The Right State

The Democrats are weighing in on the North Korea nuclear weapon test and the results are in: the Democrats are ignoring history and are trying to blame President Bush.  Take these news articles.

The Boston Globe:

Congressional candidate Carol Shea-Porter says the Bush administration was so focused on Iraq that it failed to keep an eye on North Korea, which announced Monday it had performed its first nuclear test.

“We took our eyes off that,” said Shea-Porter, a Rochester Democrat who is challenging Republican Rep. Jeb Bradley in the 1st District.

“We certainly should have been paying attention to North Korea,” she said in an interview Monday with The Associated Press.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Democratic Sen. John Kerry, the president’s rival in 2004 and a potential 2008 candidate, assailed Bush’s policy as a “shocking failure,” and said, “While we’ve been bogged down in Iraq where there were no weapons of mass destruction, a madman has apparently tested the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.”

Now the MSM is getting involved questioning what gives the US the right to dictate to other countries who is allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.  Diane Sawyer on ABC This Morning asks this moronic question.

Sawyer: “I want to ask you a question I’ve heard being asked this morning, which is, really, how can the U.S. tell other countries whether they can have nuclear weapons or not, when the U.S. has them and seven other countries as well? Does this mean that the genie is officially out of the bottle and that the U.S. is no longer in a position to dictate who gets nuclear weapons?”

Come on Sawyer, you have got to wake up.  Most of the nations of the world signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).  It was designed to make the world safer by limiting the spread and use of nuclear weapons.  The NPT divided the world into two groups: those with nuclear weapons before Jan. 1, 1967 (United States, England, Russia, France, and China) and all the other countries.  The signatories of the treaty promised to obey their parts of the treaty.  For the nuclear countries, they were to keep their technology of nuclear weapons to themselves.  They are not allowed to transfer nuclear material, technology, or knowledge to the non-nuclear countries.  The non-nuclear countries promised not to try to acquire nuclear weapons and to submit to searches to make sure they were not trying to acquire these weapons.  That is why the US is so intent on trying to keep nuclear weapons from non nuclear countries.

During the Cold War, the threat of mutually assured destruction (MAD) kept the peace between the two superpowers.  The knowledge that the USSR and the US could destroy each other kept each side’s nuclear arsenals locked up.  The will to live on both sides was greater than their will to die and that is what kept the peace.

With the threat of Islamic terrorists, the status quo no longer applies.  The Islamists want to die in order to kill their enemies.  Therefore the threat of MAD does not scare them.  The Islamo-facsists would gladly give their lives in order to destroy the United States.  At the same time, the Islamists could care less about the women and children and other innocents who would die in the resultant firestorm and nuclear holocaust.  The old method of maintaining the peace does not work on those who want to die.

The US as the world’s only remaining superpower has the right to protect itself.  They are the only ones capable of dictating anything to anyone.  Our survival is at stake.

What the Democrats and the MSM are ignoring is history, more specifically, Bill Clinton’s history.  The basic time line can be found at the Arms Control Association website.  It is fairly accurate, but incomplete.

In 1991 President George H.W. Bush announces the withdrawal of all nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula.  USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev follows suit.  South Korea promises not to produce, store, develop or use nuclear weapons.  Later that year, both Koreas declare the peninsula a nuclear free zone.  North Korea signs the NPT.

In 1993 the IAEA demands to inspect two facilities believing North Korea is cheating on the NPT.  North Korea refuses and withdraws from the NPT.

For the next two years, North Korea plays a game of cat and mouse with the UN Security Council and the IAEA.  Finally Bill Clinton sends former President Jimmy Carter to North Korea to begin negotiations.    What the two sides come up with gives North Korea everything they could possibly want.  The North Koreans promise to freeze and suspend their nuclear ambitions in return for two light water reactors and normalization of relations with the US.

Again North Korea plays a game of cat and mouse with the IAEA and the US as they secretly work on their nuclear program.

In 1998, Bill Clinton is obviously tired of working on Kim Jong Il alone, so he sends envoys to enlist the help of South Korea and Japan in a concerted effort to reign in North Korea.  This is the first multi-party talks to stop North Korea’s enrichment program.

In 1999 Bill Clinton with the full knowledge that North Korea was reneging on their deal to end their nuclear weapons program, signed a contract allowing Korea Electric Power Corporation to begin building two light water reactors.

Clinton knows North Korea was violating its agreements in 1998.

“U.S. intelligence analysts believe about 15,000 North Koreans are at work on a vast, secret underground nuclear facility, a development administration officials say may represent a decision by North Korea to abandon a four-year-old agreement to freeze its nuclear weapons program,” the [Washington] Post reported on Aug. 18, 1998.

All through the last half of the 1990s, North Korea is negotiating with the US for compensation for ending its missile program.  They were asking $1 billion a year.  Of course this amounted to black mail and the Clinton administration rightfully refused to pay.  But since Kim Jong Il seems to be cooperating with both the US and South Korea, Clinton eases sanctions on the still rogue regime.  He even indicated a willingness to remove North Korea from the State Department’s terrorism list.

While Bill Clinton was trying to warm up to the Kim regime, North Korea was secretly developing its nuclear enrichment program.  It was not until President George W. Bush came to office that the US began to take a hard stance towards North Korea and their development of nuclear weapons.

The left would have us believe that North Korea did not try to develop nuclear weapons until President Bush included them in the ‘axis of evil’ speech.  This obviously is not true.  They have been trying to obtain nukes even before the Clinton administration.

The left would have us believe that the 1994 agreement did not exist, but it did.  The agreement gave Kim Jong Il everything he wanted with only a few safeguards.  Only the new administration of George W. Bush ended the Kim’s love affair with Bill Clinton.  And why not, Bill could not believe North Korea would be so bold as to continue their development of nukes while at the negotiating table.  But they did.

The left would have us believe that the six party talks between the US, China, South Korea, Japan, Russia, and North Korea is a new idea that is not working.  Then why did the Clinton administration attempt the same approach to North Korea when direct bi-lateral talks were not working?  Enlisting the help of other countries at risk from a nuclear North Korea is smart.  It was smart when Bill Clinton attempted it.  It was still smart when George Bush tried it.

The left would have us believe that North Korea has developed nuclear weapons on George Bush’s watch because his attention was distracted by Iraq.  I have one response, what has changed?  North Korea has wanted nuclear weapons while George H.W. Bush was in office.  They want them still.  North Korea has lied, hidden, and obfuscated their way into just about everything they have wanted.  They have continually used the tactic of threaten, then back down, go back to the bargaining table, obtain concessions, and then threaten once again.  They used this tactic during the Clinton administration and they are trying it during the Bush administration.  It difference is Bill Clinton’s tactic did not work and yet he was still trying to reward Kim Jong Il for his malfeasance.

Do the Democrats think they can show how tough they are on North Korea by criticizing the Bush administration?  Blaming George W. Bush for North Korea’s move into the selective group of nuclear nations is telling only half of the story.  The rest of the story is the failure of Bill Clinton to act decisively when he had the chance.

I believe Senator Mitch McConnell has it about right.(Seattle P-I)

Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate’s second-ranking Republican, accused Democrats of playing partisan politics with a nuclear weapons threat. “Listening to some Democrats, you’d think the enemy was George Bush, not Kim Jong Il,” he said.

North Korea has tested a nuclear bomb.  This should not be a Republican or a Democratic issue.  It should be a US security issue in which both sides set aside their differences in order to protect the United States of America.  If the Democrats want to point fingers, I am willing to help them out.  All they have to do is to look into a mirror to see the problem.

Interesting reading is Japundit.  alexpappas writes a post on how Japan should treat the ‘nuke kid‘ on the block.

Tags: Democrats, Nuclear Weapons //