Bush On Jong

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October 14, 2006


"See, they're back to the old blackmail game." -- Bush, NBC interview, April 24, 2003


Bush laid out his full response to the apparent test of North Korea's suspected nuclear arsenal in his weekly radio address. He again promised "serious repercussions" and "real consequences" if they continued. "The United States negotiated with North Korea and reached a bilateral agreement in 1994," Bush explained to Americans in his prepared remarks.

"After I came to office (in 2001)," he said, "we discovered that North Korea had been violating this agreement . . . my administration confronted the North Korea regime with this evidence in 2002 . . . the North Koreans subsequently walked away from the 1994 agreement . . . we brought together other nations in the region in an effort to resolve the situation through multilateral diplomacy (ditching unilateral talks) . . . and, unfortunately, North Korea failed to act on its commitment."

From 2001, when he first came to office, to the end of 2006, Bush sat on his hands as North Korea built up its nuclear arsenal. Bush expected everyone else in the world except his administration to talk to North Korea because he wasn't interested. He invaded and occupied Afghanistan, invaded and occupied Iraq, fostered and facilitated Israel's invasion of Lebanon, yet, he won't directly confront the one nation which has actually directly threatened the U.S. and the world, and appears to be in actual possession of the nuclear means to carry out the threat; unlike the other hapless victims of his Mideast coups.

Bush has been so hot on using our military to defend against these other imagined threats to our security that it would seem a 'slam-dunk' that North Korea would get the works from the invader-in chief. But, all he can manage to do and say as Kim Jong-il plays chicken, is to hide behind his "partners in the region" and threaten the regime, again, with "serious repercussions."

Where does Bush see his responsibility in delivering those repercussions he has promised; the repercussions that were due North Korea from the moment he "came to office" and discovered they were in violation? What did he do when he discovered they were in violation of the 1994 bilateral agreement? By his own explanation, Bush waited a year, until 2002, to "confront North Korea with the evidence." He then, simply, allowed North Korea to walk away from the treaty.

Bush's response to the rogue regime was to step back even further from directly confronting Kim Jong-il, and leave that job to China and others as he hid behind his carefully constructed wall of the 'six-party talks' and ducked accountability for allowing the certain violations to continue unabated. Bush is still committed to outsourcing responsibility to the rest of the world for following through on his many ultimatums to North Korea, like his swaggering declaration in the past that NK wouldn't be allowed to cross his "red line."

The "serious repercussions" he says North Korea are due will apparently not come in the form of the 'shock and awe' that he insisted Iraq deserved for Saddam's intransigence in making the details of his arsenal available to U.N. inspectors. In the case of North Korea, for Bush, repercussions are to be "negotiated with those in the region." Bush is vowing to "pursue a diplomatic solution" to Kim Jong-il's intransigence. It's in sharp contrast with the fervor and zeal in which encouraged the nation and the world to join him in as he rushed to invade and occupy Iraq.

It shouldn't be seen as so far fetched to suggest that Bush doesn't give a wit at all about North Korea's apparent massing and testing of their nuclear arsenal. Bush waited and watched as Kim Jong-il built up his nuclear arsenal, all the while insisting that we direct the bulk of our defenses to Iraq, where there was no threat at all to our nation.

Afghanistan gets only a miserly fraction of the forces Bush put in Iraq as bin-Laden and his accomplices find refuge in the mountains which border Pakistan. How can anyone look at the way Bush has committed our forces and conclude that he's at all serious about actually confronting the most pernicious threats we actually face?

Bush's explanation for his own intransigence in directly confronting North Korea is that Kim Jong-il "failed to act," rather than the more relevant impression he's sending North Korea, and by extension, Iran, of his own failure to act against the defiant regime. The example Bush provided the world in his invasion, occupations, and military muckraking in Iraq and Afghanistan is that our great military power's leader is more content with coveting his conquered prizes, than he is in directly confronting any of the antagonists he's presented as the primary provocateurs of our apocalypse.

Bush's delusions about the impact of his Iraq occupation have made him blind to the distrust and wariness he's generated among his international 'partners' toward his insistence on 'staying the course' in the Iraq debacle, despite the majority of his 'willing' coalition who long ago abandoned him there. As a result, Bush has had to bend over backward to convince those countries that he expects to carry the burden and responsibility for the North Korean threat, that he won't Iraqicize it. It will be a surprise if any of the other nations in the U.N., save the usual pack of U.S.-sponsored toadies, give Bush any more than a typically toothless resolution that he can wave about as he hawks every other aspect of his expansionism and feathering of the instruments of whatever hegemony he can advance.

Japan has already invited Lockheed's military-industrial warriors to install more of their 'missile defense' boondoggle as a counter to the North Korean aggression. Poland and other Central European nations have, so far, resisted the Bush cabal's hard-sell of similar U.S. 'missile defense' technology on their soil to counter the administration's hyped threat from Iran. Where is the incentive for Bush to actually stop North Korea? He and the industry executives that he's packed into his Executive offices are invested in defending against a very narrow set of threats which are represented by theory and speculation regarding Iran, and blustering ineptness left to fester in North Korea.

Why would a "nuclear-free Korean peninsula" need an extensive, costly missile-defense system? Instead of direct diplomacy with North Korea, Iran, and others, Bush is resigning us to these 'cold war' confrontations that allow the antagonists to inflate whatever threat they pose as he inflates our own nation's potential for unleashing devastating, destructive reprisals. Bush is unconcerned about his own ineptness in confronting the forces massing against our nation as he measures his own importance against the threats that he intends to bequeath to future generations.

Former U.S. Secretary Baker, leading the 'Iraq Study Group', created last March by Congress, argues in their 'Stability First' document that, it's important to "work toward political accommodation with insurgents . . ." Baker has been openly encouraging Bush to begin direct talks with countries he's been isolating in his rhetoric, like Syria and Iran. The elders want a solution, and have signaled their exasperation with the younger Bush's crusade.

Bush deliberately missed the point of North Korea's rattling of their nuclear war chest in order to maintain whatever air of fear he could manage to convey to Americans over the suspected nuclear tests. Kim Jong-il must have wondered what it would take to re-focus the attention of the U.S. and the world on his impoverished nation as Bush seemed more indifferent to every successive nuke North Korea announced. The Korean strongman couldn't have misjudged the purpose behind the over five years of Bush's indifferent response to his nuclear build-up.

Now we know. Bush was waiting for North Korea to act.



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