President Bushs North Korea Failure Is Important to Remember

[Democrats_win]

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/why-president-bushs-north-korea-failure-is-important-to-remember

"A key part of that backstory is that over the course of the late 90s the US negotiated a series of agreements called the Agreed Framework which shuttered the North Koreans nuclear weapons program in exchange for a combination of commitments and aid. The Bush team argued that the agreement was ‘appeasement’ and that the US had caught the North Koreans cheating on the agreement during Bush’s first term. The cheating argument has always struck me as questionable....

The simple reality was that the Bush team didn’t like the deal but had nothing to replace it with. The threat of force wasn’t credible because of the costs of a military confrontation which the North Koreans were well aware of. So the US got to act tough (or rather feel tough) and not go in for ‘appeasement’ and the result was that North Korea became a nuclear power. Might they have become a nuclear power anyway? Maybe. But it seems very hard to argue that they would have gotten there as quickly as they did or would even be there today if the US had continued with the quite minor amounts of aid the Agreed Framework required."
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It should also be noted that Bush's attack on Iraq gave North Korea a very powerful motivation to build a nuclear bomb. (Saddam didn't have the bomb so he was attacked.) In fact historians, such as Walter LaFeber, note that the Iraq invasion took America's eye off of North Korea allowing them to build the bomb. Additionally, the invasion helped Iran too. We took out Iran's biggest enemy and helped reduce the threat to Iran from Afghanistan.

[procon]

1. I thought that was the one of the worst decisions that jackass ever made.

Like Trump, Bush was gleefully engaged in tearing down everything Clinton did, but he made a catastrophic decision in cutting off diplomatic and political negotiations with North Korea. He basically did nothing while they became a nuclear power.