[tag]Fred Kaplan[/tag]’s 2004 piece for the Washington Monthly on U.S. policy towards [tag]North Korea[/tag], “Rolling Blunder,” is the definitive take-down of the Bush administration’s approach to the burgeoning crisis. Digby referred to the article the other day as the “gold standard,” which is the perfect description.
Of course, the crisis has worsened since 2004, and Bush’s policy has become less coherent. Worse, ideologues who should know better, like Sen. John [tag]McCain[/tag], have taken to defending the administration’s approach and blaming Clinton for today’s mess. With this in mind, Kaplan has, thankfully, returned to the subject in another definitive piece, this time for Slate. In it, Kaplan explained that McCain “has skidded his Straight Talk Express off the highway into a gopher’s ditch of slime.” McCain’s version of history “goes beyond ‘revisionism’ to outright falsification. It is the exact opposite of what really happened.”
In the spring of 1994, barely a year into Bill Clinton’s presidency, the North Koreans announced that they were about to remove the fuel rods from their nuclear reactor (as a first step to reprocessing them into plutonium), cancel their commitment to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (which they had signed in 1985), and expel the international weapons inspectors (who had been guarding the rods under the treaty’s authority).
Did Clinton “reward” them for doing these things, as McCain claims? Far from it. Not only did he push the U.N. Security Council to consider sanctions, he also ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to draw up plans to send 50,000 additional troops to South Korea — bolstering the 37,000 already there — along with more than 400 combat jets, 50 ships, and several battalions of Apache helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles, multiple-launch rockets, and Patriot air-defense missiles. He also sent in an advance team of 250 soldiers to set up logistical headquarters for the influx of troops and gear.
He sent an explicit signal that removing the fuel rods would cross a “red line.” Several of his former aides insist that if North Korea had crossed that line, he would have launched an airstrike on the Yongbyon reactor, even knowing that it might lead to war.
Unlike Bush’s incoherent mess of a policy, Clinton coupled his willingness to use force with diplomatic backchannels. This combination of sticks and carrots, Kaplan noted, “led Kim Il-Sung to call off his threats — the fuel rods weren’t removed, the inspectors weren’t kicked out — and, a few months later, to the signing of the Agreed Framework.”
McCain got this part wrong, too.
The accord fell apart, but not for the reasons that McCain and others have suggested. First, the U.S.-led consortium never provided the light-water reactors. (So much for the wild claims I’ve heard lately that North Korea got the bomb through Clinton-supplied technology.) Congress never authorized the money; the South Koreans, who were led by a harder-line government than the one in power now, scuttled the deal after a North Korean spy submarine washed up on their shores.
Second, when President George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001, he made it clear, right off, that the Agreed Framework was dead and that he had no interest in further talks with the North Korean regime; his view was that you don’t negotiate with evil, you defeat it or wait for it to crumble.
Third, a few months into Bush’s term, evidence mounted that the North Koreans had been … not quite violating the Agreed Framework but certainly maneuvering around it. Confronted by U.S. intelligence data in October 2002, Pyongyang officials admitted that they’d been enriching uranium — an alternative route (though much slower than plutonium) to getting a bomb…. It should be noted that the bomb that the North Koreans set off on Sunday was apparently a plutonium bomb, not a uranium bomb. In other words, it was a bomb made entirely in Bush’s time, not at all in Clinton’s.
All the Republicans who are now insisting that Bush has to be “tough” with North Korea, unlike Clinton, have it backwards. In 2002, North Korea crossed Clinton’s “red line” — Kim Jung Il unlocked the rods and kick out the inspectors — but Bush didn’t do anything.
As Kaplan put it, “Bush didn’t take military action, he didn’t call for sanctions, nor did he try diplomacy. It’s Bush, not Clinton, who did nothing.”
In a more contemporary context, McCain’s criticism this week is not only wrong, it’s bizarre. As Joe Cirincione explained yesterday, “This is Bush’s Bomb. All the plutonium made for these bombs was made either during his presidency or his father’s. To blame his failure on Bill Clinton should not be allowed to stand. Senator McCain should be ashamed.”
Wrong on Iraq, wrong on North Korea — if you like Bush’s foreign policy, you’ll love McCain’s.