John McCain: PUNK (Korean Nukes edition)
Thu Oct 12, 2006 at 03:39:25 PM PDT
For those of you who might continue to believe the entirely mistaken notion that McCain is a different kind of Republican, a "maverick", "principled" "independent" or in any way shape or form some kind of compromise acceptable candidate who is somehow more mainstream than the current cabal...
McCain's done a one-eighty on torture, on calling the Swiftboaters, on fiscal accountability in government, holding Bush accountable for the disastrous US foreign policy, and on issues so numerous it's difficult to keep a catalog up to date.
Why? There's nothing this "maverick" won't do for political gain to reach the White House.
This time, it's lying about the record on North Korea. More on the flip.
Ignoring the general point that it's hardly fair to make Clinton run on the record of her husband's administration, this is classic distraction politics. Point the finger anywhere but at the real culprit.
John McCain takes another page out of the Karl Rove playbook by blaming the Clintons -- and Hilary, by name! -- for North Korea's nuclear test.
To recap:
- North Korea doesn't get nuclear weapons under Clinton.
- North Korea does get nuclear weapons under Bush.
- Therefore it's Clinton's fault, because, after all, Bush has had the issue for only six years.
Here's what Selig Harrison reports in the international edition of Newsweek (don't bother to look for it on your newstand, since Newsweek thinks Americans are dumb):
On Sept. 19, 2005, North Korea signed a widely heralded denuclearization agreement with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. Pyongyang pledged to "abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs." In return, Washington agreed that the United States and North Korea would "respect each other's sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize their relations."
Four days later, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sweeping financial sanctions against North Korea designed to cut off the country's access to the international banking system, branding it a "criminal state" guilty of counterfeiting, money laundering and trafficking in weapons of mass destruction.
The Bush administration says that this sequence of events was a coincidence. Whatever the truth, I found on a recent trip to Pyongyang that North Korean leaders view the financial sanctions as the cutting edge of a calculated effort by dominant elements in the administration to undercut the Sept. 19 accord, squeeze the Kim Jong Il regime and eventually force its collapse. My conversations made clear that North Korea's missile tests in July and its threat last week to conduct a nuclear test explosion at an unspecified date "in the future" were directly provoked by the U.S. sanctions. In North Korean eyes, pressure must be met with pressure to maintain national honor and, hopefully, to jump-start new bilateral negotiations with Washington that could ease the financial squeeze. When I warned against a nuclear test, saying that it would only strengthen opponents of negotiations in Washington, several top officials replied that "soft" tactics had not worked and they had nothing to lose.
That's what cowboys like McCain have wrought: a foreign policy where we deliberately stick our fingers in the eyes of our enemies and adversaries instead of trying to manipulate their behavior to our advantage. That's the difference between saber-rattling and diplomacy. It has nothing to do with being "soft" or "firm"; it has everything to do with getting results that are in our national interest.
This is either McCain showing his true stripes as an extremist hawk, or once again showing he's willing to be a proxy-apologist for the Bush administration's abject failures in foreign policy. Take your pick.
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