John Bolton and his moustache effrayant have weighed in on our deal with the North Koreans and is quite disappointed. And when I say disappointed, I mean in the way that Darth Vader was disappointed with Admiral Ozzel.
I don’t entirely agree with Ambassador Bolton. He makes several good points and I don’t dismiss any of them, but it seems to me that the deal, as it stands right now, is a good one. The disclosure that North Korea made still has to be verified and our whole end of things can be withdrawn in a hot second if their declaration turns out to be fraudulent. So we do have a very big out here. We’re not necessarily giving up a lot by taking them off our Terrorist Nations Hit List nor are we taking our eyes off of them completely.
I have the same question about the Norks’ hand in terrorism as see-dubya does and his commenter doesn’t really answer the question for me. I know that North Korea was involved in terrorist acts into the 1980s, but that was then. This is now and the game is entirely different. Kim Jong-Il has definitely sold materials to Syria and Iran, which are themselves Islamist terrorist nations, but the Norks themselves, not so much.
I wonder if the administration is playing a longer game than perhaps Bolton wants to admit. Kim has no real ideological ties to the Islamists. Heck, the only real ideology he has is “I’m so cool. Like me!”. I can’t even call him a Marxist anymore without laughing a little bit. His regime is certainly still as cruel as it ever was, but it’s gotten old and the dry rot is more than evident. He has sucked the life from his nation and he doesn’t have a lot of the old Dear Leader mojo left. I can see where opening North Korea up to some Western influence in the form of limited trade can put a lot of pressure on the Ronery One. Perhaps, if we play things a little smoothly here, we’ll see the beginning of the end of tyrany in North Korea. That would be a great good worth far, far more than what little we seem to be giving up right now.
Tags: John Bolton, Kim Jong-Il, North Korea
