Why didn't Clinton stop the NK Nuke?

[edhopper]

I mean, he probably had multiple opportunities, I'm sure the CIA told him exactly where he could find them. Sandy Berger probably told them to shut up.
He could have taken care of this.
Now Bush has to protect us from another threat. Good thing he recognized they where in the axis of evil.

[Solly Mack]

1. The clenis doesn't reach that far?

so it couldn't play patriot to NK's scud?

[Phredicles]

2. Yeah, and you know who didn't stop Katrina either?

That's right - Bill Clinton.

[endarkenment]

3. Actually the Clinton administration

negotiated a slow down of nuclear research and a halt to weapons development. The bush regime threw all that work out the window, insulted the NK regime, threatened them several times with annihilation and then were SHOCKED, SHOCKED, when NK decided it had to defend itself.

[Kahuna]

8. Bingo. That "Axis of Evil" utterance should go down in history

as the three most foolish words uttered by a world leader. Yet the foolish bushbots actually cheered him, not realizing that if you threaten someone, they are more likely to arm themselves to be ab;e counter your threats.

[Liberal Veteran]

4. I heard S. Korea offered Kim Jong Il on a silver platter...

Why didn't Clinton take him????

[gulfcoastliberal]

5. If this is an honest question, Clinton almost re-started the Korean War

over this nukes issue. Instead, things cooled own, diplomcy prevailed and until the 2000 coup, the nuclear material was kept under constant surviellance by IAEA officials living in NK. That's the talking point here: Clinton almost started a war to stop NK from having weapon of mas destruction. We nearly had a hot "shooting" war over it.

[blm]

6. Clinton was on the verge of success with his efforts, and was planning a

trip to NK in early 2001, but Bush told him he didn't WANT him to go.

If the Dem party infrastructure was strong enough to have gotten Gore's votes counted, NK would not be testing nuclear weapons today.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

7. Clinton DID stop the NKs from accumulating bomb material

Dubya abrogated an agreement Clinton had with the NKs, and in 2002 they resumed producing plutonium. See a great Washington Monthly article at http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0405.kap... .

This weekend's test has been just a matter of time since Dubya overruled Colin Powell and abrogated the Clinton-era agreement.

Bad for us, great for Dubya's pals at Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, and the other "Star Wars" contractors.

[blm]

9. Great info thread in GD-P, including Bolton hearing transcripts re NK

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

[ProgressiveEconomist]

10. Thanx4 the link. I prefer Kaplan's more succinct account of Dubya's

NK blunder, which seems much like his pre-9/11 antiterror policy, the decision to ignore even Jim Baker's warnings about ground war in Iraq, Katrina, Abramoff, etc., etc.,:

From http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0405.kap... :

"Rolling Blunder: How the Bush administration let North Korea get nukes.

By Fred Kaplan; May 2004

On Oct. 4, 2002, officials from the U.S. State Department flew to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, and confronted Kim Jong-il's foreign ministry ... After a few shrill diplomatic exchanges over the uranium, Pyongyang upped the ante. The North Koreans expelled the international inspectors, broke the locks on the fuel rods, loaded them onto a truck, and drove them to a nearby reprocessing facility, to be converted into bomb-grade plutonium. The White House stood by and did nothing. Why did George W. Bush--his foreign policy avowedly devoted to stopping "rogue regimes" from acquiring weapons of mass destruction--allow one of the world's most dangerous regimes to acquire the makings of the deadliest WMDs? Given the current mayhem and bloodshed in Iraq, it's hard to imagine a decision more ill-conceived than invading that country unilaterally without a plan for the "post-war" era....

Yet Bush has neither threatened war nor pursued diplomacy.... The pattern of decision making that led to this debacle--as described to me in recent interviews with key former administration officials who participated in the events--will sound familiar to anyone who has watched Bush and his cabinet in action. It is a pattern of wishful thinking, blinding moral outrage, willful ignorance of foreign cultures, a naive faith in American triumphalism, a contempt for the messy compromises of diplomacy, and a knee-jerk refusal to do anything the way the Clinton administration did it."

[blm]

11. I read it at the time - excellent. Bolton transcript post adds fuel for us

.

[Tesha]

12. What, like "throw his body on the bomb?" or something? (NT)