TO REMEMBER: "North Korea cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb. We have to be very firm about it." - Bill Clinton, "Meet the Press," Nov. 7, 1993.
VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE I: "Diplomacy with North Korea has scored a resounding triumph. Monday's draft agreement freezing and then dismantling North Korea's nuclear program should bring to an end two years of international anxiety and put to rest widespread fears that an unpredictable nation might provoke nuclear disaster.
The U.S. negotiator Robert Gallucci and his North Korean interlocutors have drawn up a detailed road map of reciprocal steps that both sides accepted despite deep mutual suspicion. In so doing they have defied impatient hawks and other skeptics who accused the Clinton Administration of gullibility and urged swifter, stronger action. The North has agreed first to freeze its nuclear program in return for U.S. diplomatic recognition and oil from Japan and other countries to meet its energy needs. Pyongyang will then begin to roll back that program as an American-led consortium replaces the North's nuclear reactors with two new ones that are much less able to be used for bomb-making. At that time, the North will also allow special inspections of its nuclear waste sites, which could help determine how much plutonium it had extracted from spent fuel in the past." - The New York Times, wrong yet again, October 19, 1994. (The Von Hoffman Award is named after famed commentator Nick von Hoffman who boldly predicted the collapse of the Afghan campaign the week Kabul fell. It's for truly bad judgment or prediction among the punditocracy.)
ZERO ACCOUNTABILITY: Now check the Times' editorial today. Not even a hint of their previous misjudgment. Just another piece of pabulum calling for more diplomacy. No criticism whatsoever of those who negotiated this deal and helped bring another nuclear rogue state into being. They even say this gives some ammunition to the Iraq "doves," who "will say this gives the lie to the administration's argument that Iraq is uniquely dangerous." Please. Don't the Times' editorialists owe their readers some kind of argument as to why they were wrong when this deal was originally signed? Hey, guys. We have Nexis now.
VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE II: Here's what the Clinton administration's top negotiator with North Korea told Jim Lehrer last January about president Bush's policy toward North Korea:"They do and can follow through." Says it all, doesn't it?
JIM LEHRER: What about the idea that the President laying the law down to them, calling them and putting them in the same league with Iraq and Iran and calling them part of this axis of evil helps the situation or hurts it? Do you feel like it helps?
WENDY SHERMAN: I don't think it was particularly helpful.
JIM LEHRER: Why not?
WENDY SHERMAN: It was very understandable as a rhetorical device to rally the American people to cause against terrorism and to the cause against weapons of mass destruction, which none of us want. What I think was wrong about it in terms of North Korea is North Korea has negotiated successfully with us. We have a 1994 framework agreement that stops the production of fissile material, which is the plutonium, the kind of plutonium needed to build nuclear weapons. They agreed to that framework agreement. They have principally kept to that agreement and taken the steps that were necessary for it to take. It's not finished yet. We still have a ways to go, but they do and can follow through. We need to hold them to it. Our agreements have to be verifiable. They need to be tough but it can be done.
ON THE OTHER HAND: There were some people who clearly saw the scam that was the Carter-engineered, Clinton-signed group-hug with the North Koreans. Here's John McCain, the same day the Times came out hailing the Clinton deal:On at least eight previous occasions, North Korea has lied to the Clinton Administration. With this agreement, Administration officials have willingly acquiesced in Pyongyang's almost certain further deception. Yet again, the Administration has mistaken resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis with merely postponing its apogee. ...I suspect that the Administration's willlingness to delay the resolution of this crisis is premised on their presumption that the bankrupt North Korean economy will force the regime's collapse before they violate the agreement. Unfortunately, their economy may be salvaged during the interim period by the hallf a billion tons of oil they will receive annually, the opening of trade relations with the U.S., and greater trade with its Asian neighbors, which the agreement [provides for]. Thus, the Administration has accomplished the remarkable feat of allowing the North Koreans to have their carrot cake and eat it too.Hmmm. And what does McCain say about Iraq today?
"DANGEROUSLY WEAK": This is clearly a suck-up to my friend Charles Krauthammer. But, hey, he deserves it. This is what he said about Clinton's North Korea deal at the time:(1) The NPT is dead. North Korea broke it and got a huge payoff from the United States not for returning to it but for pretending to. Its nuclear program proceeds unmolested. In Tehran and Tripoli and Baghdad the message is received: Nonproliferation means nothing. (2) The IAEA, if it goes along with this sham, is corrupted beyond redemption. It is supposed to be an impartial referee blowing the whistle on proliferators. Yet if Washington does not want to hear the whistle, the IAEA can be bullied into silence. (3) American credibility - not very high after Clinton's about-faces in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti - sinks to a new low. This is a president easily cowed and dangerously weak. Said one government official to the New York Times, "It's one of these cases where the administration was huffing and puffing and backed down." Better though, said another, than "falling on our own sword over phony principle." If nonproliferation, so earnestly trumpeted by this president, is a phony principle, then where do we look for this president's real principles? This administration would not recognize a foreign policy principle, phony or otherwise, if it tripped over one in the street. The State Department, mixing cravenness with cynicism, calls this capitulation "very good news." For Kim Il Sung, certainly. For us, the deal is worse than dangerous. It is shameful.Man, was he right. And what is his position today on Iraq?