where we didn’t want to be; face to face with a nuclear North Korea while we’re still fighting wars in two other countries. We absolutely cannot take any military action against North Korea without bringing back the draft. North Korea is FAR more dangerous than any terrorist state; their entire economy is built around its military and the entire country has a fanatical, religious devotion to its leader.
For all our sakes, I hope Dubya shuts up and lets China and Japan do the talking.
Edit: Sorry, but Bush does deserve at least part of the blame for the situation. Our invading Iraq made the rest of the world realize that, one way or another, they need to deter us from doing the same to them.
And building a nuke accomplishes this how???
No nukes = possible invasion.
Nukes = won’t you pretty please come back to the discussion table?
If NK does go all “WarGames” it would be nice to have a military that’s not over-reached and over-exausted in unwinnable wars.
Not true; according to Kaplan’s article there’s plenty of mines and whatnot that China is trying to buy out.
Nukes = get nuked first before you have the chance to launch yours
Nukes = “you’ve escalated to the point where invasion is the most attractive option”
I mean, maybe it makes sense some way some how if you’re a psychotic dictator, but I don’t think building w00t! newx! is going to bring people to diplomacy, when “trying to get you to not be nookyooler” was the aim of the diplomatic efforts in the first place.
And if China wants those mines as Kaplan suggests, maybe it’s easier to just buddy up to the USA: “Hey, we’ll let you invade North Korea, if we can have the mines afterwards. You get your ‘free’ state snicker snicker, and we get some worthless rocks that you don’t need. And wouldn’t you rather -we- have those North Korean nukes than… Bin Laden!!! We’re just sayin’…”
You find that hard to believe because you hate freedom, Glenn.
Name one post-nuclear country we’ve ever invaded. Hint: Iraq doesn’t count.
Past performance is no indication of future results.
Remember that China is the Big Dog in PRNK’s neighborhood. Iraq and Afghanistan have no Big Dog in their neighborhoods, but China expects to have NK on a short leash, and the USA can do nothing with PRNK without either asking the PRC “may I” or risk hugely pissing off the PRC. It’s also a valid hypothesis that the PRC secretly put PRNK up to this.
Either way, China is, and always has been, the key. China is the only player who counts, which is why blaming Bush for anything related to PRNK is idiocy. China is responsible for PRNK’s very existence.
Incidentally, S. Korea halted a shipment of “relief aid” to PRNK at the news. The contents? Cement. That’s right: PRNK is so resource-poor they don’t even have proper sand to make cement with.
Anyone want to take a stab at how long it takes to develop and build nuclear weapons?
For a Third World country like North Korea, it takes a decade or more. NK had been working on its program since the first Gulf War, and the work never really abated (as we now know) under the Agreed Framework.
Iran has also been underway since the first Gulf War. They’ll be ready to test a low-yield nuke within months of switching on the Bushehr reactor.
For a First World nation like, say, South Korea or Japan, it could be up and running in six months.
It’s also a valid hypothesis that the PRC secretly put PRNK up to this.
Not a chance. It is not in China’s strategic interest. China is the only nuclear player on the Asian rim and has zero interest in seeing Japan or SK forced into nuclearizing. Also, China may someday feel the need to invade Taiwan – so about the last thing it needs is to provide another excuse for Taiwan to seek a nuclear arsenal.
Well, now we get another chance to see what the United Nations intends to do about the fact that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty has been shat upon. The handling (or, rather, non-handling) of Iran on this issue does not give me much hope. Sadly, and inexplicably, the global political trend seems to be toward acceptance of nuclear proliferation among rogue states. That’s just swell.
And just like that, the entire concept of historical precedents disappeared in a puff of smoke.
North Korean diplomacy is about brinksmanship and escalation. They were going to get the bomb eventually. Did Bush accelerate this? Maybe. Could he have prevented it? Doubt it.
The most alarming thing about the recent North Korean developments is that North Korea is ignoring China. If North Korea is prepared to ignore China, that would suggest that whoever the US president or whatever the US diplomatic policy would have meant very little to them. I just hope Kim is not off his rockers.
North Korea has been thumbing their nose at China for quite a while now. An interesting illustration - China had to briefly halt food aid a few years back, because North Korea wasn’t giving back the trains they were being shipped on. It isn’t just Stalin who believed gratitude the disease of dogs.
If North Korea has broken with China (as appears likely - a nuclear North Korea is a huge, huge diplomatic failure for China) this is disastrous for any hope of future negotiation. China was the last country with any leverage over the North. With that gone, there literally is nothing that can be done to enforce any negotiated settlement. And the North has proven time and again that they cannot simply be trusted to follow a treaty they sign - they to this day constantly violate the armistice that ended the Korean War. Camp Boniface, the US base nearest the DMZ, is named after a US army captain who was brutally beaten to death when he led a team that committed the unpardonable act of chopping down a tree that obstructed the US side’s view of the DMZ.
Negotiation with these folks will not be easy. And their failure is not at the feet of any particular US party.
Lum: Saying “failure is not at the feet of any particular US party” is highly disingenuous.
Before Bush took office NK’s plutonium was under lock and key. It was monitored by the IAEA and it was being shipped out of country. Granted they were pursuing a uranium enrichment program - violating the Agreed Framework in spirit - but the fact is uranium enrichment is a nontrivial process.
The nuke that went off this weekend likely had a plutonium core - the same plutonium that was once safely locked away and even being shipped out of the country. This particular failure lies very much at the feet of the Bush administration.
edit: speling is hadr
Even without nukes, any military conflict with NK will result in hundreds of thousands of civilian casulties in Seoul. Any of you armchair diplomats want to tell me how to A) avoid that or B) how any military intervention against NK has always been off the table due to A)? And if force is off the table, what leverage does the US have against a country whose juche ideology dictates self-reliance to the point where sanctions have no meaning?
But dimplomacy is HARD!
But wait, if we make the timeline long enough we can blame EVERYBODY! What happens on your watch is always someone else’s fault!
Pages, bombs, whatever…
WTF is a president’s job again?
But nobody, it seems, can actually do anything ever. Why bother trying when you can just act cynical and everyone will think you’re “cool”?
You’re proclaming Lum being disingenous?
Where is your reference that the IAEA had NK’s plutonium under lock and key? My references show they were never able to discern how much NK actually possessed.
It doesn’t take much research to find out exactly what the IAEA was or wasn’t doing and what was under seal. (1),(2),(3)
Is the solution to do less?