The Hill
September 14, 2004
Don't fault Bush for N. Korea
by David Keene
The explosion that shook North Korea over the weekend led almost
immediately and perhaps inevitably to an attack in this country. Within
hours, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry figured out a way
to blame President Bush and his administration for whatever is going on
in Asia.
It is Kerry's contention that Bush, obsessed with Iraq, ignored
developments on the Korean peninsula and must therefore bear
responsibility for the continuing antics of the lunatic who runs North
Korea. The contention is ludicrous given our dealings with North Korea
during the Clinton years. It was then that President Bill Clinton
decided, with the connivance of former President Jimmy Carter, that the
way to Kim Jong Il's heart was free oil.
During Clinton's watch, we sent North Korea hundreds of millions of
dollars' worth of oil as part of a naive and foolhardy attempt to
change that nation's behavior. Kim said he needed nuclear reactors to
supply power for his people, but the reactors he had were capable of
producing the material needed to build thermonuclear bombs.
Clinton decided that if the United States gave North Korea oil and
promised help to build reactors that wouldn't generate thermonuclear
material, Kim's energy problem would be solved and the world would be a
safer place.
The problem was that the success of the scheme depended on accepting
Kim as a basically well-meaning national leader who tells the truth,
cares about his people, wants peace and can be trusted. Clinton, Carter
and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright were possibly the only three
people in the world willing to do that. Most everyone else recognized
Kim as a madman who cares not a whit for the people he rules and seems
incapable of dealing forthrightly with anyone.
Still, while Kim may be crazy, he's no fool. He knew a sucker when he
saw one, accepted the oil and went right on doing what he'd intended to
do all along. He built himself a bomb and now has as many as half a
dozen to hold, use or sell. We stood by and let this happen in the '90s
and at the same time watched him build and test missiles capable of
carrying the bombs we were praying he wasn't developing. As a result,
he is in a position to threaten his neighbors and the western United
States.
How this is Bush's fault is beyond me. When Bush declared North Korea a
part of the "axis of evil," he did so precisely because of
the threat Clinton ignored. Bush knew that if terrorists like Osama bin
Laden ever acquire nuclear weapons, they are likely to be labeled
"Made in North Korea," since Kim himself has bragged that he
intends to sell at least some of his bombs to whoever may have a use
for them.
The problem Bush faced was not of his making, and it was certainly not
his "obsession" with Iraq that prevented him from eliminating
the North Korean threat. Our pre-emptive strike against Iraq was based
on our belief that Iraq had chemical or biological weapons of mass
destruction and was well on the way to going nuclear. Our troops went
in knowing that Saddam Hussein might use what he had against them but
secure in the knowledge that he couldn't launch a full strike against
us at the time we launched our assault. The fear was that if we waited,
the window of opportunity allowing us to strike would close and we'd be
forced to deal with a truly dangerous rogue state.
North Korea is that rogue state. Given the resources at its disposal,
going after Kim militarily would make Iraq look like a walk in the
park. Had Bush nevertheless moved to take Kim out, Kerry would be
blasting the president as irresponsible and Democrats would be in the
streets protesting another Asian war. It is disingenuous to assert that
while Bush should not have acted against a Middle East madman, he
should have against an Asian, or that his obsession with one prevented
him from going after the other.
Perhaps Kerry actually believes that he could sit down with Kim and
come up with an agreement that decades of presidents have failed to
get. After all, Kerry promises that if we just elect him, France and
other nations who oppose us now will jump at the chance to help America
in Iraq. Maybe he also believes that he can soothe the madman who rules
North Korea.
It would be interesting but very dangerous to let Kerry try.
New York Post
September 15, 2004
Terror's Pals In The Press
By Ralph Peters
Journalists across the world are horrified. A U.S. helicopter gunship killed an al-Arabiya producer in Baghdad. And the international solidarity between scribblers immediately kicked into gear, outraged at American brutality. Not a single journalist asked the fundamental question: How is it that "reporters" from al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya are on the scene immediately when U.S. troops are ambushed or when a massive car bomb explodes?
It doesn't take a new CIA director to figure it out. Arab journalists are not only in contact with terrorists, they're in collusion with them. Time and again, we see dramatic video and photographs from the terrorists' angle, killers with rocket-propelled grenades on their shoulders and blackened U.S. military vehicles. Iraq's a big country, the size of California. Baghdad's a big city, a blue-ribbon victim of urban sprawl. It's simply impossible to believe that the handful of Arab TV journalists on the scene are so brilliant that they instinctively know where the action's going down. Our journalists need to drop the feigned naiveté. Reporters who cut deals with terrorists for gory footage, who know a terror bombing's on the way and say nothing or who accompany thugs as they ambush U.S. soldiers, are not neutral observers.
As this column has consistently maintained, al-Jazeera, especially, is not a news organization. It's an anti-American propaganda bureau. Does anyone imagine that al Qaeda and other terror groups - the head-choppers for Allah - send their tapes to al-Jazeera because the postage is cheaper? We are at war. Not only with terrorists, but with their supporters. That al-Arabiya producer joined forces with killers who ambushed a Bradley infantry fighting vehicle. He wasn't a journalist. He was a terrorist. Whether he carried a camera or a gun.
Our gunship didn't target him. It fired at the disabled Bradley so looters couldn't make off with weapons, ammunition or communications gear. Self-defense. The looters and terrorists clambering over the vehicle were fair game. So was their sidekick from al-Arabiya.
OF COURSE, we can't even get our media house in order here at home. It's been a loathsome week for American journalism. CBS won't name its source for those "incriminating" documents about President Bush's National Guard service. That would violate its high journalistic principles (although lying about our president does not).
Instead, we get poor old Dan Rather, the crazy uncle of network news, insisting that those documents could have been typed on an early-1970s super typewriter, that there might have been just the right outrageously expensive machine in that fly-specked National Guard office - and that an officer who had never used it before would use it for note-taking. Let me share some reality with Uncle Dan. I served in our active-duty military five years after those documents purportedly were written. I was in Army intelligence. And only the big boss's secretary had an electric typewriter - one too primitive to create those documents. I worked on a manual machine made in East Germany (swear to God). In 1977. In a front-line division. The National Guard got the junk we didn't want.
CBS lied. The sad thing is that they just might be able to stonewall America. That's network news, folks. Defend forgeries. Defend "journalists" who support terror. Let our soldiers die. Let the American people rot. And trash our president in wartime.
No wonder al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya get away, literally, with murder.
Email from a co-worker...MUD