Robert Scheer: Going Back to North Korea, Hat in Hand (Truthdig)

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Going Back to North Korea, Hat in Hand


Posted on Feb 27, 2007

By Robert Scheer

So now it’s North Korea’s turn to feed at the trough of U.S. economic aid, as if exploding a nuclear weapon is all that’s needed to prove a nation’s peaceful intentions. Of course, there is nothing wrong with negotiating with our enemies rather than weakly blustering at cartoon images of them—I wish we would do the same in our dealings with Iran—but it would be nice if we would stop shooting ourselves in the foot first.

Five years and an outlaw nuke test after President Bush blew up the peace process with Pyongyang so he could look tougher than his predecessor, he capitulated completely earlier this month in accepting a negotiating framework that tacitly accepts the huge surge in the communist state’s estimated nuclear arsenal. Bush blinked big-time. The carrot replaced the stick, and that is a good thing, carrying the hope that through diplomacy North Korea will end its isolation and follow the modernizing path of communist China. But six years of presidential haranguing about rogue regimes derailed previous efforts at arms control, allowing the dangerously unstable North Korea to join the nuclear club.

In particular, Bush’s rejection of the Clinton administration’s alleged pandering to North Korea gave that country’s erratic rulers a believable rationale to cut the international monitoring seals on their super-dangerous plutonium stores. Now Bush has had to go back, hat and heating oil in hand, to beg for a restart to negotiations with a nuked-up Pyongyang, which now is in an exponentially better bargaining position.

Distracted by the occupation of Iraq, a country that had no functioning nuclear weapons program or stockpiles of plutonium, and obsessed with regime change in Iran, a country with a very primitive nuclear program, the Bush team has decided to live with the North Korean bomb. Indeed, Bush has agreed to remove North Korea from the list of nations sponsoring terrorism—not because North Korea’s dictator abandoned his nuclear ambitions but rather because he achieved them. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070227_going_back_to_north_korea_hat_in_hand/