It didn’t take long for Senator Clinton to stake out her political line on new news from North Korea.
In a hearing Thursday, the chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency testified that our intelligence community believes that the NorKs have the capability to arm a multi-stage missile with a nuclear warhead. The New York Times has the report, with very important caveats.
Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, the Defense Intelligence Agency chief, said in Senate testimony that North Korea had been judged to have the “capability” to put a nuclear weapon atop its missiles, he stopped well short of saying it had done so, or even that it had assembled warheads small enough for the purpose. Nor did he give evidence to back up his view during the public session of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
It’s important to note, as the Times does that there is a critical difference between having both a nuke and a missile and having a nuke that the missile can carry. Right now, that’s what we have to assume North Korea is working on steadily and it’s what we have to address directly in the multilateral negitiations we have with that nation. For those who have paid attention to this situation over the past year or so, this news is no real surprise. As the article notes later, Vice Admiral Jacoby was confirming something he said a month ago.
We know that North Korea has nuclear weapons – they told us they did and we’ve confirmed it. We also know that North Korea has multi-stage missiles in the same way. It’s not such a revalation, then, that they have the capability to which Jacoby testified.
What is a surprise is the stance that Senator Clinton took after the meeting.
In an interview on Thursday, Mrs. Clinton called Admiral Jacoby’s statement “the first confirmation, publicly, by the administration that the North Koreans have the ability to arm a missile with a nuclear device that can reach the United States,” adding, “Put simply, they couldn’t do that when George Bush became president, and now they can.”
Is she sure – really sure – she wants to take this position. After all, the North Koreans didn’t have nuclear weapons before her husband became President. Thanks in large part to being snookered by Kim Jong-Il on the “agreed framework” of NorK nuclear research, it was able to develop several such weapons (as many as a half-dozen, by most estimates). While she lived in the White House, we started engaging in talks with a non-nuclear North Korea and once we got the “agreed framework”, we basically ignored them and went on to other things (like, say a whole truckload of dodgy pardons or a failed negotiation between Yasser Arafat and the Israelis). After she left the White House, North Korea informed us that they had nuclear weapons, had never bothered to adhere to the “agreed framework”, and was going to continue their production unless we bribed them with food and cash.
I don’t know that Senator Clinton wants those facts to be widely remembered, which is certainly going to happen now that she’s played the “Blame Bush” card. It’s not a very winning strategy, considering the smashing failure her party suffered playing that card in the last two elections.
Then again, I keep hearing what a smart politician she is, so she may have something else up her sleeve. Maybe she’ll run away from her husband’s failure in the coming weeks and suggest her own strategy for dealing with Kim.
UPDATE: Michelle Malkin notes Andrew Card’s similar reaction yesterday on Meet the Press.
