CNN's Mike Chinoy: Nuke Test A MAJOR Setback For Bushco

[stopbush]

Saying how much Clinton did to control NK and how close Clinton was to a real solution. How bushco came
in distrusting everything Clinton had done. How bushco made a big deal of being tough with NK, but
NK started enriching uranium again which led to them developing the bomb. "And it happened
on bush's watch. This will feed the nationalism that is such a big part of the NK identity."

How soon before CNN yanks Mike off the air?

[Ignacio Upton]

1. CNN will change its tune once everyone wakes up in a few hours

n/t.

[NVMojo]

2. Mike is right!!!

[Chipper Chat]

6. I have to trust Chenoy in this matter.

He is either half-Korean or half-Chinese.

[Erika]

3. Bush's ego blew it again

He wouldn't talk to them. How blanking unreal.

[blm]

4. A little reminder from the 2004 debates

KERRY: With respect to North Korea, the real story: We had inspectors and television cameras in the nuclear reactor in North Korea. Secretary Bill Perry negotiated that under President Clinton. And we knew where the fuel rods were. And we knew the limits on their nuclear power.

Colin Powell, our secretary of state, announced one day that we were going to continue the dialog of working with the North Koreans. The president reversed it publicly while the president of South Korea was here.

And the president of South Korea went back to South Korea bewildered and embarrassed because it went against his policy. And for two years, this administration didn't talk at all to North Korea.

While they didn't talk at all, the fuel rods came out, the inspectors were kicked out, the television cameras were kicked out. And today, there are four to seven nuclear weapons in the hands of North Korea.

That happened on this president's watch


First Debate
September 30, 2004
http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2004a.html





JACOBS: Yes, Randee.

Iran sponsors terrorism and has missiles capable of hitting Israel and southern Europe. Iran will have nuclear weapons in two to three years time.

In the event that U.N. sanctions don't stop this threat, what will you do as president?

KERRY: I don't think you can just rely on U.N. sanctions, Randee. But you're absolutely correct, it is a threat, it's a huge threat.

And what's interesting is, it's a threat that has grown while the president has been preoccupied with Iraq, where there wasn't a threat.

If he'd let the inspectors do their job and go on, we wouldn't have 10 times the numbers of forces in Iraq that we have in Afghanistan chasing Osama bin Laden.

Meanwhile, while Iran is moving toward nuclear weapons, some 37 tons of what they called yellow cake, the stuff they use to make enriched uranium, while they're doing that, North Korea has moved from one bomb maybe, maybe, to four to seven bombs.

For two years, the president didn't even engage with North Korea, did nothing at all, while it was growing more dangerous, despite the warnings of former Secretary of Defense William Perry, who negotiated getting television cameras and inspectors into that reactor.

We were safer before President Bush came to office. Now they have the bombs and we're less safe.

So what do we do? We've got to join with the British and the French, with the Germans, who've been involved, in their initiative. We've got to lead the world now to crack down on proliferation as a whole.

But the president's been slow to do that, even in Russia.

At his pace, it's going to take 13 years to reduce and get ahold of all the loose nuclear material in the former Soviet Union. I've proposed a plan that can capture it and contain it and clean it within four years.

And the president is moving to the creation of our own bunker- busting nuclear weapon. It's very hard to get other countries to give up their weapons when you're busy developing a new one.

>>>>>>

[Disturbed]

5. Busholinin Regime played Hard Headed and so

did NK. Even Andrea Greenspan said that the US Regime goeaded NK to go for the Nukes.

Same goes for Iran.

Busholinin Regime is the most dangerous on the Planet Earth.

[Chipper Chat]

7. "Bring it on"

That little quip from Der Blivet has caused more than a few problems.

[blm]

12. Bring it on has been their big foreign policy idea.

I remember this being said in 2004 - "Bring it on is NOT a foreign policy strategy." I may be paraphrasing, but I think it's right.

[magellan]

8. Another little reminder of the truth and who dropped the ball

Rolling Blunder - How the Bush administration let North Korea get nukes

By Fred Kaplan - May 2004, Washington Monthly

On Oct. 4, 2002, officials from the U.S. State Department flew to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, and confronted Kim Jong-il's foreign ministry with evidence that Kim had acquired centrifuges for processing highly enriched uranium, which could be used for building nuclear weapons. To the Americans' surprise, the North Koreans conceded. It was an unsettling revelation, coming just as the Bush administration was gearing up for a confrontation with Iraq. This new threat wasn't imminent; processing uranium is a tedious task; Kim Jong-il was almost certainly years away from grinding enough of the stuff to make an atomic bomb.

But the North Koreans had another route to nuclear weapons--a stash of radioactive fuel rods, taken a decade earlier from its nuclear power plant in Yongbyon. These rods could be processed into plutonium--and, from that, into A-bombs--not in years but in months. Thanks to an agreement brokered by the Clinton administration, the rods were locked in a storage facility under the monitoring of international weapons-inspectors. Common sense dictated that--whatever it did about the centrifuges--the Bush administration should do everything possible to keep the fuel rods locked up.

Unfortunately, common sense was in short supply. After a few shrill diplomatic exchanges over the uranium, Pyongyang upped the ante. The North Koreans expelled the international inspectors, broke the locks on the fuel rods, loaded them onto a truck, and drove them to a nearby reprocessing facility, to be converted into bomb-grade plutonium. The White House stood by and did nothing. Why did George W. Bush--his foreign policy avowedly devoted to stopping "rogue regimes" from acquiring weapons of mass destruction--allow one of the world's most dangerous regimes to acquire the makings of the deadliest WMDs? Given the current mayhem and bloodshed in Iraq, it's hard to imagine a decision more ill-conceived than invading that country unilaterally without a plan for the "post-war" era. But the Bush administration's inept diplomacy toward North Korea might well have graver consequences. President Bush made the case for war in Iraq on the premise that Saddam Hussein might soon have nuclear weapons--which turned out not to be true. Kim Jong-il may have nuclear weapons now; he certainly has enough plutonium to build some, and the reactors to breed more.

Yet Bush has neither threatened war nor pursued diplomacy. He has recently, and halfheartedly, agreed to hold talks; the next round is set for June. But any deal that the United States might cut now to dismantle North Korea's nuclear-weapons program will be harder and costlier than a deal that Bush could have cut 18 months ago, when he first had the chance, before Kim Jong-il got his hands on bomb-grade material and the leverage that goes with it.

more...

Also remember, as Kaplan points out, that at the same time this was going on, Bush** was using visions of mushroom clouds to terrify us into war with Iraq, knowing full and well that Saddam had NO SUCH WEAPONS.

[Garbo 2004]

9. Josh Marshall also covers that ground today on his blog.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/

[Irreverend IX]

10. This year's October Surprises...

Are all coming in like sucker-punches to the befuddled Bush Administration. Dubya couldn't look more ineffectual now if he tried. If the Repubs are going to pull out a victory, they'd better have photos of all the Dem candidates screwing Osama Bin Laden or something equivalent.

[madokie]

11. that something equivalent I'm afraid is diebold