Posted on 01/27/2003 11:02:47 AM PST by RCW2001
DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, describing bombs as North Korea's only cash crop, said Monday it was urgent for Washington to reach a deal with Pyongyang before poverty drove it to sell a nuclear weapon.
Clinton, who was president during a previous nuclear crisis with North Korea in the early 1990s, said the United States should be prepared to sign a non-aggression pact with the Stalinist nation if it abandoned all its atomic programs.
"North Korea has greater capacity to produce atomic weapons than Iraq does, and less capacity to feed itself than Iraq does. So for the North Koreans, their 'cash crops', if you will, are missiles and bombs," Clinton told Reuters in an interview.
"So I think it is urgent that before they, out of economic necessity, get more irresponsible, we do what we can with the South Koreans, the Japanese, the Chinese and the Russians to make a big deal with them, a verifiable deal to end all nuclear programs and their long-range missile sales."
In return, North Korea should get "the international recognition they crave," as well as desperately needed cash for food and energy programs.
The United States should "give them a non-aggression pact if they want that, because we'd never attack them unless they did something that violated that pact anyway."
The latest nuclear crisis erupted when the United States announced last October that North Korea had admitted to running a covert program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
Pyongyang has subsequently expelled international inspectors and pulled out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. U.S. officials have said they fear it may already possess a small number of nuclear weapons.
Its actions are in breach of a 1994 deal with Washington, without which Clinton said Pyongyang "would have had 100 weapons by now, and the temptation to sell them would be overwhelming, because they're so poor."
He described North Korea's behavior as a form of attention-seeking.
"North Korea wants to be reconciled with the world, they want to be reconciled with their neighbors and accepted by the United States and other great powers. They sometimes think the only way they can get anybody's attention is to misbehave," he said in the interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
"We can't keep going through this endless cycle of rewarding their misbehavior. So we need a comprehensive agreement here, and I think we should do that sooner rather than later because they can make big bombs, and do it well."
It's a deal with Washington for the blame that it didn't work, but he takes credit for it not being worse!?!?!
SHUT THE .... UP!
Between this and the dims 'prebuttle', a plan designed to blame Pres. Bush for 'ignoring' 'important issues' or listening to their 'pleas' for 'compassion'. They have set a trap that usually turns on them when he hits it out of the park with his speach. Last week Rush said 'they keep opening the door into their noses. ;-)
These people are vile.
Howlin, he was always more comfortable with the hard left of Europe than he ever was with Americans.
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