The Invisible Hand

The Clinton Version

This weekend the Clinton legacy brigade tested out some new talking points on North Korea in the hopes of deflecting blame for negotiating the greatest foreign policy sham treaty since Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich with a sign pasted to his back reading "mißbrauchen Sie mich."

According to Ash Carter, a former Clinton Defense Department appointee, who’s name in English literally means “Garbage Hauler,” the Clinton Administration was this close (tiny space between thumb and index finger) to attacking North Korea in 1994 when it announced that it would withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The Comeback Kid supposedly weighted the options and was poised to act with uncharacteristic boldness to prevent North Korea from plunging the world into the abyss of nuclear terrorism.

All this, by the way, seemed to escape the notice of the news media at the time.

Ash Carter says the crisis was “defused” at the 11th hour by the “Agreed Framework” hammered out by Clinton’s steely negotiating team of Jimmy Carter and Warren Christopher et al.

Well, considering that the North Koreans never actually honored that agreement and in fact embarked on an even more ambitious nuclear weapons program just after agreeing to it, that hardly qualifies as a crisis defused. The most charitable interpretation would be a crisis hidden in the attic for the next tenants to discover.

It sounds a hell of a lot more like confronted with a determined Communist dictator the Clinton Administration surrendered unilaterally.

The essence of the crisis is that in 1994 North Korea threatened to build a nuclear weapon. Today, after the Clinton Administration defused the crisis, North Korea is threatening to use the nuclear weapon its claims to have built.

Nice work guys.

By the way, what do you have to do in Washington to “never work in this town again?”