Is Kim Mailing Thank-You Notes?Amazingly, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton weren't invited to attend North Korea's nuclear bomb test last night. How rude! Not only is
Kim Jong Il a mass murdering commie, he's an ingrate, too.
Though every American president since Eisenhower has been far too tolerant of North Korea's bullshit, Carter and Clinton are the two most responsible for transforming the world's craziest regime into a nuclear power. In 1994, Jimmy Carter was (as he is today) desperate to change his well-deserved reputation as a profoundly crappy president. So he volunteered to represent Clinton in bilateral negotiations with the North Koreans, the aim of which was to persuade Kim to abandon his quest for nuclear weapons. In true
Neville Chamberlain fashion, Carter announced that he had successfully persuaded Kim to freeze and eventually abandon his nuclear weapons program in exchange for the U.S., South Korea and Japan building for him two nuclear power plants. President Clinton and Congress signed off on the agreement.
And,
as I wrote in 2002, after Kim got his nuclear reactors, courtesy of the United States, he broke the Carter agreement by refusing to halt his nuclear weapons program and using those reactors to produce weapons-grade plutonium. In other words, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter gave Kim Jong Il the ammunition for weapons of mass destruction that will most likely be aimed at the United States and our allies.
Jimmy Carter was willing to conclude any agreeement -- even a bad one -- with North Korea just so he could, like Chamberlain did after his talks with Hitler, dramatically announce that his negotiations had averted war and preserved peace. And, like Chamberlain, Carter was very wrong.
What happened last night in the North Korean underground is the direct consequence of Bill Clinton choosing a negotiator whose sole agenda was not safeguarding the United States against nuclear attacks by North Korea, but, rather, repairing his own tattered reputation.
