If Bush really said that (and I don’t take JG’s word for it), then it was a stupid thing to say. So if you want to claim that NK is a failure per Bush’s own standards, fine. But that makes the other three “not failures”. Personally, I prefer to evaluate the success or failures based on what I think is best for the country and what I think is a reasonable accomplishment or not. But it’s your thread, so take it in whatever direction you want.
You may be right, but the President was telling us otherwise back in December 2002:
That sounds to me like a declaration of a specific foreign-policy aim—i.e., a peaceful diplomatic resolution to bring North Korea into compliance and keep it nuke-free.
The Bush Administration did not accomplish that goal, so I don’t see any way to avoid the conclusion that the Administration’s NK policy has failed, by its own standards.
Maybe those standards were unreasonable, and maybe there never was any realistic way to keep NK from getting the bomb, but that’s not the line the Administration was pitching us a few years ago.
Huh? Where did you get that? Even if it were plutonium note the following form the PBS cite I gave above:
Why would plutonium = post 2002?
Another subtle changing of the subject. Sure. Also, I want a bomb. However, that doesn’t mean that it is impossible to convince them that it is not in their best interests to continue to pursue one. Basically telling them to fuck off for five years isn’t even just failing: it’s not even trying.
Cite? Did you forget Libya? Poland?
Cite? Where are these claims coming from? They seem to amount to “I suck at soccer, therefore, there is no possible way to score a goal.”
Where do you get the “fuck off” from"? You keep repeating that, but it’s just wrong. We have been negotiating with them for years as part of the 6-party talks.](Six-party talks - Wikipedia)
No, they come from: I’ve watched their actions for years, and they’ve given no indication that they will negotaite in good faith. They never stopped their nuclear program no matter what we did. What evidence do you have that NK will negotiate in good faith. Besides, I’m too old for soccer-- no one played that commie sport when I was a kid.
Yeah, well Bush is an idiot. You can quote me on that.
Seriously, though, what do you expect him to say when he knows a military option isn’t viable? Do you believe everything Bush says?
Could it be that, if that were the case, the source material would be more likely derived from the actual plutonium rods that were known to exist and was under IAEA seal until they practically begged Bush to intervene and keep them from breaking open the seals than from some alleged and purported super secret uranium enrichment program?
December 2002: North Korea expelling IAEA inspectors
That’s when NK got access to the fuel rods they been busily reprocessing.
BTW, did you notice the article I linked to where McCain blames Clinton’s failure to stop NK’s uranium program for this mess? You said no one was doing that.
Is the senator intentionally spreading disinformation, or is he just ignorant?
I hear Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown is looking for work, as is Tom Delay.
Who in their right mind would? But that doesn’t change the fact that Bush’s words still define the Bush Administration’s standards, which is the basis in this thread for judging the Bush Administration’s foreign policy outcomes.
Which, as it happens, were not what the NKs really wanted. What they really wanted was the cred from dealing with us head on.
Ah, so it’s just your opinion that negotiation is 100% pointless. So, in your estimation, our foriegn policy should be to simply wait until they get nukes, and then run around screaming “OMG THEY GOT NUKES”? It doesn’t seem like anyone on the planet agrees with your opinion though.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/010308.php
To summarize: What was denoted last weekend appears to be the material that NK gained access to in 2002 when both sides dropped out of a treaty neither side was living up to. They may have also been trying to enrich uranium, but so far that plot is not known to be anywhere near compleition. The Clinton plan may have fallen apart, but contrary to your claims, it does seem to have stopped their plutonium program at least for a signficant amount of time until Bush decided that cowboys and indians was a better idea than trying to salvage the old agreement and the NKs just broke open the plutonium and started at it again.
Re North Korea, remember that enriching uranium is an exacting engineering process; just because you get A.Q. Khan’s diagrams that tell you how, doesn’t mean you can do it if your country lacks the overall technological level to build all those cascading centrifuges to the proper tolerances and all.
At worst, maintaining the Agreed Framework would surely have bought us some time while North Korea mastered the technology of enriching uranium to bomb-level purity. At best, they might never have gotten there, even if we pursued no further deals with them. And somewhere in between, we might have been able to negotiate a second deal with them, covering uranium enrichment. Probably not with this President, of course, but the next one’s only two years, three months, and ten days away. But who’s counting?
I never negotiations were pointless. That’s a strawman. I said I doubt that they’d stop NK from getting nukes. There’s always value in talking-- whether you can achieve a particular objective by talking is a separate issue.
Well, that was a unilateral decision made by NK. But I thought you were implying they had never had access to plutonium prior to 2002, which they did.
Of course there are plenty of people IRL who will blame Clinton for everything. It should have been clear for the context that I was talking about people in this thread. Sorry if that was confusing.
As fo McCain, do you not know anything about poltical posturing? McCain (a likely 2008 presidential candidate) made that response to HRC (another likely 2008 presidential candidate) when HRC said that the test was an indication of the failure of the Bush policy. McCain didn’t just say that out of the blue, as you implied. Those two remarks appear to have little to do with Bush and a lot to do with the 2006 and 2008 elections. Don’t you think so?
I’ll offer a paradigm, or maybe just twenty cents worth…
I don’t think Hillary is running, but I think she is making every effort to keep in place, such that if the Democratic Party comes clamoring for her hand, she may accept. Even steel magnolias are still ladies, you know? Johnny is running like crazy, running every minute. He has some respect amongst the leftish, but none of them is going to send him any money. Gotta have money. (Remember Phil Gramm: “The mother’s milk of poliltics”? No corrupt sleazeball ever uttered truer words…) Gotta kiss that which presented.
Ah, it’s a strawman because you believe that talking is personally rewarding… but ultimately pointless in achieving what they are meant to achieve. But not, you know, POINTLESS, because it turns out that you think that like, we’ll all grow as people from them? That’s really splitting hairs to avoid the point I think.
The reality is that the parties to negotiations, including the US, aren’t there for any other reason than to make sure NK does not become a nuclear power. You think that’s impossible, but then it doesn’t seem like anyone’s really tried either, so how would anyone know? What negotiations were done DO seem to have accomplished stuff for at least a certain period of time.
Look, are you interested in an honest debate or do you just want to insult the people who disagree with you? There are lots of good reasons to continue the dialogue, not the least of which is that the Chinese do have some leverage. Besides, you never know what information you might get just be being at the table. I said it didn’t make a lot of sense to negotiate one-on-one with NK, but I never said the 6-party-talks were worthless. In fact, I said I thought that was the right to go.
What did it accomplish? The N. Koreans continued their nuclear program on the sly while we gave them food and oil. You seem to be implying that NK actually suspended their nuclear program-- do you have any evidence that they did? I offered a cite which claimed they didn’t.
You didn’t just say that it didn’t make a lot of sense: you said: “this idea that we can somehow negotiate them out of wanted nukes is naive beyond comprehension. Maybe (and that’s a highly qualified maybe) China could do that, but not us. We have nothing to offer them. Nothing, nada, zip, zilch.”
We suspect that they continued their uranium program, which the agreement never covered in the first place. We also appeared to have reneged on our side of the agreement.
We do have lots of evidence that their plutonium program, the one we DID have an agreement on, was suspended. We also know that THAT program was always the most plausible one for them getting and having a bomb in the near future.
As John Marshall puts it, summing up Condi Rice’s description of Success and Failure (which I guess is a NEW redefined standard for the Bush administration)
You might object that the 6 party talks wasn’t nothing, but a heck of a lot of people said from the start and continued to say that 6 party talks weren’t going to go anywhere. You tried the claim of how talking to them individually would allow playing oen against the other, but what makes far more sense is that 6 party talks allowed them to bog down negotiations by involving a dizzying array of different interests and policies. Negotiations between two parties is always going to be more direct and to the point than between a horde of them.
It also makes no sense to claim that Bush policy “worked” to prevent nukes in Iraq or Iran. All evidence points to the fact that Iraq had no hope of nukes, and Iran if anything has been emboldened and enabled to speed up their development of them.
This post article seems to lay things out pretty well:
Key quotes:
In short, all evidence is that one on one challenging the North Koreans DID have an effect, and thus your claim that we have no power at all to influence them looks, simply put, wrong. The agreement was imperfect in that it didn’t cover other avenues to the bomb: it dealt with the devil we knew at the time. But as imperfect as it was, it DID seem to have some real effect in dealing with it.
As Marshall notes, you can criticize the Clinton policy for being all carrots (as you have done) but this is both historical inaccurate (the Clinton administration made a specific military threat against a specific action) and hard to hold up as ineffective. The Bush policy has been neither carrots nor sticks: it’s not clear it was much of anything. And, not surprisingly, not doing anything of substance didn’t accomplish anything of substance.