There's an ongoing debate among right-wingers (such as me) about who was the worse president: Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton.
Well, today Carter's out shooting off his pie hole about North Korean nukes being at least partially Bush's fault.
That's the pot calling the stainless steel kettle black.
Says the former peanut farmer:
"The Bush administration changed [Clinton's] policy," he continued. "They put in the trash can the agreement with North Korea, and as a result of that -- and threatened North Korea with military attack -- and as a result of those threats and the discarding of the previous agreement, North Korea announced that they were withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty."
"It's like night and day. It was daytime when Clinton was in office that totally prohibited and prevented any sort of plutonium enrichment," he said. "All that was dramatically changed under George Bush and now we have the North Koreans having exploded a plutonium bomb."
In the October 23rd edition of National Review an article by Mario Loyola (subscription required) recounts the history of Clinton/Carter "policy" on North Korea:
In the 2003 book Going Critical, three of the Clinton administration officials closest to the crisis recall the deliberations.
“Logically,” they write, “there were three military possibilities for attacking Yongbyon”: destroy just the reprocessing facility; destroy the entire facility, including the reactor; or destroy the entire facility and “remove key North Korean military assets, in order to degrade Pyongyang’s ability to retaliate.” Cowed by North Korea’s threat to unleash war against the South—an almost-obvious bluff—Clinton placed the fate of the nonproliferation regime in the hands of “unofficial” envoy Jimmy Carter, who promptly reached a deal with Pyongyang and then announced it on CNN—without telling the administration first. The administration was forced to cave on the most important U.S. demands: inspections at any time and any place, and the dismantling of the plutonium program.
In other words, the sanctimonious Carter negotiated an agreement with Pyongyang which gave Kim all sorts of goodies (oil, nuclear reactors, food) in exchange Kim only had to agree to stop trying to build nukes, no inspections, no verification, but we had to take Kim's word. But as this Sister Toljah (lol) recounts, Kim broke that agreement almost immediately.
Kim did not build nukes because Bush was mean to him. Kim built nukes because Carter and Clinton let him.
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