Reaction from Democrats was predictable. They reacted the way they always react when something adverse happens. They blamed President Bush.
About a nanosecond after the news broke, failed presidential candidate John F. Kerry quipped “While we’ve been bogged down in Iraq where there were no weapons of mass destruction, a madman has apparently tested the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.”
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid asserted that “on the Bush Administration’s watch, North Korea’s arsenal has grown to as many as a dozen bombs” because Bush is “distracted by Iraq and paralyzed by internal divisions.” Senator Reid then suggested that the president “rally the international community and…directly speak with the North Koreans so they understand we will not continue to stand on the sidelines.”
Three days after the nuke test, Jimmy Carter penned a New York Times editorial, asserting that “…beginning in 2002, the United States branded North Korea as part of an axis of evil, threatened military action, ended the shipments of fuel oil and the construction of nuclear power plants and refused to consider further bilateral talks. In their discussions with me at this time, North Korean spokesmen seemed convinced that the American positions posed a serious danger to their country and to its political regime.”
“Responding in its ill-advised but predictable way, Pyongyang withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, expelled atomic energy agency inspectors, resumed processing fuel rods and began developing nuclear explosive devices.”
In other words, North Korea has nukes not because of failed diplomacy, but because President Bush said they were part of the axis of evil.
Democrats have once again stepped on a rake and had the handle hit them squarely between the eyes, because all it takes is a recent history lesson to refute everything the Democrats have said.
In 1994, the Clinton administration sent Jimmy Carter to North Korea, who struck a deal with then-dictator Kim Il Sung. Under the terms, we gave North Korea more than $5 billion worth of oil, two nuclear reactors, and lots of technology. They promised not to build nukes, and, in return, we allowed the North Koreans to evade weapons inspectors for the next five years.
Japan and South Korea were furious, and understandably so.
The New York Times called it “a resounding triumph.”
In another flashback, the New York Sun recently reminded us that “In 2000, President Clinton went so far as to dispatch Secretary Albright to pay homage and clink glasses with Kim Jong Il, a toast that will live in infamy as one of the lowest points to which an American state secretary has ever sunk. North Korea has reveled in the diplomacy while moving ahead with its nuclear weapons program.”
Finally, on October 17, 2002, the New York Times declared on its front page, “Confronted by new American intelligence, North Korea has admitted that it has been conducting a major clandestine nuclear weapons development program for the past several years.”
A resounding triumph, indeed.
Folks, the way to handle North Korea is the same way John F. Kennedy, the last great president the Democratic Party produced, handled the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962. (Hint: It wasn’t through diplomacy.)
The result — that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev turned his ships around and pulled his nukes out of Cuba — prompted then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk to comment, “We were eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked.”
That’s how you deal with communists, and that’s what Kim Jong Il is — a communist. Communists lie and deceive, and cannot be trusted to keep whatever promises they make. The Soviet Union proved it, and the North Koreans have proven it again. Like militant Islam, communists understand one thing, and that one thing is power and might, which the U.S. has plenty of. The diplomatic pattern the Democrats ran failed miserably, and it won’t work for the Bush administration, either. It’s time to play hardball.
