Lessons from North Korea

As I discussed in an earlier post, the Bush administration deserves a large portion of the blame for the current situation. The Bushites would not even consider negotiating with somebody that Bush's gut told to hate, and they could certainly not bring themselves to following the Clinton administration on anything. Let's look at the record:

George H. W. Bush: one to two bombs worth of plutonium.
Bill Clinton: zero plutonium.
George W. Bush: 4-6 nuclear weapons worth of plutonium and one nuclear test.

But this goes way beyond North Korea. As Kevin Drum put it:

"Let's recap: The Bush/Cheney administration took a bad situation with Iraq and made it even worse. They've taken a bad situation with Iran and made it even worse (see here, here, and here). They've taken a bad situation with North Korea and made it even worse (see Fred Kaplan here). At every step along the way, they've deliberately taken actions that cut off any possibility of solving our geopolitical problems with anything other than military force."

An, of course, much of the blame for these various debacle lies with Cheney and Rumsfeld. How many failures in the past six years cannot be traced to this dynamic duo, I wonder?

But of course, John McCain-- fresh from sacrificing his principles and supporting torture so he could become president-- blames Clinton's policy in the 1990s, when it was precisely this policy that kept North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. As Carpetbagger notes, if Clinton's policy was a failure, what do we make of Bush's policy? But that's beside the point! The real point is to drill it into people's minds that, after six years of incompetence and disaster, Clinton is still to blame. For 9/11. For not catching Bin Laden. For Hurrane Katrina. I'm sure they'll pin Mark Foley on him shortly.