The Real Korean Blunder

This week's Right-Wing Think Tank Review covered an AEI article by Nicholas Eberstadt and Christopher Griffin which called the recent six-party agreement a "strategic blunder," largely because it failed to address the issue of a North Korean uranium enrichment program, as well as the plutonium weapons the Koreans may have already built.

The foolishness of the neoconservative hard line represented by people like Eberstadt and Griffin is further illustrated by an article in yesterday's New York Times which reports that the White House is publicly admitting that it doesn't even really know if the Koreans have an HEU program. As you'll recall, it was neocon hard-nosing over the HEU issue that prompted the Bush administration to abandon the Agreed Framework in 2002, thus encouraging the Koreans to go ahead and build nukes with the plutonium program that the Agreed Framework had been keeping in check.

Josh Marshall perfectly sums up the horrifying incompetence of it all:

Because of a weapons program that may not even have existed (and no one ever thought was far advanced) the White House got the North Koreans to restart their plutonium program and then sat by while they produced a half dozen or a dozen real nuclear weapons -- not the Doug Feith/John Bolton kind, but the real thing.

Absolutely stunning stupidity. The neocons and their pet politicians in the Bush administration have done incalculable damage to American national security and to global stability. As Marshall points out, "In this decade there's been no stronger force for nuclear weapons proliferation than the dynamic duo of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush."

And yet the wheels keep churning at AEI, and people keep pretending to take this crowd seriously.

Labels: American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy, George Bush, North Korea

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 1:03 PM