Billmon: Appeasing North Korea

Bush ended with an attack on North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. 'He's starving his own people,' Bush said, and imprisoning intellectuals in 'a Gulag the size of Houston.' The president called him a 'pygmy' and compared him to 'a spoiled child at a dinner table.'

Newsweek
"I Sniff Some Politics"
May 27, 2002

There was also a change in tone by the administration with much more respectful references to North Korea -- that was clearly noted by the North Korean press, which for example pointed out that in one of his press conferences, President Bush talked about "Mr." Kim Jong-il. You no longer saw references to pygmies and tyrants.

New York Times
Q&A: North Korea nuclear talks
September 19, 2005

I've been trying to see if I can figure out the differences between the nuclear agreement that Condi Rice signed with North Korea -- which, it turns out, may not be a real deal after all -- and the agreement negotiated by the Clinton administration in 1994. As far as I can tell, the two most important ones are:

• Unlike Clinton, Rice did what the Cheney administration has vowed it would never do: She rewarded the North Koreans for agreeing to live up to their previous commitments.

• Also unlike Clinton, Rice and her husband . . . I mean, her president, have not been the target of a hurricane of right-wing hate speech for negotiating with one of the world's most odious regimes. (This Frontpagemag screed, from which I stole the title of my post, is a fairly typical example.)

A third, but less important, difference is that the Cheney administration did not explicitly promise to build Kim Jong Il a light-water reactor, as the Clintonites did in the so-called Agreed Framework. However, Rice's team did promise to talk about building such a reactor "at the appropriate time." The North Koreans, perhaps sensing an opening, immediately declared that the appropriate time was right now, and issued one of their by-now familiar bloodcurdling threats to incinerate the Korean peninsula if the Americans so much as look at them crosseyed.