Looking elsewhere for truth Part 2 -- Lafcadio T. Lion and Strawberry Sage and Friends Fun Forum

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Date Posted: 16:19:46 06/21/03 Sat
Author: Sage
Author Host/IP: qam1c-sif-39.monroeaccess.net / 12.27.215.40
Subject: Looking elsewhere for truth Part 2
In reply to: Sage 's message, "Looking elsewhere for truth Part 1" on 16:15:42 06/21/03 Sat

Lurching from one issue to the next, Clinton devoted his attention in these early years to learning the ways of Washington. At first his attention was riveted on his futile attempt to pass an economic stimulus package to "jump-start" the economy. Keeping to his campaign promise to focus "like a laser beam" on the economy, Clinton then turned to his economic program-a combination of tax increases and spending cuts-which did much to reduce the budget deficit and gave Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan the room he needed to drive down interest rates.

Clinton spent 1994 preoccupied with his anticrime legislation, a mix of longer sentences, more prisons, an expanded death penalty, and gun controls, which passed narrowly and had a significant impact in reducing crime over the ensuing decade. What time he had left was devoted to the fortunes of his wife's health-care reform proposals, des-tined to die an agonizing defeat in Congress.

As 1994 drew to a close, Clinton traveled to the Middle East to help cement a diplomatic accord between Jordan and Israel, advancing the legacy of the Camp David accords of President Jimmy Carter. Clobbered in the 1994 midterm elections, Clinton scrambled to respond to the Republican program of budget and tax cuts and to find his footing amid a Congress suddenly in the hands of his enemies.

I worked in the Clinton White House from late 1994 through late 1996. From November 1994 through February of 1995, I held seven private meetings, of two to three hours each, with President Clinton. In January, we worked together, in private, for six hours, drafting his State of the Union speech to Congress. In the course of these meetings, we spoke of every major issue he faced in our attempt to cope with the challenges posed by the newly elected Republican Congress. We delved extensively into policy initiatives about crime, law enforcement, and gun control, and we talked at length about how to strengthen his hand in dealing with foreign-policy issues.

Yet, in all those discussions, Clinton never mentioned a single word about the terrorist threat that was gathering around America. He did not allude to the World Trade Center bombings or to any of the evidence of further terror plans that had emerged since. The subject just wasn't on his mind, despite massive evidence flowing in from America's law-enforcement agencies.

Simply put, Clinton had no time for terrorism. Notoriously unable to delegate responsibility, compulsive in controlling the actions of his subordinates, Clinton was too busy juggling other issues to address the threat terrorism posed during these opening years of his presidency.

That is, until the end of 1994, when he was forced to face the first major foreign-policy crisis of his presidency-the imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons by the rogue regime in North Korea.

North Korea: The Feel-Good Deal That Left Our Security Dangling

On October 5, 2002, a bombshell burst: North Korea acknowledged, as The Washington Post reported, that it "has been secretly developing nuclear weapons for years in violation of international agreements." One official in George W. Bush's administration called it a "jaw drop-ping" revelation. The North Koreans were unapologetic; indeed, they were "assertive, aggressive about it."

As the Post reported, American assistant secretary of state James A. Kelly had presented the North Koreans with detailed evidence "of a covert nuclear weapons program" during a visit to the isolated state on October 3-October 5, 2002. After denouncing the allegations as "fabrications," the North Koreans "met through the night before deciding to reveal that the project had been under way for several years."

The revelation was doubly shocking in light of a widely hailed agreement the Clinton administration had signed with North Korea, in 1994, which was to have banned the development of atomic weapons or the diversion of fuel from North Korea's nuclear reactors. North Korea had agreed to suspend operations at its Yongbyon nuclear plant and to seal, under international inspection, used fuel rods that could have been reprocessed into bomb-grade material. the Post reported that the United States, Japan, and South Korea, in return, "agreed to arrange construction of two light-water nuclear power plants (whose fuel is less likely to be diverted to pernicious use) in North Korea and to provide 500,000 metric tons of heavy fuel oil annually to generate electricity until the plants are built." The $4 billion cost of the reactors, and the bill for providing the fuel, was to be shared by the three allies.

The United States had kept its end of the bargain. But the North Koreans, apparently, had gone behind our backs and begun to build bombs using uranium it had highly enriched at a secret underground complex. In December 2001, The CIA's National Intelligence Estimate, according to The Washington Post, reported that the rogue state had likely had one or two nuclear bombs as early as the mid-1990s. Right under Clinton's nose.

It was a breach that called to mind the Nazi and Japanese treaty violations of the years before World War II. Pyongyang's actions were high handed, arrogant, sneaky, and duplicitous.

Clinton had been duped. Big-time.

The crisis with North Korea that led to the 1994 agreement in the first place began at the start of Clinton's term, when North Korea, as rogue as a nation can get, diverted nuclear fuel from its Yongbyon reactor in 1989 and was planning future diversions to build up enough material to produce five atomic bombs.

Clinton's foreign-policy team gathered itself for its first major test since its early confrontation with Haiti's dictatorship. Their efforts thus far to forge a coherent approach to international issues were widely regarded a joke.

The Washington Post reported that the challenge from North Korea "is the first time that the administration has tried to forge a coalition for a major strategic purpose. . . . The success or failure of Clinton's effort will be a gauge of administration diplomatic skills, which critics have found wanting in negotiations with allies over Bosnia, with military rulers in Haiti over the return of democracy, with Japan over trade and with China over human rights." A Clinton administration official added that Korea "is the primary test for the administration of acting through the Security Council."

Clinton began by threatening to impose economic sanctions to get North Korea to behave. He hoped that China would privately cooper-ate, to pull the noose even tighter. The sanctions would bar Koreans living abroad-primarily in Japan-from sending money to their relatives in the North, a key source of foreign exchange for the isolated government; ban arms sales to North Korea; and end economic aid from the United Nations. If Pyongyang did not give in, then full economic sanctions would be imposed. South Korea enthusiastically agreed to join the sanctions, and after some hesitation Japanese officials said they'd go along. A deal seemed in the making. For once, Clinton was showing some backbone.

News reports after Clinton left office speculated that the president may have been considering a preemptive bombing of the Yongbyon nuclear plant where North Korea was storing its spent fuel rods to pre-vent reprocessing. One wonders if these reports are accurate or just posturing by former administration officials anxious to justify their actions while in office. At the time, Clinton's foreign-policy team downplayed the idea that a military option was under consideration. The Washing-ton Post quoted "senior administration officials and independent analysts" as saying that the United States was "unlikely to initiate military action in Korea," saying that a conflict was "too risky." Among their concerns was that a preemptive strike might bring on a "radioactive explosion."

Clinton may have secured the agreement of Japan and South Korea to economic sanctions, but he may have been surprised to find he also needed former President Jimmy Carter's approval. Or so Carter himself seemed to believe: As if he'd never left office, the ex-president stepped in, uninvited save by North Korea, and cooled whatever resolution Washington might once have had.

Angering Clinton, Carter decided unilaterally to travel to North Korea to seek a way out of the crisis. Clinton had used Carter's services as a mediator earlier in his administration, asking the former president to smooth the way for the departure of the dictators who ruled Haiti and the restoration of democratic rule. Backed by a large naval and amphibious force waiting offshore to attack, the former president was able to orchestrate a bloodless transition on that troubled island.

But this time Carter's trip was forced on Clinton, presented to him as a fait accompli. When Carter made it clear that he was going to North Korea, Clinton had no choice but to bless the mission. "Frankly, he was going to go anyway and . . . we didn't want this to be some dispute," a senior administration official told The Washington Post.

Of course, there was one problem: Carter opposed administration policy. He was against sanctioning North Korea. Rather than traveling as an envoy of administration policy, in truth, he was looking to block it. But Carter's views had resonance within the administration's dovish foreign-policy team. As the Post reported, there was widespread fear among Clinton's top advisers that sanctions could provoke North Korea to oust U.N. inspectors and lead to a go-it-alone pursuit of nuclear weapons that might, they feared, "lead to possible war."

On June 16, 1994, Clinton and his top foreign-policy aides huddled in what the Post described melodramatically as "a grim council of war-discussing sending new planes, ships, and troops to South Korea for a possible horrible conflict" when the phone rang. It was Carter, calling from North Korea to tell him that he would "shortly appear on CNN to convey what the former president considered a dramatic breakthrough in the . . . dispute" with North Korea.

The scene must have been something to watch. the Post describes how "Vice President Gore, Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, Secretary of State Warren Christopher and the others filed into a cramped office [adjoining the Oval Office], equipped with a television set, to watch Carter. They were flabbergasted when the former president described [North Korean dictator] Kim's promises as a 'very positive step' and urged the administration to withdraw a two-day-old proposal for . . . sanctions against North Korea. 'It looked as if we were contracting out our foreign policy, like we were bystanders . . . and had totally lost control of it,' a White House official later recalled."

Gore urged everyone to calm down, put aside their anger, and coolly analyze what was going on. But Carter's move had halted what-ever momentum there was for sanctions, and tough action was put on hold while the administration played out the Carter initiative, forced to do so, in part, by public hopes raised by the former president.

In reality, all Carter had gotten out of Pyongyang was what The Washington Post called "a small concession"-a "limited and some-what vague pledge to Carter . . . that North Korea would leave international inspectors in place at North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear complex, and freeze its accumulation of plutonium if Washington entered high-level talks," an offer it had made before.

But Clinton and his people seized on the gesture and followed the path of negotiation, its former determination to impose sanctions ebbing precipitously. The North agreed to freeze its nuclear program and, as The New York Times reported, "to allow inspectors to monitor where some spent reactor fuel rods were being stored. In return the United States agreed to resume negotiations with the North Koreas without other conditions."

In reality, North Korea had conceded nothing. The spent fuel rods were so radioactive that, as The Washington Post reported, they "cannot be reprocessed anyway for awhile while [they are] cooled in a storage pond." Republicans in Congress pointed out that "if North Korea wants to, it can find a reason to withdraw from the talks in several months and have enough plutonium . . . for four to five nuclear weapons. . . . Such an outcome would make Carter and the Clinton Administration look like dupes."

And dupes they were, as they abandoned their plans for coercion and grasped at the hope of negotiations.

In the meantime, Bill Clinton's presidency was entering a period of crisis. The disorganization and left-leaning policies of 1993-1994 were alienating even the Democrats who controlled both houses of Congress. In August 1994, Hillary Clinton's vaunted health-care reforms went down to crashing defeat in the Senate. With congressional elections looming in November, Clinton needed to pull a rabbit out of his hat if he hoped to hold on to control of Congress.

North Korea was his rabbit. In late October 1994, just weeks before the election, the United States and North Korea struck a deal: Kim Jong Il, who had taken over as dictator of the North after his father Kim Il Sung died in July, agreed to "internationally monitored containment and eventual rollback" of its nuclear capability, as The Washington Post reported. In return, the United States, Japan, and South Korea agreed to provide food and fuel for North Korea and to fund its two light-water nuclear power plants.

Hailing it as a "gigantic political breakthrough," the Post breathlessly announced that the agreement "could end the specter of a rogue state's going nuclear."

From the start, however, there were reasons to doubt whether North Korea would keep its promise. Even as it celebrated the deal, the Post reported that "North Korea's record of treachery, its maintenance of a regime conducive to treachery and its leadership uncertainties compel great wariness." The Clinton administration was consequently careful to demand that the North Koreans "freeze and dismantle the graphite reactors [and] comply with the nuclear abstinence demanded under the Nonproliferation Treaty" before the United States had to deliver on its end of the treaty.

Republicans criticized the deal as a bribe to get North Korea to do what it had already committed to do as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Congress grew increasingly restive about voting the funds necessary for the implementation of the agreement.

Such concerns lay more or less dormant for four years, while Clinton basked in the apparent triumph of his diplomatic accord with North Korea. But suddenly, in August 1998, North Korea fired a multi-state ballistic rocket over Japan without warning. While North Korea "subsequently insisted that it was only trying to send a music satellite aloft to celebrate two imminent joyous events-the regime's 50th anniversary and the formal accession to supreme power of Kim Jong Il," as the National Review reported, the missile spoke volumes about the nation's warlike intentions. Kim's regime, already in possession of the world's third-largest arsenal of chemical weapons, had now developed the ballistic missiles it needed to deliver them.

After he left office, President Clinton feigned surprise that North Korea was cheating and developing nuclear weapons despite its commitments in 1994. He told interviewer Larry King, on February 6, 2003, that "it turns out they [North Korea] had this smaller laboratory program to develop a nuclear bomb with enriched uranium." He might not have said so explicitly, but Clinton's implication was clear: The development was news to him.

Don't be fooled: The revelation of North Korea's perfidy may have been a surprise to the world, but it was no surprise to Bill Clinton. As early as 1998, The Washington Post reported, U.S. intelligence had warned that the rogue nation was developing bombs in secret under-ground locations. But Clinton did nothing; indeed, he assured Congress that North Korea was in compliance with the 1994 agreement so that it wouldn't cut off the purse strings that funded the U.S. end of the deal.

In mid-August 1998, The New York Times reported that the U.S. intelligence community had detected "a huge secret underground complex in North Korea" that might be "the centerpiece of an effort to revive the country's ...nuclear weapons program." On August 18, The Washington Post reported that "U.S. intelligence analysts believe about 15,000 North Koreans are at work on a vast, secret underground nuclear facility, a development administration officials say may represent a decision by North Korea to abandon a four-year-old agreement to freeze its nuclear weapons program.

"Administration officials who have been briefed on the intelligence data, which includes imagery collected by spy satellites, describe a large-scale tunneling and digging operation in a mountainside about 25 miles northeast of Yongbyon, a former nuclear research center where North Korea is said to have produced enough plutonium for two nuclear weapons." Is it possible that the intelligence agencies of the U.S. government could find such a massive and crucial development and fail to report it to the president of the United States? Not in this world.

Indeed, the United States asked for a look at the underground caverns. North Korea first blustered and threatened and then asked for a cash payment of $300 million if the inspection failed to uncover suspicious work on a bomb. Later, the North Koreans said they wanted the $300 million up front for a one-time-only peek. Obviously the president would have had to have known about this exchange; indeed, he would have had to authorize the communication in the first place.

But, despite the evidence of massive cheating, Clinton did nothing and told Congress nothing was amiss. The Washington Post reported that "administration officials have told Congress that North Korea has not yet technically violated the [1994] agreement, despite its development of the [underground] caverns, because the Yongbyon facilities [identified in the treaty] have not been reactivated."

But Congress began to act. In late 1998, the Senate voted by 80-11 "to condition funding on a presidential certification that North Korea has halted all nuclear activities and has curtailed missile sales to nations classified by the State Department as supporters of terrorism." But Clinton continued to wink at North Korean aggressive moves, hoping against hope that the 1994 deal would remain in place.

Ever the master of semantics, the president, who had previously denied that what he did with Monica Lewinsky constituted "sexual relations," now maintained that the treaty with North Korea wasn't really a treaty at all.

The National Review reported that "American negotiators who hammered . . . out [the 1994 deal with North Korea] have repeatedly emphasized that it is not an 'agreement'-that it does not bind any party to specific actions or hold parties in noncompliance if given objectives are not met. 'Failure' of the 'Agreed Framework, consequently,' the officials maintained 'is very much in the mind of the beholder.' "

There is some evidence that North Korean diverted the fuel rods that it probably used to make atomic bombs even before Clinton took office. According to the congressional research service, North Korea shut down its nuclear reactor for seventy days in 1989, which "gave it the opportunity to remove nuclear fuel rods, from which plutonium is reprocessed."

Even if the crime took place on the first President Bush's watch, Clinton failed to address it in the 1994 Framework Agreement with North Korea, and he continued to send Pyongyang fuel and food even though he knew the regime may have already illegally developed nuclear weapons.

Clinton had wiped North Korea off his radar screen, never to return during his term. And there matters lay until Bush took office and discovered that North Korea had been industriously building nuclear weapons all along and likely had one or two in its quiver already.

By his willful blindness to North Korea's conduct and his wishful thinking that the regime would abide by the deal he had made with it in 1994, Bill Clinton had opened the door to one of the most serious threats to our national security since the end of the cold war.

When prompt action could have headed off North Korean noncompliance, Bill Clinton willfully and deliberately did nothing, allowing the North to build its bombs in its underground caverns.

And, as in so many other situations, he left the problem to George W. Bush.

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Replies:

Looking elsewhere for truth Part 3 -- Sage, 16:24:00 06/21/03 Sat
- Looking elsewhere for truth Part 4 -- Sage, 16:27:24 06/21/03 Sat
  - Looking elsewhere for truth Part 5 -- Sage, 16:29:24 06/21/03 Sat