McCain Plays the Blame Game
I see the Bush Administration has drafted McCain as a player in their “blame game.” Remember when they said they wouldn’t play the “blame game” when they were being rightly criticized for their failed response to Katrina? Several months later they started playing the game with gusto and blamed Clinton for 9/11.
And now that North Korea claims to have successfully tested a nuclear bomb, somebody has to take the blame for letting them move so far ahead in their quest to join the nuclear club. And who better to blame than Clinton? I guess it doesn’t matter to McCain that Bush has been president for nearly six years. It’s not his fault.
Here’s what McCain had to say:
“I would remind Senator (Hillary) Clinton and other Democrats critical of the Bush administration’s policies that the framework agreement her husband’s administration negotiated was a failure,” McCain said at a news conference after a campaign appearance for Republican Senate candidate Mike Bouchard.
“The Koreans received millions and millions in energy assistance. They’ve diverted millions of dollars of food assistance to their military,” he said.
Philippe Reines, a spokesman for Senator Clinton, responded with:
“History is clear that nothing the Bush administration has done has stopped the North Koreans from openly testing a nuclear weapon and presenting a new danger to the region of the world.”
Yes… Clinton made some mistakes, and so did his predecessor Bush I.
In 1989, the North Koreans took their reactor offline for about 100 days, and U.S. intelligence officials believe the North Koreans separated out plutonium for reprocessing. Estimates vary, but specialists believe the North Koreans obtained enough plutonium at that point to make one or two bombs.
The U.S. “didn’t do anything,” Wolfsthal said. “History is going to show that was a tremendous turning point.”
But Clinton did get some things right. Jimmy Carter provides the details in this column from The New York Times: (also available here.)
Responding to an invitation from President Kim Il-sung of North Korea, and with the approval of President Bill Clinton, I went to Pyongyang and negotiated an agreement under which North Korea would cease its nuclear program at Yongbyon and permit inspectors from the atomic agency to return to the site to assure that the spent fuel was not reprocessed. It was also agreed that direct talks would be held between the two Koreas.
The spent fuel (estimated to be adequate for a half-dozen bombs) continued to be monitored, and extensive bilateral discussions were held. The United States assured the North Koreans that there would be no military threat to them, that it would supply fuel oil to replace the lost nuclear power and that it would help build two modern atomic power plants, with their fuel rods and operation to be monitored by international inspectors. The summit talks resulted in South Korean President Kim Dae-jung earning the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize for his successful efforts to ease tensions on the peninsula.
But beginning in 2002, the United States branded North Korea as part of an axis of evil, threatened military action, ended the shipments of fuel oil and the construction of nuclear power plants and refused to consider further bilateral talks. In their discussions with me at this time, North Korean spokesmen seemed convinced that the American positions posed a serious danger to their country and to its political regime.
It was pretty clear early on that Bush’s strategy for dealing with North Korea was to “get tough.” Now it’s pretty clear his strategy didn’t work. How can a “straight shooter” like McCain say that North Korea’s entry into the nuclear club is Clinton’s fault? Who has been in charge of everything for the last five-plus years? George Bush and a Republican Congress, that’s who.
If McCain were a true straight-shooting patriot, he’d know where to aim his blame bullets, and he wouldn’t be afraid to fire a few rounds.
