A Clean Slate for North Korea

When the White House says it can move "quite soon" believe it. Only Wednesday the White House said it could "take North Korea off a terrorism blacklist "quite soon"" Well, it's quite soon. Just goes to show that politicians can move with lightning quickness when it come to selling out our country.

FROM FRONTPAGEMAG:

A Clean Slate for North Korea

By Jacob Laksin

FrontPageMagazine.com | 6/27/2008
YOU KNOW THE BUSH administration’s North Korea policy is fatally flawed when even Barack Obama, last heard pledging to meet with the world’s dictators “without preconditions,” judges it naïve.
And yet, the presumptive Democratic nominee sounded all too sensible yesterday when he suggested that the Bush administration’s baffling decision to strike Pyongyang from the U.S. list of terrorism-sponsoring states and to lift trade sanctions against the tyrannical regime – in exchange for an alarmingly incomplete “declaration” of its nuclear plants and materials – may have been premature. Concessions to Kim Jong Ill, Obama stressed, should be “based on North Korean performance.”
The Bush administration favors a different metric: wishful thinking. How else to explain that it has generously rewarded North Korea for repeatedly flouting nuclear agreements – not least agreements it has signed with the administration as recently as last fall? Under the terms of an October 2007 agreement, after all, North Korea by the end of last year was supposed to provide a “complete” inventory of its nuclear programs and weaponry while demonstrating that it had shut down its nuclear plants. By the time the deadline arrived on December 31, however, Pyongyang was nowhere near satisfying its obligations under the pact. For that intransigence, it has now been given two gifts by the administration.
This is not the course negotiations were supposed to take. Back in December, State Department officials were warning that North Korea’s failure to come clean would prompt the U.S. “reevaluate and look to other options.” At the time, that sounded like a threat – and a warranted one. In the years before the pact, North Korea had made a menace of itself on the international stage, beginning with its expulsion of U.N. nuclear monitors in late 2002. The following year, North Korea declared itself free from the obligations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and restarted the nuclear weapons program it was supposed to have suspended under a 1994 agreement with the Clinton administration.
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