Big news:

The Sideshow links to a thought-provoking article at The Consortiumnews.com. According to the author, the Bush administration is directly responsible for North Korea's decision to go nuclear. Here are the key events:

	stimulus	response
2001
shortly after taking office	Bush cut off talks with North Korea and snubbed South Korea’s President Kim Dae-Jung over his détente strategy
2002
After the Sept. 11 terror attacks	Bush began counting North Korea as part of his “axis of evil,”
Early 2002	In late 2001, Bush sent to Congress a “nuclear posture review,” which laid out future U.S. strategy for deploying nuclear weapons. Leaked early this year, the NPR put North Korea on a list of potential targets for U.S. nuclear weapons. In doing that, Bush reversed President Clinton's commitment against targeting non-nuclear states with nuclear weapons. As part of the nuclear review, the Bush administration also discussed lowering the threshold for the use of U.S. nuclear weapons by making low-yield tactical nukes available for some battlefield situations.
March		The North Korean government warned of “strong countermeasures” against Bush’s nuclear policy shifts.
March		The New York Times reported that “North Korea threatened earlier this month to withdraw from the (1994 nuclear suspension) agreement if the Bush administration persisted with what North Korea called a ‘hard-line’ policy that differed from the Clinton administration’s approach.”
May	Raising the tensions even more, Bush personally lashed out at North Korea's leader Kim Jong Il during a closed-door meeting of Republican lawmakers. In a lectern-thumping, disjointed tirade that unnerved some Republicans present, Bush denounced Kim Jong Il as a "pygmy" and compared him to "a spoiled child at a dinner table," Newsweek magazine reported
Summer		U.S. intelligence was seeing evidence of a resurgent nuclear program in North Korea.
July		"U.S. officials have known since early July that North Korea had acquired key equipment for enriching uranium," the Wall Street Journal reported.
October	U.S. diplomats confronted Pyongyang with the evidence ...	... and were surprised when North Korean leaders admitted that they were working on building nuclear weapons.
25 October		North Korea issued a press release at the United Nations explaining its reasoning. The statement cited both Bush's "axis of evil" rhetoric and the administration's decision to target North Korea for a possible preemptive nuclear strike.

The argument that Bush's foreign policy caused North Korea to scrap the 1994 agreement and go nuclear sounds persuasive. In addition, it's surprisingly simple. Threaten North Korea, and they react. No complicated Clash of Civilizations or mysterious global financial issues. So simple, in fact, that even Bush might understand it.

Putting our naïve hat on, we don't understand why people aren't shouting from the rooftops about this. The Bush administration's North Korea policy has been a disaster. Talking tough was not the right approach. The 1994 agreement was working until the delicate balance was upset by Bush. And these guys are considered good at foreign policy?

UPDATE: We've been trying to determine exactly when, and in what manner, the North Koreans resumed their nuclear program. It's possible that they started a uranium enrichment program in the late 1990's, but nobody is saying for sure. (By the way, the 1994 agreement was designed to halt the production of plutonium - which seems to have succeeded.) It still looks like the North Koreans didn't pursue a nuclear program until after Bush made his policy changes. The reason? The U.S. recently confronted North Korea with intelligence that - we presume - would have shown an operative nuclear program at an earlier date, if that was the case.
posted by Quiddity at 10/29/2002 07:38:00 PM