Bush blew a chance with Kim?

news.yahoo.com...


WASHINGTON - North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, in a previously undisclosed message to President Bush in November 2002, said the United States and North Korea "should be able to resolve the nuclear issue in compliance with the demands of the new century," according to two private U.S. Korea experts who delivered Kim's message to the White House.

If the United States makes a bold decision, we will respond accordingly," Kim said in a written personal message to Bush that he sent through Donald Gregg, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, and Don Oberdorfer, a Korea expert at the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

Gregg and Oberdorfer write about their mission to Pyongyang in an opinion piece in Wednesday's editions of The Washington Post.

Kim's offer was conditioned on U.S. recognition of North Korean sovereignty and assurances of non-aggression, Gregg and Oberdorfer wrote.

They said they took the message to White House and State Department officials and urged the administration to follow up on Kim's initiative.

But the administration spurned engagement with Kim who, in response, the authors said, moved within weeks to expel the U.N. inspectors from the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and reopen plutonium facilities that had been shut down since 1994 under an agreement with the Clinton administration.

Just a month before the November 2002 meeting with Kim, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly had led a U.S. delegation to North Korea, where they confronted officials with intelligence information suggesting that the regime had secretly embarked on a uranium enrichment program in defiance of pledges in 1994 not to pursue nuclear weapons.

it looks like Bush says no no and no. so in the end, Kim wanted demands and Bush says no.

That kind of puts a damper on the whole "hell-bent irrational leader" theory.

He obviously wanted to cooperate at one point and was shut down by the US, his development of nuclear weapons was in response to the US' refusal to promise we won't attack, so what does he do? Builds nuclear weapons for deterrence, one way or another he wants to guarentee the US won't attack his country.

The neocons are not looking for a way out of the North Korean standoff.

They like things just as they are: as long as they have a scary boogeyman to frighten people with, they can get the domestic political support they need.

It's the same reason I don't expect the US (at least not under Bush & Co.) to make any serious attempts to capture OBL and bring him to justice - he is too useful for them out there on the loose somewhere.

[edit on 6/22/05 by xmotex]