Shrub keeps claiming that loonytoon Kim Jong Il is 100% to blame
for the lack of progress in negotiations. But just as Shrub lied
about Iraq, WMDs, etc. etc. etc., so he has about North Korea.
But then, the US has been violating it's 1994 agreement to supply
North Korea with electricity and oil ever since the agreement was
signed, so why should any new blame shifting surprise?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050622/ap_on_re_as/us_north_korea
Bob Dog
Atheist #153 = 1^3 + 5^3 + 3^3
EAC's chief cook and brainwasher
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"You won't find any opposition to the idea of evolution among
sophisticated, educated theologians. It comes from an
exceedingly retarded, primitive version of religion, which
unfortunately is at present undergoing an epidemic in the
United States."
- Richard Dawkins
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Korea Experts: U.S. Spurned '02 Kim Effort
WASHINGTON - North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, in a previously
undisclosed message to President Bush in November 2002, said the
United States and North Korea "should be able to resolve the
nuclear issue in compliance with the demands of the new century,"
according to two private U.S. Korea experts who delivered Kim's
message to the White House.
"If the United States makes a bold decision, we will respond
accordingly," Kim said in a written personal message to Bush
that he sent through Donald Gregg, a former U.S. ambassador to
South Korea, and Don Oberdorfer, a Korea expert at the School of
Advanced International Studies in Washington.
Gregg and Oberdorfer write about their mission to Pyongyang in
an opinion piece in Wednesday's editions of The Washington Post.
Kim's offer was conditioned on U.S. recognition of North Korean
sovereignty and assurances of non-aggression, Gregg and
Oberdorfer wrote.
They said they took the message to White House and State
Department officials and urged the administration to follow up
on Kim's initiative.
But the administration spurned engagement with Kim who, in
response, the authors said, moved within weeks to expel the U.N.
inspectors from the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency,
withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and reopen plutonium
facilities that had been shut down since 1994 under an agreement
with the Clinton administration.
Just a month before the November 2002 meeting with Kim, Assistant
Secretary of State James Kelly had led a U.S. delegation to North
Korea, where they confronted officials with intelligence
information suggesting that the regime had secretly embarked on a
uranium enrichment program in defiance of pledges in 1994 not to
pursue nuclear weapons.
Multilateral efforts to negotiate a dismantling of the North's
nuclear facilities since then have not prospered.
As Gregg and Oberdorfer point out, at the time they delivered
Kim's message to senior officials in Washington, the
administration was deeply immersed in what turned out to be an
unsuccessful diplomatic effort in the U.N. Security Council to
head off war with Iraq.
U.S. 0fficials were not immediately available for comment on
Kim's reported 2002 overture to Washington.
Gregg and Oberdorfer said they see a new opportunity for a
breakthrough with North Korea in Kim's conciliatory comments last
week in which he raised the possibility of reversing his nuclear
program and rejoining the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
They urged that Bush follow up on Kim's overture by communicating
directly with him after consultations with Asian partners of the
United States in six-party nuclear disarmament talks.
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