I'm begining to agree with Cindy Sheehan more every day.

[Dr.Phool]

I think that I would rather move to Venezuela, and live under Hugo Chavez than live under this insane chimp any longer.

I guess that I'm cursed with a very good memory. Whenever I hear someone, especially a politician, or a talking idiot in the media, screeching about N. Korea or China, I tend to point out that Clinton was pretty close to making an agreement with N. Korea when he left office, but the chimp torpedoed all that effort on day 1 of his junta.

I also remember all the sabre rattling and provocation of China, when we knocked one of their jets out of the sky.

Here, Eric Alterman, one of my favorites, puts it into a lot more detail.

And mods, I'm going to try to sneak in a 4th paragraph here for clarity. Besides, I'm feeling pretty Decidery today.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/


Now here’s me:(Alterman)

The tone of Powell’s tenure was set early in the administration when he announced that he planned “to pick up where the Clinton administration had left off” in trying to secure the peace between North and South Korea, while negotiating with the North to prevent its acquisition of nuclear weaponry. The president not only repudiated his secretary of state in public, announcing, “We’re not certain as to whether or not they’re keeping all terms of all agreements,” he did so during a joint appearance with South Korean president (and Nobel laureate) Kim Dae Jung, thereby humiliating his honored guest as well. A day later, Powell backpedaled. “The president forcefully made the point that we are undertaking a full review of our relationship with North Korea,” Powell said. “There was some suggestion that imminent negotiations are about to begin—that is not the case.” He later admitted to a group of journalists, “I got a little far forward on my skis.” It would not be the last time.


…

As former ambassadors Morton Abramowitz and James Laney warned at the moment of Bush’s carelessly worded “Axis of Evil” address, “Besides putting another knife in the diminishing South Korean president,” the speech would likely cause “dangerous escalatory consequences . . . renewed tensions on the peninsula and continued export of missiles to the Mideast.” North Korea called the Bush bluff, and the result, notes columnist Richard Cohen, was “a stumble, a fumble, an error compounded by a blooper. . . . As appalling a display of diplomacy as anyone has seen since a shooting in Sarajevo turned into World War I.

Bush made a bad situation worse when, in a taped interview with Bob Woodward, he insisted, “I loathe Kim Jong Il!” waving his finger in the air. “I’ve got a visceral reaction to this guy, because he is starving his people.” Bush also said that he wanted to “topple him,” and that he considered the leader to be a “pygmy.” Woodward wrote that the president had become so emotional while speaking about Kim Jong Il that “I thought he might jump up.” Given what a frightful tinderbox the Koreas have become, Bush’s ratcheting up of the hostile rhetoric could hardly have come at a worse time. In December 2002 the North Koreans shocked most of the world by ordering the three IAEA inspectors to leave the country, shutting down 1 cameras monitoring the nuclear complex in Yongbyon and removing the IAEA seals in their nuclear facilities. The following month, Pyongyang announced it had withdrawn from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), restarted its small research reactor, and began removing spent nuclear fuel rods for likely reprocessing into weapons-grade plutonium. In October 2003, it announced that it had finished reprocessing spent fuel rods into plutonium and now possesses “nuclear deterrence”—another way of saying it has the bomb. No independent confirmation was available. Even including Iraq and Iran, the Korean peninsula is probably the single most dangerous and possibly unstable situation on Earth. As Jonathan Pollack, chairman of the Strategic Research Department of the Naval War College, observes, “If you wanted a case of imminent threat and danger, according to the principles enunciated in the National Security Strategy document, then North Korea is much more of a threat than Iraq ever was in the last few years.”

Bush had already undermined the extremely sensitive negotiations under way to bring the North Korean regime into the international system. When South Korean president (and Nobel laureate) Kim Dae Jung visited Washington six weeks after Bush took office, Bush humiliated both his guest and his own secretary of state by publicly repudiating the negotiations after both had just publicly endorsed them. (Powell had termed their continuation “a no-brainer.”) One suspects the president’s decision was motivated by a combination of unreflective machismo and a desire to provide military planners with an excuse to build a missile-defense system. But in doing so, he displayed a disturbing lack of familiarity with the details of the negotiations he purposely sabotaged. “We’re not certain as to whether or not they’re keeping all terms of all agreements,” he said at the time. But at the time, these “agreements” numbered just one: the 1994 “Agreed Framework,” which froze North Korea’s enormous plutonium-processing program— one that was bigger, at the time, than those of Israel, India, and Pakistan combined—in exchange for economic aid. Bush aides were later forced to admit they could find no evidence to support the president’s accusation. (A White House official tried to clear up the matter by explaining: “That’s how the president speaks.”)