Posted on 09/16/2003 2:57:44 PM PDT by Shermy
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Unable to go to Pyongyang in his final days as president because of preoccupation with the Middle East, Bill Clinton invited North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to Washington in hopes of closing a missile deal, but was turned down, his former secretary of state says.
In her new autobiography, Madeleine Albright reveals that Clinton later regretted investing his last days in office pursuing an elusive Israel-Palestinian accord rather than a possible agreement with the isolated communist regime.
In the book, "Madam Secretary," and during an interview with Reuters, Albright made clear she believes President Bush has squandered a diplomatic opportunity handed to him by his predecessor to resolve the crisis with the North.
"While I make no apologies for Kim Jong-il, who is a horrible dictator and has starved his people, I don't blame him for being a bit confused" about U.S. policy, the first woman to be U.S. secretary of state told Reuters.
"He's not the best signal reader and we're sending mixed messages" on the U.S. willingness to negotiate, she said.
Her successor, Colin Powell, led Albright to believe the new administration "would pick up roughly where we left off."
But instead, it undertook a yearlong policy review, then uncovered information about a covert North Korean program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
This fueled new tensions that led to Pyongyang ousting U.N. inspectors, withdrawing from a key nuclear arms treaty and threatening to begin reprocessing more nuclear fuel.
OPPORTUNITY LOST?
"I do think if the Bush administration had picked up the hand of cards on the table that we had left them, we might be in better shape now," Albright said.
She expressed hope six-party talks that began in Beijing last month would be successful but said direct U.S.-North Korea talks, which Bush has rejected, ultimately would be needed.
In a 1994 accord negotiated by former President Clinton's team, North Korea froze its plutonium-fueled nuclear weapons program in return for two light-water nuclear power reactors and oil supplies.
At the end of Clinton's term, the administration was negotiating a second deal, one to halt the North's production, testing, deployment and export of missiles.
Albright paid an unprecedented visit to Pyongyang in October 2000 to advance missile discussions and Kim invited Clinton to come to the North Korean capital to close the deal.
Clinton was "more than willing to make the trip" to Pyongyang and even asked Bush, who was declared the winner of the 2000 election, if he objected.
Bush said it was Clinton's decision, but Clinton was torn between going or staying home to focus on an Israel-Palestinian peace accord, which seemed promising but eventually failed, Albright wrote.
In a final effort to do both, Clinton invited Kim to Washington. But Kim's invite to Clinton was already public and given the lateness of the U.S. invitation and the importance of "face" in Asian diplomacy, the North declined, Albright wrote.
One day before leaving office, Clinton and Albright spoke by telephone. "Fuming about all the time we had invested in (Palestinian leader Yasser) Arafat, he said he wished he had taken the chance of going to North Korea instead of staying in Washington to make a final push on the Middle East," Albright recalled.
AIMING FOR HONESTY
The 512-page book is filled with funny and poignant personal details as well as policy prescriptions, revealing more about Albright's hopes and insecurities than secretaries of state usually do.
"I decided there is no value in writing about a book about my life without being honest," she said.
It was most difficult to write about her divorce from newspaper heir Joseph Albright -- she was devastated but has "moved on and had a pretty good life" -- and about learning in 1997 that her family, who fled the Nazis, then the Soviets in Czechoslovakia for the United States, was Jewish, not Roman Catholic, and her grandparents perished in the Holocaust.
Albright was "furious" when people criticized her parents, now dead, for not telling their children about their heritage.
But she concluded: "My guess is that they (parents) associated our heritage with suffering and wanted to protect us."
Her book recalls tough struggles with Clinton's male-dominated foreign policy team.
But she told Reuters she felt Clinton was very supportive of her, and having seen the toll Bush administration infighting has taken on Powell, she is less inclined to think her battles resulted from being a woman.
Did someone say Madeline Albright?
She calls the discovery of their lying a diplomatic opportunity? What an optimist...which is the kindest thing I can think to say of a woman who bungled every diplomatic opportunity that came her way.
Who is the fugliest female democrat.
I'll start. I vote Janet Reno, no, hold on, Helen Thomas; ummmm. Decisions... decisions.
No bias on the part of Reuters, I'm sure. The "journalist" still can't get over the fact Bore lost.
/john
Alan Colmes.
/john
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