Bolton drops A-bomb on Bush’s North Korea deal
North Korea blew up the cooling tower at its Yongbyon nuclear plant the other day. This was in response to a Bush administration diplomatic initiative which offered to remove the DPRK from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Like Bryan Preston, I’ve been waiting for John Bolton’s reaction to the deal. It came out tonight in the Wall Street Journal.
Short version: he’s not happy.
In the waning days of American presidencies, this theater is the stuff of legacy.
North Korea has consecutively broken every major agreement with the U.S. since the North’s creation. The Bush administration provides no reason why this one will not be added to that long list except the audacity of hope. Where have we heard that recently? Barack Obama and John Kerry both announced support for the deal, and Mr. Obama said he intended to apply Bush’s policy to other rogue states, thus confirming the early start of the Obama administration.
The Feb. 13, 2007, agreement states explicitly that North Korea was to provide “a complete declaration of all nuclear programs” within 60 days. This it manifestly did not do, either in timing or substance.
And thus the faith-based non-proliferation policy becomes law. For good or for ill, this will be an important part of the Bush administration’s legacy.
I predict it will rank right up there with Clinton’s decision to pardon Marc Rich.
____________
One quibble with all this: does North Korea sponsor terrorism? I’m not sure that they do. One of our nightmares was that they would sell the fruits of Yongbyon to Syria…which they did…or to Al Qaeda, which I hope they haven’t (but they’re supposed to tell us if they did.)
But I’m not sure that they actually sponsored terrorists, in the way that–say the Taliban sponsored Al Qaeda or Iran sponsors Hezbollah. (They did provide weapons to Syria and Iran–which are state sponsors of terrorism, as opposed to terrorists. )
Should that matter? It was clearly the closest diplomatic club at hand to hit North Korea with, and if it provided a legal means of pressure on them, it was probably a defensible choice. So does anybody care whether they actually sponsored terrorists or not?
UPDATE: In the comments, Tantor has an answer for me:
Yeah, North Korea sponsored terrorists and used terrorism as part of its foreign policy. For example, Kim Jong Il sent North Korean suicide bombers to blow up Korean Air Lines Flight 858 on November 29, 1987. That terror attack is what placed North Korea on the list of terror sponsors. The surviving bomber, a twentysomething woman named Kim Hyun Hui, wrote a book about her experience, “The Tears Of My Soul.”
That followed a 1970 skyjacking of a JAL airliner to Pyongyang by Japanese Red Army terrorists, where North Korea granted them asylum.
North Korean commandoes attacked the South Korean president’s palace in 1968. In 1972, North Korea tried to kill the South Korean president again with a bomb which detonated prematurely in a cemetery the President was scheduled to visit.
In 1974, the South Korean First Lady, Yook Young-soo, was shot dead by a North Korean assassin who was gunning for her husband, President Park Chung-hee, at an independence day celebration held at the National Theater in Seoul.
North Korea attempted to assassinate the South Korean President again in Rangoon in 1983, missing him again but killing his staff. A camera caught the carnage, which you can watch here.
All these terror attacks come on top of the constant commando infiltrations and attacks constantly mounted by North Korea on the South.
So, yeah, North Korea not just sponsored terror, but terror was a way of life for North Korea.
Okey dokey, then.
Tantor’s blog is here. He seems to know a thing or two about a thing or two.
___________
{Post by See-Dubya}
See what others have said
Note from Michelle: This section is for comments from michellemalkin.com's community of registered readers. Please don't assume that I agree with or endorse any particular comment just because I let it stand. A reminder: Anyone who fails to comply with my terms of use may lose his or her posting privilege.
Trackbacks
- Outside The Beltway | OTB
- The Saloon dot net
- Bolton Speaks on North Korea. His Moustacheness is Not Pleased. | The Sundries Shack
- PrestoPundit
- So how does John Bolton feel about the North Korea deal? « The Daley Gator
- Some voices against NK getting de-listed from terrorist states’ list « Blogging for a free world
Comments
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Categories: Homeland Security
Power Line
» More From the East Anglia Archives
American Thinker
» Sarah Palin and the low ebb of the cultural leftDoug Ross @ Journal
» ACORN pwnage part II: Breitbart's BigGovt Lowers the BoomBig Government
» BREAKING: San Diego ACORN Document Dump ScandalVillainous Company
» Amateur Hour in the Oval Office Continues....Nice Deb
» OGreen Room
» Times Slimes Obamic Climes
The stache has weighed you in the balance and found your Korea policy wanting. Can’t say I’m pleased that John Fing Kerry and Snobama were happy w the deal either.
see-dubya, you asked if North Korea sponsors terrorism the way I look at it they do from at a minimum a 3rd person perspective. They are the providers of material support to state sponsors of terrorism. For example the drug cartels do not sell drugs directly to the individual users, they sell them to the dealers who sell them to the users. So would this absolve the drug cartels from an guilt that there product was sold to the users seeing as that they did not directly sell to the users?
I love this line from Bolton:
My only question is how long will this deal take to bite us in the butt like the deal in 1994 did?
Why is Bush making it embarrassing to those of use who have supported him these past 7.5 years? It’s not going to gain him the popularity he seems to be craving in closing out his presidency. He would be better served getting tougher on these rogues – including total support of Israel against their terrorist Palestinian neighbors.
Dare I say, ‘trust, but verify’?
Drivingjack:
Yeah, so that Axis of Evil speech–was that just a big April Fools’ thing? I thought he meant that these countries were evil and we were going to isolate them.
Ha ha, funny joke. You got me going there, George. Good one.
Truesoldier:
Yeah, but you run into trouble here when things are a little bit attentuated.
France is building a nuclear reactor for Libya right now (and why people aren’t screaming about this, I’m not sure…) but I still don’t put France in the same category of dangerous eviltude as the DPRK.
I’m as big a Bush basher as any other disgrunteled conservative, but we don’t a lot of good options with N Korea. I think the best thing to do is to make a deal with China – if NK gets nukes, then so does Taiwan.
But we’re holding back the tide here. More and more countries will go nuclear, and there is little we can do to stop it.
So, how’s that border fence coming along?
On a more cheerful note, the world is supposed to end in a month or so when that new European super-collider starts up. Don’t worry, be happy.
Our young people are in harm’s way globally-
Europe-60 + years
Korea-50 + uears
Mid-east-50+ years
and so on and so on and so on…
Mark Styne is correct-the US is spending her young lives and $$$$$ for …What????
Let all of the above get off of their collective socialistic behinds and start manning and $$$$ their own militaries….
We’ll man our borders…and send “diplomats” to monitor our interests.
Maybe I’m tired …but, all of these ruse side-shots are getting VERY old!!!
Yeah (there should be more screamin about it), but then again it is the French we are taking about, so I would not be too worried about a French Weaponization process. After all I think this video shows how well some French weapons work.
PS I’ve titled my post #8
North Korea LIES again!!!!
#9 TS LOL LOL LOL thanks – I needed that : French weapons ……:-)
The weapons test was hysterical
Couldn’t Bush have used the cooling tower as the main building in the inevitable Bush Library? Don’t even move it, just leave it there. The George W. Bush “Nucular” Library…
With everyone getting nuclear reactors i see the world will be blow up by some 3rd world crazy a%$ just cause someone made them mad and they wanted to cop an attitude. We can not depend on the IAEA to control anything and the U.N. is a joke. I guess when someone like Iran, Syria, Hammas, Hezbullah, or some third world country gets a nuclear weapon and uses it we will be kciking our own a$$ then. If we have one left to kick.
Yeah, North Korea sponsored terrorists and used terrorism as part of its foreign policy. For example, Kim Jong Il sent North Korean suicide bombers to blow up Korean Air Lines Flight 858 on November 29, 1987. That terror attack is what placed North Korea on the list of terror sponsors. The surviving bomber, a twentysomething woman named Kim Hyun Hui, wrote a book about her experience, “The Tears Of My Soul.”
That followed a 1970 skyjacking of a JAL airliner to Pyongyang by Japanese Red Army terrorists, where North Korea granted them asylum.
North Korean commandoes attacked the South Korean president’s palace in 1968. In 1972, North Korea tried to kill the South Korean president again with a bomb which detonated prematurely in a cemetery the President was scheduled to visit.
In 1974, the South Korean First Lady, Yook Young-soo, was shot dead by a North Korean assassin who was gunning for her husband, President Park Chung-hee, at an independence day celebration held at the National Theater in Seoul.
North Korea attempted to assassinate the South Korean President again in Rangoon in 1983, missing him again but killing his staff. A camera caught the carnage, which you can watch here.
All these terror attacks come on top of the constant commando infiltrations and attacks constantly mounted by North Korea on the South.
So, yeah, North Korea not just sponsored terror, but terror was a way of life for North Korea.
Holy Sh$t!!
And these people think they can criticize us???
Not a chance.
Either some other factor will intervene and prevent other state actors from “going nuclear” (and saving “W”’s bacon), or it will rank up there with Idiotarian Carter’s handling of the Iranian Hostage Crisis (complete with Carter micromanagement culminating with the debacle at Desert 1)
OT – A second incident with the French - this one not so funny.
I think north korea need this deal more then anything the people starving and they know that if they push america then we’ll have to teach them a lesson with our bombs ships and guns.
Amazing that our government hasn’t learned a basic principle of life: If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting. You keep “playing ball” with N. Korea, you’ll lose every time.
Pretty good listing of DPRK’s hit list up there. While they haven’t expressly targeted the US before, they’ve been evil little %#$@s in their own backyard.
One Tantor missed: North Korea also kidnapped a number of Japanese citizens throughout the 60s and 70s. Wonder what the very anti-nuke Japanese have to say about this new policy.
I see Bush is still trying to reach out to the left; it looks like this time for some kind of legacy thing with the liberal elites. It never worked before – why does he believe it will work now?
Because he has learned nothing. Besides ruining the republican party what has he done in the past 3 years? Absolutely Nothing
When I deployed to Kunsan Air Base, South Korea back in the 1980s as part of the annual Team Spirit war games to keep the North Korean heads down, I was impressed to see a sign posted on the golf course that said, “OFF LIMITS AFTER DARK, TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.” There’s a sign which commands attention. Evidently, North Korean infiltrators used the golf course to penetrate the base.
Kunsan was on the coast, a nasty coast of shallow mud flats. The North Koreans would launch commandoes from submarines in semi-inflated boats to land on the muddy beach. Every morning the Republic of Korea army would go down to the beach to examine it. Each private was assigned a section of beach which was covered in pebbles. The private would examine his section to see if it had been disturbed. If not, he’d spend an hour rearranging the pebbles in a different design. If they had been disturbed, they would hunt down the infiltrator who landed there and kill him.
Trusting Communist regimes has never gotten us anywhere. Lefties didn’t care what the aftereffects were when we “departed” Vietnam. Soon afterward, millions of people died in the Vietnamese purge, and nearby countries also fell to the scourge.
It’s interesting that something that we should have learned from the 1950’s, did not resonate in the 1960-1970’s. It’s interesting that Pres. Bush didn’t trust Saddam Hussein but now he’s going to trust North Korea.
Look what’s happening with China. China is now in vogue. It’s now the thing for China to rape the US economy, out manufacture us, steal our military and trade secrets (care of Bubba Clinton), while they deny freedoms to their own people that Americans themselves take for granted. How did this happen?
I’ll tell you how it happened. We the American looked the other way because the public felt there would be no consequences in importing scientists/engineers, outsourcing labor and manufacturing, and dumbing down the population. No, it’s not surprising that Dems identifiy with Commies it’s that so-called “conservatives” so want to appease them.
That’s the real shame.
Tantor is right. The Norks have the world’s largest submarine fleet, all designed to sneak in commandos. The entire coast of the South is fenced and patrolled and yes, I’ve seen stacks of tiny rocks along the fences, painted white with single little red stripes perfectly aligned so even if a conscientious invader restacked the rocks, he’d still have to get the stripes perfectly aligned, hard to do in a murderous hurry.
And the Yellow Sea at Kunsan is very very yellow. Never played golf there, though as of the mid-nineties the perimeter road was still off limits after dark.
graysonret #20, how about saying it this way: “if you keep playing ball with North Korea, you’ve lost yours…”?
Another thought, is there some way to get John Bolton running for President? Huh? We need somebody there with some cast iron gonads. He’s definitely got’m. What a breath of fresh air, he is.
The general science quotient in this country is so low that not only do MOST Americas but more than a few “reporters” think cooling towers ARE nuclear reactors! Just heard one on a NYC local TV station! Sheesh!!!
MM, Please, in an age of biased and outdated science reporting and cable programs, Please keep brushed up on your sciences!!!
(Hey, try telling a lot of teachers who hear that the space shuttle just landed from a “30 million mile trip” that it actually went no higher than the length of Long Island!)
James Greenidge
Queens NY
What happened to my country…I damn well know…LIBERALS!
I don’t remember living or reading where this country was this far left, this close to collapsing. From the hell hole San Frecksisco to the government school system to the mililtary jag’s conductiong a war to our forever laughable congress and comedic primary elections and presidency. Looking back at the great societies of history and we are falling right in place to fail. It is a sad day in America. Damn I love America, I want her back!
Kidnapping of Japanese citizens (and citizens of other countries too!).
Just last week PBS had on “Independent Lens” a documentary about a 13 year old Japanense girl who was kidnapped in the 70’s. In fact the bombers of the Korean Airline were trained on how to act Japanese by these kidnapped Japanese citizens.