Slate's Kaplan: McCain is Dead Wrong about Bill Clinton and North Korea

[flpoljunkie]

http://www.slate.com/id/2151354/nav/tap2/

The Slime Talk Express

McCain is dead wrong about Bill Clinton and North Korea.
By Fred Kaplan

Posted Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2006, at 4:32 PM ET

Sen. John McCain has skidded his Straight Talk Express off the highway into a gopher's ditch of slime. The moment came Tuesday, when he responded to charges by Sen. Hillary Clinton, his potential rival in the 2008 presidential election, that George W. Bush bears some responsibility for North Korea's newborn status as a nuclear-armed power.

Here, according to the Washington Post, is what McCain said in a campaign speech near Detroit:

I would remind Senator Clinton and other Democrats critical of Bush administration policies that the framework agreement her husband's administration negotiated was a failure. Every single time the Clinton administration warned the Koreans not to do something—not to kick out the IAEA inspectors, not to remove the fuel rods from their reactor—they did it. And they were rewarded every single time by the Clinton administration with further talks.

McCain's version of history goes beyond "revisionism" to outright falsification. It is the exact opposite of what really happened. Let's take a look at the plain facts.

more...

[still_one]

1. The real question is what would have mccain done?

would he have attacked North Korea? Is mccain saying he is against talking to them unilaterally?

It is no question where he stands on Iraq, and that is to send more troops and initiate a draft. It doesn't matter to him that the Iraq war was based on a lie.

I remember mccain when he oppossed making Martin Luther King day a national holiday, and his involvement in the S&L scandal

[ProgressiveEconomist]

2. Under Clinton, 24-hr video surveillance and IAEA seals kept plutonium

from being extracted from 8,000 North Korean spent reactor fuel rods, with 100 percent certainty.

Because Dubya's representatives suspected NK might be cheating on an extremely slow alternative process of extracting U-235 using centrifuges, Dubya decided to break Clinton's 1994 agreement with NK. Within weeks, NK broke open the seals on the fuel rods and started reprocessing them into bomb-grade plutonium. Eventually, such reprocessing may yield 30 atomic weapons a year for sale to other countries and terror groups and for threatening SK and Japan.

This brings to mind the Biblical parable of the Good Shepherd--Dubya idiotically unleashed 99 percent of NK's capacity to harm the world because NK might have been cheating on 1 percent of their nuclear capacity. Clinton would have taken out the Yongbian reprocessing facility immediately when it was restarted in 2002, but Dubya did NOTHING!

These facts come mainly from a great article the same Fred Kaplan of your OP wrote for Washington Monthly in 2004. Kaplan forecasted last weekend's events in that article, more than two years ago. It's still the most informative single piece I've read about Dubya's NK nuke fiasco. See http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x2368449 .