You just know that somewhere, the left is blaming this on Bush:
North Korea said Thursday it has completed reprocessing its 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods and is using plutonium extracted from them to make atomic bombs.
“The (North) successfully finished the reprocessing of some 8,000 spent fuel rods,” a spokesman for North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the North’s official news agency, KCNA.
Accusing the United States of taking a “hostile policy” toward the North, the statement said that North Korea “made a switchover in the use of plutonium churned out by reprocessing spent fuel rods in the direction increasing its nuclear deterrent force.”
You just know that people on the DU will say that if Bush had just continued Clinton’s policy of being blackmailed, we would be so much safer. Funny they never recognize they are spouting the North Korean party line.
*** Update ***
That didn’t take long. North Korea is pursuing a weapons program because we ‘didn’t talk to them.’
Moe Lane
It’ll probably take some of them a while to notice, John. After all, the Plame affair is now officially a Surely /This/ Will Be The Beginning Of The End For The Bush Administration* situation; it may take them a bit to regear.
Moe
*Which means, of course, that the scandal’s dead.
(putting hand on chest)
Hey, don’t blame the messenger, guys: it’s not *my* fault that every time somebody says those words and means them the significance of the event that they’re referring to shrivels up and dies within a week or so. Look on the bright side; maybe my pointing it out will put a hex on the hex, or something… :)
Kimmitt
You’re damn right I’m blaming Bush. The blackmail was cheap at any price, and national security is more important than the collective machismo of the right wing.
Moe Lane
“The blackmail was cheap at any price…”
IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile nation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say:
Kevin Drum
John, I didn’t say they were doing this because we didn’t talk to them. What I did say was that we should have talked to them.
That’s been my feeling ever since the beginning, so there’s not much new here. It’s possible that opening talks earlier could have headed this off. I don’t know if it’s likely, but it was at least worth a try. And what’s the downside of talking?
John Cole
WE had to refuse to talk to them on a bilateral platform because then their blackmail would have achieved what the had set out to do- even Josh Marshall agrees with this. The strategy is to bring together the regional powers to engage in multilateral talks.
At any rate, what you seem to forget is that North Korea is a tyranny run by a madman, and they are going to do whatever they want until they are forced to do otherwise. The only thing that changes is their excuse for doing what they do, which the left is now lapping up because it can be used in the frontal assault on the Bush administration.
Dean
Okay, one more time:
North Korea signed THREE separate agreements saying it would not develop nuclear capabilities.
1989—accession to the NPT, under SOVIET pressure.
1991—North-South Agreement, whereby they categorically commit not to develop ANY nuclear weapons capability.
1994—Agreed Framework, which reiterates BOTH NPT AND N-S Agreement.
When did the NKs start their uranium reprocessing? AT LEAST 1998. Actually, there’s indications they were interested in this even earlier, but the plutonium reprocessing apparently took precedence.
So, talks, whenever they happened, weren’t going to head this off because they were already doing it BEFORE the talks began.
Ah, but Kimmitt and Calpundit says, talking would’ve made them stop.
Well, one of the biggest downsides of talking is the creation of expectations. Or, to make the point more directly, if the North Koreans and us had met, and they’d walked out, would you be blaming the North or the US?
But (as I noted in a comment to a post a bit further up) we wanted them to talk in a MULTILATERAL forum. I’d think that folks like Kevin would WANT that. Limits that cowboy unilateralism and all that.
And we wanted this, both to make it clear to the Chinese that they have a stake in this too (and having talked to some of them, believe me, they WERE in denial on this), and to bring a united front up against the NKs.
It sure didn’t hurt that the NKs then cost the Chinese face, in a big time way, by throwing their (the Chinese) claims of “No nuclear capability will be tolerated on the peninsula” back in their face.
Or is it that PAYING THEM OFF would make them stop?
Well, the ’89 NPT allowed them access to nuclear power plant technology. Didn’t make ’em stop.
The ’91 agreement initiated southern investment in the North, including the various Hyundai ventures. Didn’t make ’em stop.
The ’94 agreement provided fuel oil and light-water reactors. Didn’t make ’em stop.
But bless my soul, THIS TIME, they’ll listen. THIS TIME, they’ll stop.
Why? Because Kimmitt says so. Well, there ya go.
Pauly
Trying to talk to the North Koreans is like trying to talk on blogs. Looks good but even the most intelligent debate just gets shouted down.
M. Scott Eiland
“The blackmail was cheap at any price…”
Folks from the fifties would have recognized this line of thought, though the wording was different:
“Better Red than Dead.”
Dean
M. Scott:
You forgot to append the observation, I think it was Churchill, but perhaps it was one of the authors of “The God that Failed”:
Unfortunately, too many of those who subscribed to this belief failed to realize that becoming the former was, in fact, no guarantee against the latter.
As many a Cambodian, Ukrainian, Chinese, or North Korean would tell you, if the dead could speak.
M. Scott Eiland
Thank you for the amendment, Dean, and for the reminder that the wages of craven appeasement are often death (though not the appeasers themselves are not always the victims). One would have thought that lesson had been learned rather thoroughly between 1935 and the end of World War Two, and again from then until the fall of the Iron Curtain. Sadly, some will refuse to learn no matter how clear the lesson.
Kimmitt
We’re not talking about giving the North Koreans the Sudentenland, we’re talking about giving them wheat so they don’t sell their nukes to Al Qaeda (for wheat).
Backing down before Hitler was stupid. But Versailles, which virtually guaranteed that the only way Germany could avoid endless poverty was to break its international obligations was stupid, too. Rather than back us into wars which then we really do have no choice but to fight, I’d rather work on containment and try to avoid the apocalypse, thanks.
Or are you of the ilk which says that we should have gone all-out during the Korean War and used it as a launching pad into China and the USSR?