[QUOTE=Apos]
This post article seems to lay things out pretty well:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001285.html
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.
[/QUOTE]
You know, I already agred with you in an earlier post that you can declare Bush’s policy a failure as judges by his own standards (see post #41). But now we’re just engaging in a “battle of the cites” regarding Clinton’s policies. If you read the PBS cite I gave earlier, it makes it clear that all the NK’s did was use their compliance to the Agreed Framework as a cover for a continued uranium enrichment program. In retrospect, we shouldn’t have allowed rjung’s stupid comment about Clinton to hijack this thread. I’ll take the bulk of the blame for allowing that to happen with my throw-away post in response to his throw-away post. There are two other active threads in GD where that discusion is taking place anyway.
So, since we both agree that Bush’s NK policy is a failure, by his own standards, shall we move on to the other three?
With Iran, the standards should be the same-- ie, that Iran doesn’t get nukes. Right? Well, they don’t have nukes, so I don’t see how we can declare Bush’s policy to be a failure.
Afghansitan: It’s not clcear to me that Bush’s own standards were for proliferating democracy in the M.E., Firstly, Pakistan isn’t even in the M.E., but can we have some cites from you as to what Bush’s policy was there? I seem to remember it was to overthrow the Taliban, destroy al Qaeda’s training camps, and capture the guys responsible for 9/11. Before we move on, I think we need to agree on what Bush’s “own standards” were.
Iraq: Similarly, I think the whole spreading democracy goal was a secondary one wrt the WMD goal, and to the extent that spreading democract was a goal, it was a long term one. I don’t recall Bush giving a timetable for the spread of democracy, but if you a cite concerning that goal, I’m open to being correccted. As I said earlier, though, it’s very clear to me that Bush never indicated that he thought Iraq was be in the horrible condition it is now-- especially 3 1/2 years after the invasion. And wrt to what I saw as the main goal (WMD), that seems like a moot point since no WMDs were there when we invaded. If you want to consider that to be a “failure” of Bush’s own standards, I’ll not argue with that. I can’t imagine how one could construct a scenario in which the Iraq policy is not a failure except in the way you’ve framed it, and only because it’s simply too early to tell.
