Playing hardball hasn't worked with the North Koreans, and now the Shrub Administration is apparently looking for a way to save face. Of course; we'll blame Clinton!! After all, he did play Popsicle for that intern, right??
WASHINGTON -- A senior Bush administration official suggested Saturday that the nuclear crisis with North Korea was the predictable result of a flawed 1994 agreement signed by the Clinton administration with Pyongyang that "frontloaded all the benefits and left the difficult things to the end" -- for the next president.
The comments marked a sharp change of direction from the administration's insistence in recent weeks that only North Korea was to blame for the crisis. As recently as last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell said he gave "great credit" to the Clinton administration for freezing North Korea's plutonium enrichment program with the 1994 Agreed Framework.
On Saturday, North Korea threatened to abandon a moratorium on ballistic missile tests, further escalating a confrontation with its neighbors and the United States one day after withdrawing from a global treaty designed to halt the spread of nuclear weapons.
North Korea's ambassador to China, Choe Jin Su, issued the threat at a news conference in Beijing in which he defended his impoverished nation's right to possess "devices to save us from a nuclear attack" and accused the United States of adopting "hostile policies."
The Bush administration's new formulation of blame coincides with a spate of accusations, some from strong administration supporters, that President Bush may have antagonized North Korea by labeling it part of the "axis of evil" and helped provoke the crisis.
Sorry, folks, but your policy failures are your own. Along with the successes you inherited from Bill Clinton, you also have to deal with the failures. Instead of laying blame for your own lack of vision, perhaps you might give some thought to creative possibilities for resolving this litttle crisis. After all, this failure is your own creation, not the Clinton Administration's.
