When Democrats like Ashton Carter and William Perry make Dick Cheney look like a moderate, its time to rethink US policy towards North Korea. How about taking the North Koreans up on their offer, made more than five years ago, to complete negotiations that would end the DPRK’s missile program once and for all?
The Center for American Progress recently posted an astute reply to the idiocy of Carter and Perry. Meanwhile, DC journalist John Feffer is a voice of reason amidst the confused warblings of liberal bloggers who ought to know better:
Kim Jong-il’s latest gambit comes at a particularly murky time in U.S.-North Korean relations. The Bush administration has tightened the financial stranglehold on Pyongyang by cracking down on suspected money laundering and counterfeiting operations. As a result, multilateral talks have ground to a halt, despite a September 2005 agreement on the eventual denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and steps toward bringing North Korea into the international community. Iran has meanwhile seized the media spotlight and maneuvered into a better negotiating position on the basis of a nuclear program considerably less advanced than North Korea’s. And both Congress and the Pentagon are contemplating troop withdrawals from Iraq, which could signal greater focus on security in Northeast Asia.
Nothing clarifies politics so much as a rash act. North Korea’s launch preparations — real, pretend, or something in between — have illuminated the difficult corner into which the Bush administration has painted itself. The proposals to attack preemptively, given the well-known and horrific consequences of such actions, reveal how impatient even previously moderate voices have become — with not only Kim Jong-il but with George W. Bush as well.
