Believe it or not: Foreign Policy Success for Bush

[kallend 2,106]

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#1 IT'S THE PRINCIPLE OF IT!

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You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency. Somerset Maugham

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The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[dorbie 0]

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Credit should be given to the SIX parties involved. This was not simply a bilateral agreement.

Sorry but I can't simply give all the credit to the Bush Administration for either its potential success or failure.

You could give him credit for insisting on the 6-party talks. That's about the only hopeful difference between this and previous deals and he got slammed by Kerrey & Co. for it, now you're sneering. Did you actually take notice of what China said about NK last week? That was not unrelated.

[Zipp0 1]

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what inclination do you have which draws you to believe they will uphold it this time?

This is where the 'verify' comes in. The reality is, we have no other viable option in this case. This at least will allow us to get people inside NK to see what they have been up to.

The agreement must allow unencumbered access to sites, and we need to break off the deal if they backtrack even a little.

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Chuck Norris doesn't do push-ups, he pushes the Earth down.

[billvon 3,076]

>IT'S THE PRINCIPLE OF IT!

We killed innocent children in Iraq. If someone's principles prefer that to paying a country to do what we want, well - let's just say I have different principles.

Let's take an example. You own a few hundred acres, and have a shooting range in the back of your house. A day-care center opens up next to you. The owner comes by and asks you to stop shooting; it scares the kids and she's worried you will miss and hit one. "I've been doing this for 20 years, and never hit anything but the target or the berm behind it," you tell her.

What options are open to her?

1) Try discussion (which didn't work in the above example)
2) Shoot you, kill your dog to scare you into stopping, or steal your guns
3) Offer you $5000 a year to go to the range down the street

3) seems like the more reasonable and principled approach.

>My point is that it never worked before in past administrations.

So send inspectors and make the oil conditional upon their reports.

>It's time to stop acting like "little johnny" who just got his lunch
>money taken by the playground bully.

I think you got that backwards. It's time to stop acting like the playground bully. Time to start paying people do what we want instead of just beating the crap out of them all the time.

[warpedskydiver 0]

So you are saying that you are okay with being bullied by other countries just because we have more $$$ ????

[billvon 3,076]

>You know that is the only way to stop an aggressor is to give in, and
>let them have whatever they ask for.

If you wanted your neighbor to get rid of the junker he parked on his lawn, would you:

a) offer to pay for a towtruck to haul it away or
b) just shoot his dog and threaten to kill him if he didn't get rid of it?

[NCclimber 0]

The problem is the US has previously offered incentives "to go to the range down the street", but the property owner starts shooting again, right after he gets all the incentives.

[willard 0]

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Well said.
Foreign relations can be done one of two ways: We can trade for influence or kill for it. I'd rather trade, even if some trades end up total write offs.

Willard, I have no issue with that if we were working with a country that keeps their end of the bargin. N.K. never has!!! Why can't we see that?

That is a very valid point, one that I have taken into consideration.

With NK we have three choices.
a: We pay them off.
b: We force them militarily to succumb to our will, i.e. bully them.
c: We aim thousands of nukes at them and let them know we'll turn them into a cinder if they launch so much as a bottle rocket.

I'll stay with option a.

Someone once said that you can't swat all the flies, so you put out bait so the rest will leave you alone.

[warpedskydiver 0]

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>You know that is the only way to stop an aggressor is to give in, and
>let them have whatever they ask for.

If you wanted your neighbor to get rid of the junker he parked on his lawn, would you:

a) offer to pay for a towtruck to haul it away or
b) just shoot his dog and threaten to kill him if he didn't get rid of it?

Why on earth would I harm a dog?

[rehmwa 2]

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If all sides can stick to the terms of the deal

I'd like to see how that will be verified over time. NK doesn't have a good track record on this topic.

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Driving is a one dimensional activity - a monkey can do it - being proud of your driving abilities is like being proud of being able to put on pants

[billvon 3,076]

>Why on earth would I harm a dog?

Same reason the USA would kill North Koreans. To get our way.

Personally, I'd offer to pay for the towtruck. I'd probably do it a few times. If that didn't work, I'd get a towtruck, pull up to his house, and say "hey, I'll give you $100 right now if you let me haul this thing away." Might work, might not. But if it did work, then I am out a few hundred bucks and I have what I want. He has some money and is happy. And no one needs to die.

[billvon 3,076]

>I'd like to see how that will be verified over time.

On-site inspectors. No inspections, no oil.

[rehmwa 2]

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>Why on earth would I harm a dog?

Same reason the USA would kill North Koreans. To get our way.

I can't believe you think of North Koreans and dogs as the same thing.

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Driving is a one dimensional activity - a monkey can do it - being proud of your driving abilities is like being proud of being able to put on pants

[ExAFO 0]

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>Why on earth would I harm a dog?

Same reason the USA would kill North Koreans...

Dinner?

Illinois needs a CCW Law. NOW.

[billvon 3,076]

>I can't believe you think of North Koreans and dogs as the same thing.

And I'm equating nuclear reactors to old broken-down cars. It's not fair, because most old broken-down cars have different types of water pumps than nuclear reactors - so the analogy is completely wrong. Apples and oranges. A horrible comparison.

(That idiot Billvon thinks a truck water pump is the same as the recirc pumps in a reactor. And he thinks he's so smart.)

[warpedskydiver 0]

Fido, the other pink meat....

[billvon 3,076]

>Dinner?

That's the dog. North Koreans are too stringy.

[NCclimber 0]

Here's an interesting story on the subject.

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On Oct. 4, 2002, officials from the U.S. State Department flew to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, and confronted Kim Jong-il's foreign ministry with evidence that Kim had acquired centrifuges for processing highly enriched uranium, which could be used for building nuclear weapons. To the Americans' surprise, the North Koreans conceded. It was an unsettling revelation, coming just as the Bush administration was gearing up for a confrontation with Iraq. This new threat wasn't imminent; processing uranium is a tedious task; Kim Jong-il was almost certainly years away from grinding enough of the stuff to make an atomic bomb.

But the North Koreans had another route to nuclear weapons--a stash of radioactive fuel rods, taken a decade earlier from its nuclear power plant in Yongbyon. These rods could be processed into plutonium--and, from that, into A-bombs--not in years but in months. Thanks to an agreement brokered by the Clinton administration, the rods were locked in a storage facility under the monitoring of international weapons-inspectors. Common sense dictated that--whatever it did about the centrifuges--the Bush administration should do everything possible to keep the fuel rods locked up.

Unfortunately, common sense was in short supply. After a few shrill diplomatic exchanges over the uranium, Pyongyang upped the ante. The North Koreans expelled the international inspectors, broke the locks on the fuel rods, loaded them onto a truck, and drove them to a nearby reprocessing facility, to be converted into bomb-grade plutonium. The White House stood by and did nothing. Why did George W. Bush--his foreign policy avowedly devoted to stopping "rogue regimes" from acquiring weapons of mass destruction--allow one of the world's most dangerous regimes to acquire the makings of the deadliest WMDs?

Check out this link for more.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0405.kaplan.html

I'm guess Bush was too caught up in his "get Saddam" program to be distracted with Kim's overt WMD program.

[rehmwa 2]

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> most old broken-down cars have different types of water pumps than nuclear reactors

"most"?

I can't believe you are advocating cooking Dog zombies in a nuclear reactor water pump.

Sure it helps soften the stringiness of the meat, but dogs are people, too. But, if we must, it helps to cook in some apples and some citrus fruits into the stew for a little sweetness flavor.

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Driving is a one dimensional activity - a monkey can do it - being proud of your driving abilities is like being proud of being able to put on pants

[billvon 3,076]

>"most"?

You've never seen my other car.

[AdD 1]

To the ppl re:cost of the subsidy, I believe this is a multilateral (gasp) agreement and the US will not bear the total cost.

Life is ez
On the dz
Every jumper's dream
3 rigs and an airstream

[rushmc 23]

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Credit should be given to the SIX parties involved. This was not simply a bilateral agreement.

Sorry but I can't simply give all the credit to the Bush Administration for either its potential success or failure.

Good point, however it must be noted that many pushed Bush to one on one talks with NK with he resisited saying that tactic did not work before and multi national talks is what was needed. So, kudos to Bush.

But as stated before, the sucess remains to be seen

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[Gawain 0]

I was pretty surprised about this when I read about it this morning. I'm not worried about us mucking it up. We didn't muck it up the last time, or the time before that....

So I try and I scream and I beg and I sigh
Just to prove I'm alive, and it's alright
'Cause tonight there's a way I'll make light of my treacherous life
Make light!

[DaVinci 0]

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Good point, however it must be noted that many pushed Bush to one on one talks with NK with he resisited saying that tactic did not work before and multi national talks is what was needed. So, kudos to Bush.

I remember when people jumped Bush's case for wanting 6 party talks. Now they want to refuse to admit it might be the only tactic that will work.

[Gawain 0]

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Good point, however it must be noted that many pushed Bush to one on one talks with NK with he resisited saying that tactic did not work before and multi national talks is what was needed. So, kudos to Bush.

I remember when people jumped Bush's case for wanting 6 party talks. Now they want to refuse to admit it might be the only tactic that will work.

As promising a development this might become, he will not earn many political points for this. There are parties that will deflect this and keep it from seeing the full light.

I also think that this development may have played a role in some of the recent comments coming out of Iran.

So I try and I scream and I beg and I sigh
Just to prove I'm alive, and it's alright
'Cause tonight there's a way I'll make light of my treacherous life
Make light!