How Bill Clinton’s Sold Out Our Country and Emboldened North Korea.

bill-and-jeffYou can thank Bill Clinton for Kim Jung Un’s having his little nuclear arsenal. You have to understand Bill lived in dread of having to be other than the “good ol’ boy.” Nothing could be worse than having to stand up to someone. Why that is so few have tried to explain. Was it he was too concerned with women and making money deals that he recoiled at the idea getting involved in something that would take his mind off of that? That’s all right if you are a governor; but if you’re president well some times you have to make hard calls rather than duck them and leave them for someone else.

Lets go back to 1994 after he finished his first year in office. Here is what is reported according to his Secretary of Defense who talked about it five years later: “The . . . crisis developed during the summer of 1994. Then, according to former Pentagon officials, the U.S. military drew up plans to send cruise missiles and F-117 stealth fighters to strike a small nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, in order to prevent North Korea from recovering the raw material to make nuclear bombs.” 

You might recall that about a dozen years before that Saddam Hussein was planning to develop his own nuclear weapons. Israel felt threatened by that. It attacked and destroyed his facility in what it called Operation Opera. It did not fear the consequences knowing a failure to act would be unthinkable.

In retrospect that was a wise move for Israel. Not so much for the United States. Had Saddam developed a nuclear weapon we may not have been so keen to invade his country. Imagine how much better off the world would be if we didn’t.

So why did we stay our hand in 1994. The point man in the State Department on Korea at the time Robert Gallucci  said “I believe it would have resulted almost certainly in war.” The Pentagon has forecast up to one-million deaths. Clinton’s Secretary of Defense Willliam Perry had ordered plans for a strike against the site to be drawn up. He feared the attack would bring about a war so he rejected the plans to do so.

According to Perry he recommended sanctions. We also feared doing that because North Korea said it would consider those an act of war. Just in case that happened we were planning to reinforce the 37,000 American troops stationed in South Korea and evacuate our civilians. But even while planning to do that we feared that if North Korea learned of it then it might launch a preemptive attack on the South. Reading this you understand how we really never had any idea how to handle the North Korean menace. Our policy was to do nothing to upset it lest it involve us in a war.

Fortunately for Bill Clinton he did not have to choose. Jimmy Carter was visiting the North Korean leader Kim IL Sung and he telephoned Clinton to say that the leader had agreed to go back to the bargaining table. Bill could go back to playing around. To ensure he would never have to face such a decision again Bill made a deal. I’ll quote from the book: Rogue Regime: Kim Jong II and the Looming Threat of North Korea.”

“The result of the Agreed Framework, is one of the most peculiar international agreements ever devised. North Korea’s chief enemy, the United States, now promised to reward Pyongyang’s breaches of international nuclear safeguards by giving it more nuclear power stations. Two 1,000 MW light-water reactors priced at U.S. $4.6 billion – and demanded that its allies – – South Korea, Japan, and the European Union – – open their wallets.”

It gets worse. “President Clinton even provided the North with a written assurance that the United States was not contemplating launching an attack nor seeking the destruction of North Korea. . .  With Clinton’s written assurance, Washington was even coming close to accepting the job of guaranteeing North Korea’s security and the continued rule of the Kim family. Instead of trying to remove a failed regime, Washington was on the path to ensuring its survival . . . .”

And survive it did. President Bush ignored its continuing build up as did President Obama and his policy of “strategic patience.”

We’ve become as strange country. We only engaged in wars with countries who we can easily beat even if they don’t threaten us. We seek to avoid as much bloodshed of our own people as possible preferring to fight from afar mostly from the air. The one fight we should have stepped up to do was ignored because it might have been difficult. Where Israel looked way down the road; we prefer not to think of what could be. That’s why our presidet president could call ISIS the JV team.

We must know what our next president plans to do about this.  We are where we are thanks to Clinton which is not where we want to be. We are threatened by a nation that is slowly building it nuclear capabilities. Our nation must come up with a plan to deal with Kim Jung Il other than sanctions which have failed. We must do this sooner rather than later for later will be too late.

6 Comments

  1. North Korean leaders talk and act like lunatics. The question is “How mad are they?” They have defied world powers in acquiring nuclear bombs. Will the world let them get more?
    2. Aljazeera News reports yesterday that North Korea has enough enriched uranium to produce 20 nuclear bombs “by the end of this year.”
    3. North Korea’s top U.S. diplomat (Han) recently declared that the U.S. with its “sanctions” and military maneuvers had crossed a “red line” and a “state of war” existed between the U.S. and N.K. He also bragged of NK’s capacity to produce multiple nuclear war heads.(CBS July 28, 2016).
    4. North Korea’s state-run media:. “The standardization of the nuclear warhead will enable (North Korea) to produce at will and as many as it wants a variety of smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher strike power . . .for their use . . . (as) nuclear warheads on ballistic rockets.”
    5. Will the world intervene when North Korea has 20, 200, or 2,000 nuclear bombs? Or after it lobs a few?
    6. The plot thickens: Did Bill Clinton’s 1,000 MW power plants facilitate North Korea’s enrichment of uranium? We know that the 5% enriched uranium used to generate electrical power can be further enriched to 90% for nuclear weapons. Iran had enriched its uranium to 20% before the Treaty, but I’ve read you’d need 500 Iranian-sized plants running a year to produce one nuclear bomb today. The problem with North Korea, of course, is that no one is inspecting their nuclear facilities.

  2. Peking is the governor of Kim’s ambitions. North Korea attacking the Seoul, and/or, any of it’s neighbors is unlikely, because, the Chinese would not allow it. I wonder how many N. Korean generals and security bureaucrats get a second check from China? China controls the smuggling of contraband over its border with Korea. Smuggled goods are like oxygen to the Kim regime. If China clamped down, Kim would suffocate. Obama has done a good job of avoiding direct military involvement. If readers want to gauge the seriousness of the N.Korean threat, watch the Japanese English language press. When Tokyo gets alarmed, start to worry.

    • “Japan warns of growing North Korea threat after fifth nuclear test”
      Japan Times
      SEP 9, 2016 (“Grave Threat”)
      “North Korea conducted its fifth and most powerful nuclear test to date around 9:30 a.m. Friday (9-9), prompting Tokyo to immediately file a protest amid concerns over accelerating developments in the North’s nuclear and ballistic missile technologies.
      Tokyo lodged the protest through its embassy in Beijing, saying the test posed a “grave threat” to Japan, the region and international society, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a news conference.
      The United States and Japan are jointly urging the United Nations Security Council to convene an emergency meeting to condemn the North” Suga said.
      2. North Korean submarine-based and land-based missiles can reach Japan easily.
      3. U.S. by treaty is obliged to defend Japan. U.S. may extend an anti-ballistic missile shield to Japan, reports say.

  3. I have more confidence in Trump than Hillary in negotiating with psychopathic dictators.

    • ‘Negotiating with psychopathic dictators?’ Has that ever worked anywhere, anytime?

      Psychopaths only understand power. What power do you hold? Use it.

      • How about “dealing with” instead?

        It’s semantics anyway.

        My point is that Trump would be tougher on our adversaries……similar to the question you posed back to me.
        He would leverage US power to yield tangible results.