Flight Pundit

The feel-good people want us to sit at a table and snack on cookies and milk, with the tyrant leader of North Korea. Liberals throw the “successful” dialogue of the Clinton Administration as evidence that NK can be appeased with the right “talks”.

On July 4, while Americans across the country were getting their bottle rockets and Roman candles ready to celebrate our independence, a small, poor country half a world away was preparing its own “rockets’ red glare.”

The tests have all been failures this time around. Who knows if this will be true in a year, 5 years, 10 years. The small poor country has a leader who choses to keep his nation poor.

This test was a failure for North Korea because its outdated Taepodong 2 missile crashed prematurely into the Sea of Japan. But we also now see that the Bush administration’s handsoff stance toward North Korea is not working. As the world’s greatest superpower, we should be actively engaged in disarming and lessening the North Korean threat.

And the hands on stance worked Mr. Richardson??

Let’s see how it worked:

During the early Clinton years, hard-liners and so-called conservative hawks advocated a pre-emptive strike to halt North Korea’s nuclear weapons development before it could field an atomic bomb. Instead of taking the hard line, President Clinton elected to rely on former President Jimmy Carter and decided to appease the Marxist-Stalinist dictatorship.

Carter met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang and returned to America waving a piece of paper and declaring peace in our time. Kim, according to Carter, had agreed to stop his nuclear weapons development.

The Clinton appeasement program for North Korea included hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, food, oil and even a nuclear reactor. However, the agreement was flawed and lacked even the most informal means of verification.

In return, Kim elected to starve his people while using the American aid to build uranium bombs. The lowest estimate is that Kim starved to death over 1 million of his own people, even with the U.S. aid program.

A million people Mr. Richardson. Under Clinton’s watch.

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We need to return to the table and hammer out the details of a comprehensive solution to North Korea’s nuclear threat. We also need to start an aggressive, bilateral dialogue between the U.S. and North Korea - including what concrete economic benefits will come North Korea’s way if it cooperates on dismantling its nuclear program.

I think we’ve already tried this as stated above…and did it work? No.

We’ve offered ecomonic benefits- nuke reactors and oil:

Under the final terms of the Agreed Framework approved in October of 1994, Clinton agreed to provide the “Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea” (DPRK) with two light water nuclear reactors and a massive allotment of oil. The U.S. agreed to ship 500,000 metric tons of oil annually in response to the North’s pretense that the energy-starved backwater had developed the nuclear facility to generate power. These shipments have cost taxpayers more than $800 million to date - a bargain compared with the $6 billion spent on constructing the nuclear reactors, which now empower North Korea to produce 100 nuclear bombs each year.

…and we offered food:

…President Clinton then sweetened the deal by rewarding Kim Jong Il’s half-year-long stall tactics with 1.1 million tons of food worth nearly $200 million.

That was a lot of money; a lot of cookies and milk. It did nothing to avert Kim’s ambitions.

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Diplomatic efforts with strong, high-level negotiators are the only way we have made progress on dealing with this rogue nation in the past. I saw this when I successfully led face-to-face negotiations for the release of an American hostage from North Korea in the mid-1990s. Condemnation from the United Nations Security Council and economic sanctions from North Korea’s Asian neighbors are a place to start, but we cannot afford to isolate this unpredictable nation further.

We cannot afford to surround this very predictable nation with showers of praise and attention, and food and oil and technology.
No. Appeasement, diplomacy don’t work. History shows this. History proves the leader of NK cannot be trusted. Only fools believe the likes of Kim, and unfortunately Mr. Richardson, you are indeed a fool.

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North Korea is the poorest, most deprived land most of us will ever know. Its agricultural work is done mostly by oxen and its people live with the constant threat of famine. But, as we now see clearly, it has also been able to cobble together a handful of nuclear weapons and is hard at work on the missile technology to deliver them.

My heart bleeds. Enough with the starving Koreans bullshit. If we want to end that, we need to get tough and take out the leader and his nuclear ambitions, along with the missles. We are not the cause of the famines there. We have helped and look where it got us. LOOK at the history.

We must turn North Korea away from its nuclear brinkmanship and toward providing a stable food supply and more opportunity for its people. This means direct engagement from the highest levels in Washington employing all the tools at our disposal.

He just doesn’t get it does he?? It’s very frustrating to read over and over again, the failures of these policies.

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NK cannot be trusted and direct engagement is just a farce:

The U.S. came to believe in 1997, for instance, that North Korea had built an underground nuclear facility in Kumchang-ri. The administration still dishonestly maintained that all was well with the Agreed Framework. On July 8, 1998, Albright told Congress, the Agreed Framework had “frozen North Korea’s dangerous nuclear-weapons program.” When intelligence about the suspect site at Kumchang-ri became public in August 1998, Albright told frustrated senators at a hearing that she hadn’t known about the information until later in July. The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, present at the hearing, had to interrupt her: “Madame Secretary, that is incorrect.” She had been told many months earlier.

We should not have trusted Clinton and his lying sacks of shit to deal with this correctly. Clinton and Richardson and others must be held accountable for our current day concerns. Not a one of them has made this better, in fact, they have made it what it is.
Funny how Richardson pipes up now…he recently visited NK and has offered “aid” from his own state. What a moron. Aid that is being taking advantage of in unfriendly ways we can be assured.

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It is now time for the U.S. to step up and become a leader on the North Korean issue. We must be willing to engage in direct bilateral discussions within the context of the six-party talks with North Korea. This issue is too important to be left solely to multilateral talks.

No it’s time for you to butt out and go back to your desserts in NM. Please tell me why Democrats cannot learn from their own miserable failures? Is it because they cannot see where they failed? If so, we have a serious problem. Because they keep trying to push their failed actions upon us and the world. Someday this will lead to a real red glare day on a west coast city.

Cross Posted @ ARS

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