Conflict of Interest
Well….North Korea tested a nuke. As Josh Marshall says, this is further proof that the Bush Administration’s foreign policy is a complete failure :
President Bush came to office believing that Clinton’s policy amounted to appeasement. Force and strength were the way to deal with North Korea, not a mix of force, diplomacy and aide. And with that premise, President Bush went about scuttling the 1994 agreement, using evidence that the North Koreans were pursuing uranium enrichment (another path to the bomb) as the final straw.
. . .
Threats are a potent force if you’re willing to follow through on them. But he wasn’t. The plutonium production plant, which had been shuttered since 1994, got unshuttered. And the bomb that exploded tonight was, if I understand this correctly, almost certainly the product of that plutonium uncorked almost four years ago.So the President talked a good game, the North Koreans called his bluff and he folded. And since then, for all intents and purposes, and all the atmospherics to the contrary, he and his administration have done essentially nothing.
I wouldn’t use the word “nothing”. At least one member of the Administration has been doing something, though it would probably be described as too much carrot, not enough stick :
Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, sat on the board of a company which three years ago sold two light water nuclear reactors to North Korea – a country he now regards as part of the “axis of evil” and which has been targeted for regime change by Washington because of its efforts to build nuclear weapons.Mr Rumsfeld was a non-executive director of ABB, a European engineering giant based in Zurich, when it won a $200m (£125m) contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors. The current defence secretary sat on the board from 1990 to 2001, earning $190,000 a year. He left to join the Bush administration.
. . .
Many members of the Bush administration are on record as opposing Mr Clinton’s plans, saying that weapons-grade nuclear material could be extracted from the type of light water reactors that ABB sold. Mr Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and the state department’s number two diplomat, Richard Armitage, both opposed the deal as did the Republican presidential candidate, Bob Dole, whose campaign Mr Rumsfeld ran and where he also acted as defence adviser.One unnamed ABB board director told Fortune magazine that Mr Rumsfeld was involved in lobbying his hawkish friends on behalf of ABB.
. . .
The type of reactors involved in the ABB deal produce plutonium which needs refining before it can be weaponised. One US congressman and critic of the North Korean regime described the reactors as “nuclear bomb factories”.North Korea expelled the inspectors last year and withdrew from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in January at about the same time that the Bush administration authorised $3.5m to keep ABB’s reactor project going.
Give it a second for those last few paragraphs to sink in. One of the biggest enemies of the United States just joined the nuclear club over the weekend and our secretary of defense was involved in selling them the technology to do it. I won’t even bother to speculate about the ulterior motives that have surely shaped our policies towards North Korean non-proliferation, but I’d love to know how much money Donald Rumsfeld has made helping Kim Jong-il make a nuclear bomb. Between Rummy and North Korea, the Bush family’s close ties to the Saudis, and our nuke-selling, Bin Laden-harboring “close allies” Pakistan, I can’t help but look forward to 2008 when our country has another chance to choose a leader who isn’t all chummy with the bad guys.
UPDATE : As commenters and emailers have pointed out, Rumsfeld’s chumminess with the North Koreans is a little more complicated than I let on. The nuclear reactors that Rumsfeld helped sell Kim Jong-il likely weren’t the source of this weekend’s nuclear test. So Rummy isn’t arming rogue leaders, he was just doing business with them. Or as it was put in the Guardian article :
Critics of the administration’s bellicose language on North Korea say that the problem was not that Mr Rumsfeld supported the Clinton-inspired diplomacy and the ABB deal but that he did not “speak up against it”. “One could draw the conclusion that economic and personal interests took precedent over non-proliferation,” said Steve LaMontagne, an analyst with the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington.
Sounds like the kinda guy you want running the Pentagon, huh?
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Holy F’n crap! My head really IS going to explode!
All these links between all our “enimies” and Dick, W, and Rumbag, and still when I try to engage in serious discussion about their motives with my retarded repub in-laws, they simply chalk it up to “you and your wacky conspiracy theories”
W… T…. F…..!!!!
Comment by Miles — October 10, 2006 @ 7:18 am
Non-story. These are Light-water reactors that Clinton negotiated to sell to N.Korea in exchange for them locking up the fuel rods from the carbon mediator reactors that Russia sold N. Korea in the 80′s.
The “seals” that N.Korea recently broke are on these Russian reactors, which, unlike LW reactors, produce a large amount of plutonium.
Believe it or not, Bush probably doesn’t want N.Korea having nuclear weapons.
Both the right wing noise machine about “Clinton arming them”, as well as the left wing “no, Bush armed them” are both idiotic.
Russia and Pakistan armed them. Clinton slowed them down for a while, then Bush ticked them off enough to go break the inspector seals.
you can update your story now
Comment by Brian — October 10, 2006 @ 10:13 am
Those would be the KEDO reactors, construction of which was abandoned in January 2006:
Comment by Gag Halfrunt — October 11, 2006 @ 3:35 am
I agree with Brian. I think the North Korea nuke story is actually a sad echo of the larger failures of our government for the better part of our lifetimes. From 1991 through 2003, the story on our foreign intelligence is that it has never gotten anything right. We didn’t know the truth about Iraq’s, India’s, or Pakistan’s nuclear programs untill too late. September 11th represented a massive failure of intelligence, both foreign and domestic. And North Korea also represents an administration-spanning failure of intelligence and foreign policy. Our problems now stem from making more bad policy on top of old bad policy.
Comment by E-Rock — October 11, 2006 @ 9:16 am
Disagree with E-Rock:
9/11 didn’t represent a massive failure of intelligence, though as with the pre-Iraq invasion intel that is what the Bush Administration would like you to believe. The truth is that they were strongly warned by intel about an impending terror attack. And they were also told countless times that Iraq was not a threat by intel- but Cheney wouldn’t accept it and kept prodding for someone to tell him differently. This country’s intel is not wrong all the time and it is never CRAZY wrong.
Comment by NM — October 11, 2006 @ 9:46 am
I hate to rain on anyone’s parade but the whole point of selling the Koreans those light water reactors was supposed to be that they couldn’t be used for producing material for weapons — or at least not to the same extent as the reactors they already had. That and the fuel oil we gave them were intended to remove any rationale that NK needed to keep their existing reactors — which were being used to produce weapons grade plutonium at the time — up and running for domestic energy production. That deal got them to shut down those existing reactors and put the plutonium they had already produced under UN surveilance. But that’s where they got their bomb material.
Believe me I’m the last person on earth you would call a Rumsfeld apologist but his list of actual crimes is plenty long enough to be damning. You don’t have to go distorting one of the few things he’s done in his sorry life that arguably wasn’t such a bad idea. And if you want to criticize the right wing you need to make damned sure you get your facts straight, because you know their going to come back on you with everything they’ve got if you give them even a glimmer of an opening.
Comment by CalD — October 11, 2006 @ 10:44 am
NM, we also thought Iraq wasn’t a threat before the first gulf war but found out afterwards that they were much further along in their weapons programs than we’d known. That’s why the intelligence community was hesitant to say definitively that Iraq wasn’t a threat anymore. We have had a decade and a half of intelligence screw-ups and leadership changes.
Comment by E-Rock — October 11, 2006 @ 10:58 am
This is a perfect example of stupidity with the morons on the right they do not care what they do,who they sell arms too and that money is everything to these greedy fucks. Thank you for selling the enemy weapons that can “destroy our way of life”
Comment by Edub — October 11, 2006 @ 5:00 pm
It just seems to me that this is another ploy to engage North Korea to attack the U.S. (probably being formulated by the Bush administration, as I type) so that this war-mongering administration has another reason to take away more American Civil Liberties, so that they can declare another war and shed more American blood, so that they can have POWER, POWER, POWER. Does this sound as Germany was in the 30s?
These men could not use diplomacy among themselves, let alone with another nation. Each wants more power and more money. Last year Dick Cheney earned $8,000,000, a salary from the U.S. and commissions from Halliburton. I suppose he will form no-bid contracts for Halliburton to clean up North Korea. Larry Silverstein who leased the WTC for 99 years, 6 weeks for $250,000, yielded $7 billion from insurance policies. Marvin Bush head security on the WTC. His contract with WTC was up on Sept. 11. The WTC was LOSING money. It was a white elephant LOSING money. Employees complained of plaster dust being left in the workplace 2 weeks before 9/11 (from drilling into the plaster). Employees heard forklifts moving around on floors which were empty. Bomb-sniffing dog patrols were taken away from the WTC the Thursday before 9/11. WTC 7 was imploded after not being hit by any plane debris. It takes at least a week to plan to implode a building, does it not?
Does this sound as if it was a conspiracy? If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, then it’s a duck. Giuliani was even involved, destroying evidence. Condi called Willie Brown to tell him not to fly on 9/11. Ashcroft flew charters only.
Wake up America, these fascists are stealing our lives and trying to steal our souls because they think we are clueless and they are above the law.
Yes, Virginia, there is a conspiracy!
Comment by Linda — October 11, 2006 @ 7:37 pm
Let’s not forget that all the debris from the WTC collapse was sent immediately to China to be recycled (i.e., evidence destroyed) though it is in direct conflict w/ U.S. law. There are also eyewitness accounts from the engineers who maintained the WTC that there was a huge explosion under the WTC prior to the planes hitting the building that sent a huge generator hurtling across the area in which it had previously worked. The conspiracy lives on…
Comment by MadDog — October 13, 2006 @ 7:27 am