North Korea’s phony peace at any cost to the U.S.

Why Bush would deal with a mad man is a mystery only known to himself and the mad people running our State Department. I will want to hear the story one day but I fear it might be an advanced case of what Ronald Regan got or some kind of coup d’état. Otherwise, it is very difficult to understand the radical change in Bush in the last few years. Maybe He wants to show some peace gesture to the world before Israel bombs Iran forcing the U.S. to join them. Or perhaps Bush needed this to get China and Russia to sign off on a strike on Iran. Who knows?

The U.S. is being played the fool by North Korea. We get to pay for the dismantling of their aging reactor and to supply them with critical food and energy and they get to keep the nuclear material and their missiles to deliver nukes. They also get to possibly try again to get nuclear material to other terrorists states like Syria and Iran.

Nothing is said about North Korea’s secret Uranium enrichment program that may continue to produce fissionable material. Now we are going to lift all sanctions and embargoes like they actually did something good and just turn a blind eye to the fact they just tried to give Syria what it takes to make a nuke. If that does not make North Korea a terrorist state I do not know what does. Thanks to Israel that plan was stopped but who knows what is going on in the slimy little demented mind of Kim Jong III?.

FrontPage Magazine

It now turns out that the options the U.S. had been contemplating were designed not to punish North Korean duplicity but to encourage it. So it is that, despite its recent collaboration with Hezbollah-sponsor Syria – to say nothing of its intent, in the run-up the Iraq war, to sell $10 million worth of medium-range missiles to Saddam Hussein for use against coalition troops – North Korea no longer will be designated a terrorist state. Never mind that the country has yet to come clean about its nuclear program. In the eyes of the Bush administration, North Korea has been given a clean slate.

And legitimacy. Notwithstanding its defiance of every nuclear treaty it has ever signed – a habit of violation that continues in its latest declaration, which reportedly discusses only plutonium processing activities and not the uranium enrichment and nuclear capabilities that were supposed to have been declared – North Korea is being treated as a credible partner in negotiations instead of the extortionist state that it clearly is. Fool the Bush administration once, the lesson appears to be, and you wind up in the “axis-of-evil.” Fool it repeatedly, and all is forgiven.

As always with North Korea, there are token concessions. To demonstrate its sincerity, Pyongyang has invited foreign TV crews to broadcast its demolition of the cooling tower at the notorious Yongbyon nuclear plant. It promises to be quite the affair, though one would have to be really taken in by spectacle to forget that the plant was already supposed to be completely disabled in the 1990s and, more recently, by the end of 2007. Nor will the made-for-the-cameras moment prove that North Korea has nothing to hide. The facility at Yongbyon is believed to have been shuttered last year, having already produced enough weapons-grade plutonium to build, by some estimates, at least nine nuclear bombs. To see the destruction of this Potemkin reactor as a sign of genuine progress is to yield to illusion.