Posted on 10/20/2006 4:18:04 PM PDT by Sub-Driver
Carter says Bush partly to blame for N.Korea test
By Adam Tanner 34 minutes ago
Former President Jimmy Carter said on Friday the Bush administration was partly responsible for North Korea's decision to test a nuclear device by isolating the Asian country, and he urged Washington to change course and talk with Pyongyang.
"Obviously most of the blame is on North Korea but it is U.S. policies that have brought us to this status," he told Reuters while riding between campaign stops for his son Jack who is running for the U.S. Senate in Nevada.
Carter, president from 1977 to 1981, negotiated a deal during a visit to North Korea in 1994 over the reclusive communist state's nuclear program when fellow Democrat Bill Clinton was president.
"The Bush administration changed that 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."
Carter said he favored resuming talks with North Korea.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Someone in the Bush administration needs to call a press conference and smack this clown down. This is irresponsible and inexcusable. Carter is the last President who should be calling other President's policies failures.
You're forgetting about S(l)ick Willie, who taught the Peanut Farmer how to be petty.
Blame America.
What a dunce.
Carter has been FAR worse than Slick. It's not even close in terms of number of times or viciousness of attack.
Slick shouldn't do it, either, but he's only done it a handful of times.
Carter does it every time he opens his mouth, which is every day.
Amen to 'The country would be better off if Carter died'
Even if we disregard Reagan's accomplishments in facing down the Soviets and bringing the fall of the evil empire, in reducing and simplifying our tax system, and in reviving the economy and the American spirit, Reagan still rates as one of our greatest presidents for simply putting Mr. Peanut out to pasture.
Notice how little Rats running for anything ask Jimma to campaign for them?
Amen to that!
Took the words right out of my mouth
The biggest problem with President Carter is the same problem psychological pseudosciences have--they stress everything as caused and never a form of goal seeking.
NK is seeking power, attention and revenge on its real or imagined enemies. President Carter need not worry. They are capable of hating us and seeking our destruction either politically or actually without any reason or cause.
In Wednesday's New York Times, former president Carter wrote that the failure of his 1994 deal was caused by President Bush labeling North Korea part of the "axis of evil" in 2002. Carter's statement doesn't withstand even the slightest analysis. On April 24, 2003, in Beijing talks with Chinese and American representatives, North Korean representatives declared that their nation possessed nuclear weapons. In 2004, Defense Intelligence Agency experts reportedly said that North Korea had between four and eight plutonium bombs. By Carter's analysis, that would mean the North Koreans stopped their nuclear weapons development for eight years, recommenced it in 2002 and in less than two years had managed to produce several weapons. His claim is risible.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/10/no_partial_credit.html
North Korea was already cheating on the agreement it signed with Carter, and it was the Bush administration that discovered this out. Moreover, how naive is Carter to have actually believed that he could save the world by negotiating with the lunatics in Pyongyang?
http://allthingsconservative.typepad.com/all_things_conservative/2006/10/blame_the_neoco.html
Sen. John McCain is right that President Bill Clinton set up North Korea’s development of a nuclear weapon with an amateurish, naive agreement in 1994, and Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry and the rest of the bribe-and-grin tribe are wrong.
The left wants you to believe that all history began with President Bush, and that anything that’s gone wrong in the world during his administration was caused by his administration. But terrorists did not wait for his election to become a threat, Iran did not wait to degenerate into a rogue state until his watch and North Korea did not wait on his “axis of evil” speech to begin its quest for nuclear weapons.
It was, in fact, in 1993 that North Korea opted out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, sending the new Clinton administration into something next door to a panic. Then, in 1994, Jimmy Carter proclaimed that he could save the day and insisted against administration wishes that he be allowed to visit with mass-murdering, famine-inducing North Korean dictator Kim II Sung.
There was little the administration could do to stop him without political discomfort, and so it said OK, as long as Carter went as a private citizen, did not negotiate on behalf of the United States and stuck to some specified talking points in explaining where the administration stood. Carter did, of course, negotiate, thought he had a swell deal and talked about it on CNN before the administration said it would or would not buy the plan. Now caught in a bind, the administration said some modifications could make the plan acceptable, and Carter reluctantly sought them and got them.
The idea basically was that the United States would lead other nations in supplying North Korea with billions of dollars for the development of nuclear-energy facilities if North Korea would play nice and promise not to build nuclear weapons. It took North Korea maybe a year or so to begin violating the play-nice part of the understanding, and maybe - who knows? - a nanosecond to get back to work on nuclear weapons.
While the agreement allowed a few inspectors to hang around, it did not call for an immediate, thoroughgoing verification program or one anywhere near sufficient to ever get the job done. Kim II Sung made a fool out of Carter. Prissiness will take you just so far in holding your own with Stalinist tyrants.
But it would be a mistake to suppose that Carter was alone to blame for decisions that were, after all, President Clinton’s to make, especially given some of what transpired later. In 1998, North Korea shot a missile over Japan. A couple of years later, in an effort to permanently stop missile testing and production, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with Kim Jong Il, son of the deceased Kim II Sung, to say, look, maybe the United States can send some peaceful satellites into the atmosphere for North Korea. If one bribe does not succeed, try, try again.
http://news.bostonherald.com/editorial/view.bg?articleid=162205
former Clinton adviser Paul Begala, now serving as a talking head on CNN, claimed that the Clinton administration contained the threat from North Korea. Clearly, Mr. Begala missed the 1990s. Of course, Mr. Begala simply forgot that Clinton's military chief of staff testified in 1998 that North Korea did not have an active ballistic missile program. One week later the North Koreans launched a missile over Japan that landed off the Alaska coast.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/1/7/164846.shtml
Jimmy has to work awful hard at being stupid these days.
I remember when Carter was president, what a joke!!!!! Did he learn something in his old age? He needed to.
Great, another Monty Python moment.
Carter is a true nut, not one who grows them.
Carter is long gone.Somebody better call his keeper.
Fixed that part for you. The twofer presidents. Two worst presidents ever, and the two worst EXpresidents ever.
Dear Former CIC,
STFU, you're an embarrassment.
Former Specialist Walsh
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