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Pyongyang moonshine
President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are coming under heavy fire from from one-time presidential loyalists over the administration's weak approach to North Korea. "This administration has always lacked the will to apply and sustain pressure on the North Korean regime to actually make a difference," said Carolyn Leddy, who served with John Bolton in the State Department and later as director of counterproliferation strategy at the National Security Council from July 2006 to November 2007.David Sands of The Washington Times reported yesterday that David Asher, who coordinated the State Department's North Korea Working Group from 2001 to 2005, describes the administration's policy towards Pyongyang this way: "Allowing North Korea to win its Cold War with the world will go down in history as one of the most remarkable and disturbing elements in the Bush administration legacy." Mr. Asher adds that Kim Jong-il's regime has "crossed all the red lines we set [in the six-party talks on North Korea's illicit nuclear weapons], blown past all the international treaty commitments, and has paid no attention to U.N. resolutions." Meanwhile, he says, the Bush administration has become "inebriated" on "Clinton-era moonshine" when it comes to Pyongyang. In recent weeks, doves like Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden and Jack Pritchard, who negotiated with North Korea during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, have used a much softer tone to raise some of the same substantive concerns about the Bush administration's policies. Posted by: ryuge 2008-05-05 |
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