Going Back to North Korea, Hat in Hand

By Robert Scheer, Truthdig. Posted February 28, 2007.

The Bush administration came to its senses about North Korea five years too late. Now other "rogue nations" know that the best way to make peace with the U.S. is to test their own nuclear weapons.

So now it's North Korea's turn to feed at the trough of U.S. economic aid, as if exploding a nuclear weapon is all that's needed to prove a nation's peaceful intentions. Of course, there is nothing wrong with negotiating with our enemies rather than weakly blustering at cartoon images of them -- I wish we would do the same in our dealings with Iran -- but it would be nice if we would stop shooting ourselves in the foot first.

Five years and an outlaw nuke test after President Bush blew up the peace process with Pyongyang so he could look tougher than his predecessor, he capitulated completely earlier this month in accepting a negotiating framework that tacitly accepts the huge surge in the communist state's estimated nuclear arsenal. Bush blinked big-time. The carrot replaced the stick, and that is a good thing, carrying the hope that through diplomacy North Korea will end its isolation and follow the modernizing path of communist China. But six years of presidential haranguing about rogue regimes derailed previous efforts at arms control, allowing the dangerously unstable North Korea to join the nuclear club.