Piling On

ThinkProgress' daily Progress Report has a very thorough summary of the North Korean nuclear issue over the last six years that's worth a read. Here's one of the sections:

'HAPHAZARD DIPLOMACY': By virtually every measure, Bush's North Korea policy has been a failure. Diplomatic efforts have broken down and North Korea has resumed plutonium production. When Bush took office, North Korea had produced enough plutonium under President George H.W. Bush for 1-2 nuclear weapons. Today, the country possesses material for 4-13 nuclear weapons. If North Korea unloads another batch of fuel, it may have enough nuclear material for 8 to 17 nuclear bombs by 2008. Sunday's test was simply the culmination of the "Bush administration's haphazard diplomacy in Northeast Asia over the past six years," noted the Center for American Progress's Joseph Cirincione. The Bush administration has consistently lacked a strong, coherent North Korea policy because of an "internal argument about whether to negotiate with the country or try to plot its collapse." (It has instead tried to do both, simultaneously.) In 2001, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell recommended that Bush "pick up where President Clinton and his administration left off" in trying to secure the peace between North and South Korea, while negotiating with the North to prevent its acquisition of nuclear weaponry. The Bush administration instead ramped up the rhetoric, including North Korea in the "axis of evil" in his 2002 State of the Union address and talking about the possible need to take preemptive military action against the regime in the administration's 2002 National Security Strategy. When North Korea responded by expelling international inspectors and unsealing its nuclear facilities, the Bush administration had no effective response. "With respect to the axis of evil," said James B. Steinberg, Clinton's deputy national security adviser, "are you better off today than you were four years ago? ... It's clear that the answer is we're worse off with respect to the nuclear proliferation problem in both North Korea and Iran than four to six years ago, and I would argue we're worse off in our overall security because of the situation in Iraq."