This is why I hate diplomacy– or at least the winking game in regards to tyrants and outlaws that civility seems to require:
President Bush is standing behind a senior U.S. official’s recent criticism of North Korea’s communist government.
A White House spokesman said Monday that Undersecretary of State John Bolton was speaking for the Bush administration last week when he described living conditions in North Korea as a “hellish nightmare” and called leader Kim Jong Il a “tyrannical dictator.”
Well, no SCREAMING EAGLE shit. He is a tyrannical dictator, and he needs to get the message that he is not going to roll over us in the next round of talks.
Kimmitt
Conservatives won’t be satisfied until Seoul is a smoking ruin, the open-air grave of five million people.
Dean
That’s right, Kimmitt. We chortle over the idea of a bunch of dead slant-eyes. Shoot, if we had our way, we’d bomb ’em ourselves!
As opposed to good liberals, of course, who’d simply like South Koreans to live under the benevolent rule of the Dear Leader.
Question: Which President wanted to withdraw all American troops from the Korean peninsula, despite the pleadings from the then South Korean leader?
Hint: It wasn’t a Republican.
Question: What is the best policy for dealing with a dictator that has broken EVERY agreement with either the US, the South Koreans, OR the international community on nuclear-related issues?
Hint: It may not be one of preemptive surrender and more concessions.
But to call a nation where there are widespread reports of cannibalism, where the military has secured much of the food aid, where people who try to flee are led back with wires through their noses, a hell-hole, THAT is unforgiveable to liberals.
Uh-huh.
Pauly
How come the liberal posters on these more conservative sites always seem so desperate and hate-filled? I’m sure there must be some in the GOP camp too, but I sure don’t see as many.
Moe Lane
“I’m sure there must be some in the GOP camp too, but I sure don’t see as many.”
To be fair, they usually go stir up trouble in the liberal sites. Nobody’s ahead on crazies points on this one. :)
Pauly
I must be looking in the wrong places then – that and I can’t stand any place that is too partisan (like Hesiod and all of them) so I probably miss out on a lot of it.
Kimmitt
That’s right, Kimmitt. We chortle over the idea of a bunch of dead slant-eyes.
No, you’re just so lost in your ideology that it’s going to take a tragedy on that scale to wake you up to the necessity of dealing with the world as it exists. Kim Jong Il can kill a million people by making a quick phone call — and can kill five million by holding a long meeting with his generals. We have to deal with that reality, rather than pretend that it doesn’t exist.
Dean
Kimmitt:
Sigh. What the HELL do you think conservatives are trying to do about North Korea? What in the world makes you think that conservatives are somehow “lost in ideology” or not dealing with reality?
Because we’re not doing what YOU would have us do? Why is your approach any more grounded in reality? I can tell you that there aren’t too many folks, conservatives OR liberals, who deal w/ North Korea on a day-to-day basis that don’t know what Kim Jong-il can do.
THAT’s not the point. The point is what the best policy options are, GIVEN that Kim Jong-il can do that.
But YOU know better, eh? In that case, what do YOU suggest we do?
And please, please, please don’t bore us w/ “I’d talk to them, and get them to give up their nukes.” Thanks for nuthin’, if that’s your answer.
But keeping in mind the record of negotiations with the North, including their actual track record of behavior, please, Kimmitt, enlighten us as to what your preferred policies would be such that you could defuse this?
Moe Lane
Dean, why bother? The kid’s so mixed up that he didn’t even notice the contradiction between suggesting that we wouldn’t be satisfied until 5M people in Seoul were dead and stating that it would take 5M dead for us to wake up about NK.
Besides, his entire ‘fight against the fascist’ theme stopped being amusing right about the time I realized that he was doing it pretty much to drum up hits to his website. Free piece of advice, neighbor: you want to play the “I’m struggling against the Fall of Night” schtick, that’s cool, but the effect gets completely spoiled when you USE YOUR FRAGGING REAL NAME ON YOUR BLOG. Take a tip from Atrios, who really is the master at this sort of thing. The link’s to the right; trust me, you’ll love it there.
I think I’m done with you now; you may go about your happy life – and good luck to your dad! :)
Moe
Kimmitt
The record of negotiations with the North is that they’re crafty bastards who will, nonetheless, refrain from developing nuclear bombs if we give them food.
But you’re probably right — Bush’s designation of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as the “Axis of Evil” combined with our swift invasion and occupation of Iraq has probably absolutely convinced Kim Jong Il that we are planning to invade North Korea and his only hope for holding onto power is to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent. The PNAC has genuinely painted us into a corner.
The North Koreans are holding South Korea hostage right now. If they get nukes, they’ll be holding South Korea and Japan hostage. If they think we’re going to invade, they’ll dig in deeper — and if they get really scared, they’ll start lobbing shells to show us they’re serious. Refusing to speak with them and throwing yet more saber-rattling rhetoric at them indicates a basic unwillingness to deal with the facts as they stand. We have no choice but to negotiate — that’s what happens when two countries have one another by the balls. You figure out how to avoid either one squeezing.
Dean
No, Kimmitt. The record of negotiations is actually that they take whatever they get, then violate the agreement.
See the 1991 N-S agreement, and also the 1994 Agreed Framework (the two need to be read together).
North Korea agreed, in 1991, not to build any nukes, of any kind, in exchange for improved relations w/ South Korea. Then, in ’94, after we found that they were cheating on the ’91 Agreement, they promised not only to stop plutonium reprocessing, but abide by ALL nuclear-related agreements, incl. the ’91 agreement.
They proceeded then to violate the ’91 (again) by undertaking uranium reprocessing.
And if you think that the PNAC has much to do w/ North Korean paranoia, perhaps you could explain things like the ’83 Rangoon bombing and the mid-1970s “Assault on Blue House”? Those were undertaken under Kim Jong-il’s direction, you know. Or how about the mini-sub incursions and commando raids of the mid-1990s? So much for them only shooting (“lobbing shells”) if they’re scared.
Isn’t it funny how your solutions don’t seem to address REALITY, as in what has actually happened, but instead involve this fantastical North Korea that is simply a poor victim of the big, bad US?
Francis W. Porretto
North Korea is the most likely source for an A-bomb that will reach terrorist hands and ultimately incinerate an American city. They’ve openly proclaimed their willingness to sell nuclear materials to whomever they please. Is there really anyone here who’s in doubt about what that means?
As Ann Coulter said in Treason, “They [liberals] don’t want a smoking gun; they want a smoking American city.”
Keep it up, morons. Should the day ever come, the rest of us will remember you.
Dean
Moe,
I guess it’s masochism. That, and frustration that the Korean situation, one of the clearer issues in foreign policy, can be so distorted “through the looking glass.”
Kimmitt
as in what has actually happened, but instead involve this fantastical North Korea that is simply a poor victim of the big, bad US?
…and here we have the standard Conservative ploy. “Anyone who disagrees with me must be a Commie-loving America-hating bastard.”
Of course North Korea is an insane totalitarian state. For God’s sake, people there are so hungry that they eat fricking corpses. The question is, what do we do, given the fact that Korea is an insane totalitarian state _and_ can reduce Seoul to rubble.
M. Scott Eiland
If we didn’t care about Seoul, North Korea’s nuclear facilities would be smoking craters right now, and their armies would last about as long as it took to give launching orders to the US ballistic missile submarines that are undoubtedly patrolling off the shores of North Korea. Seoul gets shelled, a few hundred thousand people die, Seoul suffers hundreds of billions in property damage–but North Korea is toast. Strange we haven’t set that plan into motion already, since we hate the South Koreans so much.
Dean
Kimmitt:
If YOU want to read my comments as somehow suggesting that you’re a commie pinko or somesuch nonsense, feel free. No one can stop you from feeling that way.
But my comment had NOTHING to do w/ that. Rather, it was pointing to YOUR argument that we needed not to scare North Korea, lest it turn Seoul into rubble.
In case you hadn’t noticed (and evidently you haven’t), North Korea has done lots of things that ran the risk of it getting exterminated. As Scott Eiland notes, the very effort at developing nukes ran that risk.
As my examples note, they’ve been willing to run that risk for nearly thirty years (look up “Assault on Blue House” yet?), long before they even had a working nuke. They don’t fear us, and they are hardly engaging in nuclear development simply as a tit-for-tat kind of behavior, which YOU view them as doing.
Francis Porretto, OTOH, asks, in essence, the right question, “If they’re willing to risk being blasted when they DON’T have nukes, what would they be willing to risk if they DID have nukes?”
You wanna think of yourself as some kind of martyr, feel free. But that kind of delusional “thinking” is about as relevant to reality as your so-called suggestions.
TM Lutas
Kimmit – You ask what to do? It’s easy, do exactly what GWB did which was to scare the PRC into threatening to cut off their food and fuel aid. N. Korea can’t currently make it through a quarter without PRC aid and the PRC does not want a nuclear N. Korea.
When Kim Jong Il set a hard and fast deadline that he’d be a declared nuke power in the fall if the US didn’t change its tune, leadership shorts all over Beijing had to be changed because the PRC leadership understands that Bush wasn’t going to blink.
In the space of 1 week, the DPRK has gone from incredibly bellicose to incredibly conciliatory in the face of virtually no US movement. Somebody blinked and nobody died.
And that’s how you play the game.