Of course it's hullballooo becaused the US was one of the countries that suggested sanctions. Not because the UN UNANIMOUSLY VOTED FOR SANCTIONS!
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Of course it's hullballooo becaused the US was one of the countries that suggested sanctions. Not because the UN UNANIMOUSLY VOTED FOR SANCTIONS!
Couldn't agree more. It's pretty hard to portray the US as a bully in this case. NOBODY wants Kim Jong Ill (or however you spell it :rolleyes: ) with his finger on the button. ....apart from Kim that is.Quote:
Of course it's hullballooo becaused the US was one of the countries that suggested sanctions. Not because the UN UNANIMOUSLY VOTED FOR SANCTIONS!
While the US may be the only nation to have used Atomic weapons I really don't have a problem with them, or any other nuclear nation, throwing their weight around a bit to prevent other nations from going nuclear. Nuclear proliferation is a very bad thing and any diplomatic mechanism short of outright war to help prevent it is alright by me, even if it does smack a little of hypocracy.
Someone was going to drop a nuke on someone during World War II. It was just luck, fate, whatever you want to call it that we did it first. Could have been the Russians, could have been the Nazis...but it wasn't.Quote:
Originally Posted by Valleysboy1978
I think that nuclear proliferation will always be around in much the same way that cancer, by virtue of existence, will also always be around. It is, I think, now endemic in the world we live in. We cannot, however much we might want to, uninvent technology, or uninvent knowledge.
I think that, in this case, the US, whether unilaterally or otherwise, are doing the world a huge favour by holding strong to their approach: it must be said that other nations, in this case, must pull along side the Americans to further strengthen the US stance.
It is, of course, not so much nuclear proliferation that's the problem, it is, as has been said, the person who controls the arsenal that's the real issue. This guy in Korea has consistently shown that he desires nuclear weapons and is not only developing the intrinsic technology, he also has an active development plan for delivering such weapons. He may not be too far down, but it will not take long, perhaps within a decade, for the N Koreans to be capable of ICBM launches.
There is, therefore, if one follows this line of reasoning, an argument to suggest that if one is democratic then one should be allowed to support a nuclear arsenal; this argument is flawed.
Although some will say the current approach of the Nuclear powers amounts to hypocritical, it is, unfortunately, because, for the worlds security, their hands are now tied. They will be tied until the world, in it's entirety, agrees not to allow the existence, or development, of any nuclear weapons. And frankly, that, in any conceivable notion of a foreseeable future, is infinitely unlikely.
True, no one wants North Korea to have the bomb, but if you look at it from their point of view, they absolutely must have the bomb to stand any chance against Bush focusing his next "war" on them. He has already branded them part of the axis of evil, and a terrorist state etc. As has already been mentioned, they would be insane not to be pursuing the bomb.Quote:
Originally Posted by FunkyDexter
Note: It's not just the US's fault they are going after the bomb, but as Putin recently stated, the current approach of threats is not a good method to co-erce them.
I suspect an assurance that they wouldn't be attacked by the US in the near future would go a long way to defusing the situation.
It's not like that hasn't been tried already. The last time that happened the UN helped them build reactors for energy and they built the nukes anyway.Quote:
Originally Posted by Suzzi
Did the US offer them a non-aggression treaty? I can't find any mention of it in google (which is not to say it didn't happen).Quote:
Originally Posted by MasterBlaster
Sort of, It was part on the deal they reached with Clinton. The US via the UN retrofitted their existing power plants with a deal to build new ones when the old ones maxed out. The stipulations were that NK Agree to onsite IAEA inspectors on the spent fuel. Non-agression was implied, I'm not sure and seriously doubt a formal treaty was ever signed or could be because of existing UN resolutions regarding NK and the existing ceasefire between the US and NK. It's all just useless paperwork any way. Why would the US give them a hand in their energy crisis if they were going to invade them? Meanwhile, the entire time that this was going on NK was working on black market nukes with plans to use the spent fuel from the US reactors to fuel them. Another in a long line of "gifts of mass destruction" to an enemy by the freaking headsmackers the US votes into office every 4 years. In the end GW Opened his goddamn mouth again spouting off krap about evildoers and gave Kim Jong Il an excuse. One thing I'll give him is that shortly before they were added to GW's sheit list of evil. The US busted a korean ship carrying tools for building nukes. His reasons were valid but he would have been better off keeping his mouth shut. At least Korea wouldn't have had an excuse for kicking inspectors out. Sound familliar? cough Iraq cough.Quote:
Originally Posted by SurfDemon
Thanks! I didn't know any of that history, like all history it gets soooo complex so quickly that everyone believes they are in the right.
I've been reading up a lot on Napolean recently, and depending on who wrote the historical accounts you wouldn't believe you were reading about the same individual. In the end, I guess the only point of view that really mattered to Napolean was what he thought his reasons were. He thought he was beloved of the people (which to a certain extent he was) and was heralding in a new age of enlightenment into Europe (and Russia). I guess it's the same from Kim 'lls point of view. He probably feels hard put upon and the victim in all of this, despite world opinion to the contrary.
Unfortunately, it's like trying to get an armed gun off a petulant youth. He knows that as soon as he gives you the gun, you're going to give him a right smacking, so he daren't hand it over, also he wants to try to use this gun to bargain for a cheeseburger. Whilst you could easily give him the cheeseburger, it's not going to solve anything because at the end of the day you still have a youth waving a gun around. Either way, you've got the same problem.
To be honest, although I am very careful about ever recommending violence as a solution, this is one of the few situations where a sudden accidental death might bring around a change in leadership and therefore open up the possibilities of meaningful dialog with the West and avert maybe thousands of deaths. Although I fully understand his reasons for doing what he is doing, I cannot see Kim Ill ever participating in the global peace process.
If he doesn't die accidently, then the best we can hope for is to at least contain North Korea until a change of leadership takes place naturally. Unfortunately, he is likely to chose his successor, and he is likely to be cut from the same cloth. So, we are left with the same problem. I see little choice but to try and befriend them and hope for the best.
There's more to it than that. The deals to help them out by the Clinton admin etc., were ended by Bush early in his first term. This included subsidized oil shipments. Bush did this on the principle that he wouldn't do anything for them until they did....whatever. It doesn't really matter what Bush wanted them to do, even though what Bush wanted was some reasonable concession. The result was that crucial energy supplies delivered via the Clinton admin deal, were ended.
To N. Korea, this was coersion, which, in fact, it was! Bush was saying effectively "You want this oil? Well, here's what you have to do to get it!" This makes sense to lots of people, but lots of people are also morons. North Korea is a strange place, but not an unknowable place. We have decades of experience in negotiating with them (heck, National Geographic even did an article on them that included the peculiarities of those negotiations). Any rational observer would have known EXACTLY what N. Korea would do in response to this. After all, they are hyper sensitive to "saving face". This is a country that is so attentive to relative positions that they shaved the chair legs on their opponents chairs for negotiations so that they would appear taller than their opponents (a trick I have heard Bill O'Reilley uses, as well).
Using the oil as a weapon to hold over them to get them to dance to our tune was perfectly designed to cause them to go nuclear. They may not respond well to carrots, but the stick has ALWAYS caused them to go the exact opposite of the desired direction, even if it means starving their own population. They do this simply because of face, rather than some deeper long-range strategic planning. When we cut off their energy supply, even though that supply was nothing but a bald faced bribe for good behavior, the only option they had was to break the seals on the nuke plant. Once that was going, they had no reason not to continue to the next logical step.
We could have prevented it by simply accepting that an alternative energy supply was the cost of keeping this rogue elephant from running amok. Consider that the baseline, and try to negotiate a better deal from there, but recognize that the cost of abandoning that baseline, no matter how distasteful such a bribe was, would be a nuclear N. Korea.
Well, little wonder that Bush admin couldn't see that. Especially during the first term, Bush made this mistake over and over: If somebody was not obeying, take the stick to them, never the carrot. All stick, no carrot. Cost him the senate, cost him Korea, cost him UN support in Iraq....hmmm, there were a few others, too. I suspect it came from his business background, as all carrot no stick is a common business practice where one person is the boss, and the others rise and fall by his favor. In politics, everybody has other pressures, and are not dependent on the leader for their livelihoods. Bush was always shocked when he beat on somebody and they didn't fall into line. His mistakes tended to be costly to him. This one was costly to the world. He mended his ways after losing the senate in his first term. He learned that senators might not fall in line, they might simply prevent him from getting anything done. With N. Korea, he didn't learn. Now what?
I guess to expand a bit, Bush caught them red handed with their hands in the nuclear black market cookie jar. The oil shpments were to be stopped until another agreement could be made with the UN. NK refused to return to the negotiating table with any one other than the US directly, something they knew could never happen without UN Involvment, so the oil never got turned back on. That was a no win situation regardless if the oil kept flowing. Either way they'd still be building nukes. I figure that if US and Soviet power companies with a budget bigger than NK's entire worth can have a few meltdowns, the Nkorea situation will solve itself in full fluroescent green glory.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker