Newsweek places blame firmly on the shoulders of Bush

It was with some interest (and no little bit of glee) that I read the cover story of the most recent issue of Newsweek, How N. Korea Changed the Nuclear Club's Rules. It is about North Korea and its path to becoming a nuclear power, but a section is devoted to comparing Clinton's North Korea policies with those of Bush's.

...the North Korean program remained a rather ramshackle affair, demonstrating that it's not so easy after all to build nukes. In the early 1990s, after Washington and Pyongyang nearly came to blows over the program, evangelist Billy Graham and Jimmy Carter went on peacemaking visits to the North, leading to Bill Clinton's "Agreed Framework" deal with Pyongyang. Under that 1994 pact, Clinton obtained a commitment to freeze plutonium reprocessing in exchange for aid and a civilian nuclear plant. When American experts were finally allowed in to inspect Yongbyon, the center of North Korea's nuclear programs, that year, they could hardly believe their eyes. Inside, the cooling pond looked like an abandoned swimming pool.

Today, however, it's a different story:

But since the breakdown of the Agreed Framework in 2002--the Bush administration discarded it as a flawed Clinton-era policy--Yongbyon has been cleaned up and repaired, says Sig Hecker, a former director of Los Alamos who was invited to inspect it in January 2004.

Newsweek places the blame firmly on the shoulders of Bush's reversal of all Clinton-era policies he could.

But the incoming secretary of State, Colin Powell, was so impressed with the deal's terms that, when Albright and her aides briefed him and the then national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, he praised it to the press... That's when the hammer dropped. Powell, it turned out, had forgotten to check with his boss before spouting off about North Korea. And Kim Dae Jung was stunned when he stepped out for a joint news conference after meeting Bush in March 2001. "He didn't talk about what we had agreed upon but began to criticize North Korea by saying that a regime that couldn't even feed its people was making nuclear weapons," Kim Dae Jung told NEWSWEEK last week. "From that time on, things began to go wrong. I am confident that if President Bush had [pursued] the agreement sought by President Clinton the North Korean issue would have been resolved, and I am very sorry about that." The Bush team says both Powell and Kim Dae Jung got ahead of themselves, imposing policy on the new president when he'd barely been in office. There was, at the time, a hostile "anything but Clinton" tone in the White House, and Kim Jong Il was also a handy villain to have around to justify the centerpiece of Bush's foreign policy, the expensive missile defense program.

It is not surprising to me that Bush, the bumbling bull in a china shop that he is, was unwilling to continue diplomacy in favor of showing US aggression and might. I only hope that the Democrats use North Korea as a talking point along with the Iraq war. We don't need another Cold War or arms race - particularly when we're mired in an unwinnable war.