Reply With Quote
Bush will easily be the scapegoat for future presidents for, Oh I don't know, the next 50 years or so. Since even he has admitted that Iraq will need to dealt with by the next President, and the next, and the next.
Bush Faults Clinton Policy, But the Debate is Complex
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 12, 2006; A23
President Bush asserted yesterday that the administration's strategy on North Korea is superior to the one pursued by his predecessor, Bill Clinton, because Clinton reached a bilateral agreement that failed, while the current administration is trying to end North Korea's nuclear programs through multi-nation talks.
"In order to solve this diplomatically, the United States and our partners must have a strong diplomatic hand," Bush said at a news conference. "And you have a better diplomatic hand with others, sending the message, than you do when you're alone."
As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice put it on Tuesday: "The United States tried direct dialogue with the North Koreans in the '90s, and that resulted in the North Koreans signing onto agreements that they then didn't keep."
But the reality is more complicated, according to former and current U.S. officials and a review of the diplomatic history.
( "more complicated" is journalistic euphemizing that dubya and Condi are dissembling for partisan purposes, 3 weeks before the elections, natch )
Bush's current policy, in fact, envisions direct, bilateral negotiations with North Korea on certain issues in the six-nation talks, such as missile proliferation and normalizing relations. That commitment to direct talks is enshrined in the agreement of principles guiding future negotiations that was reached in Beijing in September 2005. Indeed, Rice was prepared to authorize her chief negotiator to travel to Pyongyang in November 2005, provided that North Korea shut down its nuclear reactor as a sign of good faith. It refused that condition, and the trip was scrubbed.
By the same token, it is not fully accurate to describe the negotiations that led to a 1994 agreement between the United States and North Korea as purely the result of one-on-one negotiations. During talks that produced the Agreed Framework, in which North Korea said it would freeze its nuclear program, U.S. negotiators briefed Japanese and South Korean officials every day. South Korea and Japan agreed to bankroll much of the cost of the light-water reactors that were to be provided to North Korea under the deal.
Robert L. Gallucci, the chief negotiator of the accord and now dean of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, said it is a "ludicrous thing" to say that the Clinton agreement failed. For eight years, the Agreed Framework kept North Korea's five-megawatt plutonium reactor frozen and under international inspection, while North Korea did not build planned 50- and 200-megawatt reactors. If those reactors had been built and running, he said, North Korea would now have enough plutonium for more than 100 nuclear weapons.
By Gallucci's account, North Korea may have produced a small amount of plutonium for one or two weapons before Clinton came into office -- during the administration of Bush's father -- but "no more material was created on his watch." When Clinton left office, officials saw signs that North Korea may have been attempting to create a clandestine uranium enrichment program, but nothing was definitive.
Such a program would violate the Agreed Framework. When the Bush administration decided it had conclusive proof of that enrichment in July 2002, it confronted North Korea and terminated fuel oil deliveries promised under the Agreed Framework. In response, North Korea evicted the inspectors, restarted the reactor and retrieved weapons-grade plutonium from 8,000 fuel rods that had been kept in a cooling pond. Intelligence analysts now think that, before Monday's apparent nuclear test, North Korea had enough plutonium for as many as a dozen weapons.
( you're doing a heckuva job, dubya!
On Clinton's watch NK produced no weapons-grade plutonium.
On dubya's watch, plutonium production is going just great.
dubya's trash talk: Clinton failed, I succeed.
dubya's flair for Orwellian double-speak is world-class. )
While the Bush administration accused Pyongyang, North Koreans complained bitterly that the United States was the chief violator of the pact because the reactors were years behind in construction and because promises to end hostile relations and normalize ties were not fulfilled.
Before the crisis in 2002, the Bush administration was prepared to hold bilateral talks with North Korea, though it took nearly two years after Bush came into office to arrange them.
( but now dubya claims that going-it-alone bi-lateral talks are bad. Which is it, dubya? Do you know? Do you even care? )
Afterward, administration insiders argued over the best approach before settling on meeting with the North Koreans only in the presence of officials from other nations.
Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell pressed China to host three-way discussions because it was clear that Bush was opposed to direct talks, according to the new book "Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell," by Washington Post Associate Editor Karen DeYoung. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld adamantly opposed any dialogue, arguing in a series of memos that the goal should be the collapse of North Korea's government, the book says.
The talks were expanded to include Japan, South Korea and Russia. During a flight to Africa in July 2003, Powell won Bush's agreement to allow U.S. negotiators to meet with the North Koreans on the sidelines of the talks, in part to assuage the Chinese, who wanted more direct engagement between the United States and North Korea.
Conservatives opposed to negotiations came to embrace the six-party format because they thought that it was so bersome that it would not achieve much, and because North Korea's behavior grated on other participants.
( ... very analogous to the Repugs willfully running the govt incompently to prove their ideology that govt is bad )
Michael Green, a former White House aide who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said some bilateral negotiations will take place if a final agreement to dismantle the program is reached. But he said that the four other nations can provide incentives on trade and energy that the United States cannot, and that the other countries have much greater ability to inflict pain on North Korea.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Bush will easily be the scapegoat for future presidents for, Oh I don't know, the next 50 years or so. Since even he has admitted that Iraq will need to dealt with by the next President, and the next, and the next.
No lie. We are still feeling the repurcussions of regime change in Iran back in the '50s.
October 14, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Behind Enemy Reactors
By JON B. WOLFSTHAL
Washington
I CELEBRATED New Year’s in 1996 by drinking cheap sparkling wine at the Yongbyon nuclear center, where North Korea produced the plutonium for its first nuclear test. Like dozens of dedicated civil servants, I served as an “on-site monitor” under the 1994 United States-North Korean nuclear agreement known as the Agreed Framework.
Those of us who served as monitors are proud of what we accomplished. I am not alone in being concerned that many commentators and government officials are trying to lay the blame for at least some of the current nuclear crisis at the feet of the previous administration’s efforts to end North Korea’s nuclear program. These allegations have little bearing on the facts and minimize the contribution of the Americans who served their country in dangerous cir stances.
In 1994, the situation with North Korea had become so fraught that the Clinton administration was considering military strikes to prevent North Korea from extracting plutonium from spent nuclear fuel at Yongbyon. At the time, North Korea might have had enough plutonium, produced in 1989, to build one or two nuclear devices. The fuel being discharged contained enough plutonium for five to six additional weapons.
Last-ditch talks between former President Jimmy Carter and President Kim Il-sung of North Korea defused the crisis and led to the framework. The deal, which helped us avoid a military conflict that could have destroyed Seoul, froze Pyongyang’s plutonium program; eventually, it could have led to North Korea abandoning its nuclear efforts in exchange for diplomatic recognition by the United States and economic incentives.
In 2002, however, American intelligence agencies confirmed that North Korea was trying to acquire a uranium enrichment program in violation of the deal. But instead of working within the framework to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear efforts, the Bush administration terminated the agreement altogether. It also began arguing for regime change.
In jettisoning the framework, the (dubya) administration jettisoned something of great diplomatic value. A key part of the agreement was the willingness of North Korea to let Americans — with whom they were legally at war — into their nuclear center to secure plutonium-bearing fuel rods for internationally monitored storage. In other words, the framework put Americans behind enemy lines.
As you might imagine, the daily cir stances were nothing short of insane. Assigned to North Korea for a month or so at a time, we were put up in a hastily constructed cement “guest house” a half-mile from the most secret nuclear site in North Korea. The 10 people on each rotation were watched by armed guards; our rooms were monitored at all times. No phone calls home or outside communication was possible. When I was there in the winter of 1996, temperatures at night hit 30 below. To get to work every day, we would pass through no fewer than four police and military checkpoints, some with machine-gun nests. The site itself was highly unsafe and radioactive and would have been shut down by safety officials in seconds had it operated in the United States.
Those who took the assignment left families and friends behind and bounced between acute stress and extreme boredom. Some read to escape the monotony, some played cards. I “borrowed” an International Atomic Energy Agency VCR to watch movies. We all knew that at any moment, should the political winds change, we would be hostages deep in hostile territory with no American embassy to protect us. But we took the job to make our country more secure and to pursue an end to North Korea’s nuclear program.
Now that North Korea claims to have tested a nuclear device, administration supporters and commentators are seeking to blame the framework for all our problems.
They should look elsewhere. Without the framework’s freeze, North Korea would have immediately acquired enough plutonium to produce more nuclear weapons and would have completed construction of two much larger weapon production reactors. By now, North Korea would have been capable of producing 20 nuclear weapons per year.
The prolonged freeze on North Korea’s production and nuclear construction delayed the acquisition of nuclear materials — and it appears to have prevented North Korea from completing the larger reactors. The testing of a nuclear device by Pyongyang was pushed back at least a decade.
Those of us who served in North Korea risked our personal safety and comfort for our country. We protected America from danger and our efforts delayed the onset of the nuclear crisis we now face. To argue otherwise is to play politics with history.
Jon B. Wolfsthal, who monitored North Korea’s nuclear program for the United States, is a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/14/op...gewanted=print
I blame Grover Cleveland for this North Korea mess.
I blame Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong Il and whatever Soviet Premier (Kruschev?) was around back when they started dumping arms and money into the effort to communize the peninsula.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
