02-10-2005, 11:43 PM
Fucking christ...I'll make this brief for now and give you some background, but I'll be back later.
First off I partially blame both Bush and Clinton for this whole situation, but more Bush at least because he could have prevented this. Clinton is partially to blame in defaulting on some aid payments, but Bush pretty much sealed the deal by stopping aid entirely and leaving North Korea with nothing to lose, and is thus more to blame.
The aid program was started when over a million people starved to death in the mid 90s and the U.S. viewed it as an opportunity to bring them back closer to the rest of the World community. After Kim Il Sung died and Kim Jong Il took power, the Clinton administration shifted gears and started defaulting on its aid program. Then Bush got out of it entirely in 2000, basically leaving NK with nothing really to lose. China and South Korea were both doing a lot to try and bring NK back into the international community. China actually set up a free trade zone with NK along its border, and SK reestablished railroad tracks and helped set up a deal where relatives who hadn't seen each other in 50 years were allowed to visit. Meanwhile Bush was ranting about an Axis Of Evil, and denied NK's actually reasonable request of direct negotiation, which Bush denied at every turn in favor of multilateralism, which Kim had made it clear he wa opposed to for some time.
NK is a crazy fucked up place, but now they are an even more crazy fucked up and dangerous place. General consensus for a while has been that they do have the bomb, although estimates vary as far as how many bombs they have and how far they could launch them. They had been following the same pattern for years -- act belligerent, wait until the foreign aid comes in, act conciliatory for a while, repeat.
It was a pretty good scam actually for both sides actually - for them, it's possibly cheaper in the long run than bothering to develop a functioning economy. For us, it's much safer to let the regime crumble over time than risk possible nuclear attack.
I know there's some sort of "principle" in dealing with places like NK in the neocon way, but it's overly idealistic and does not reflect the way the real world works, and now NK is practically uninvadable should that ever come to that anyway.
In short, Bush could have prevented this, and botched that terribly.
First off I partially blame both Bush and Clinton for this whole situation, but more Bush at least because he could have prevented this. Clinton is partially to blame in defaulting on some aid payments, but Bush pretty much sealed the deal by stopping aid entirely and leaving North Korea with nothing to lose, and is thus more to blame.
The aid program was started when over a million people starved to death in the mid 90s and the U.S. viewed it as an opportunity to bring them back closer to the rest of the World community. After Kim Il Sung died and Kim Jong Il took power, the Clinton administration shifted gears and started defaulting on its aid program. Then Bush got out of it entirely in 2000, basically leaving NK with nothing really to lose. China and South Korea were both doing a lot to try and bring NK back into the international community. China actually set up a free trade zone with NK along its border, and SK reestablished railroad tracks and helped set up a deal where relatives who hadn't seen each other in 50 years were allowed to visit. Meanwhile Bush was ranting about an Axis Of Evil, and denied NK's actually reasonable request of direct negotiation, which Bush denied at every turn in favor of multilateralism, which Kim had made it clear he wa opposed to for some time.
NK is a crazy fucked up place, but now they are an even more crazy fucked up and dangerous place. General consensus for a while has been that they do have the bomb, although estimates vary as far as how many bombs they have and how far they could launch them. They had been following the same pattern for years -- act belligerent, wait until the foreign aid comes in, act conciliatory for a while, repeat.
It was a pretty good scam actually for both sides actually - for them, it's possibly cheaper in the long run than bothering to develop a functioning economy. For us, it's much safer to let the regime crumble over time than risk possible nuclear attack.
I know there's some sort of "principle" in dealing with places like NK in the neocon way, but it's overly idealistic and does not reflect the way the real world works, and now NK is practically uninvadable should that ever come to that anyway.
In short, Bush could have prevented this, and botched that terribly.