A Lack of Evidence

“Listening to some Democrats, you'd think the enemy was George Bush, not Kim Jong Il…”

– Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky

What evidence is there – at all – that the Democrats would have handled North Korea any differently than the Bush Administration? None! The most important agenda, the most important aspect about the Democratic platform the past few years has been nothing more than “oppose Bush”!

Let’s go back in time: What exactly did President Clinton do about North Korea? He signed an agreement with Pyongyang in the mid-1990s that the North Koreans immediately, and secretly, set about violating.

If Al Gore had secured the Oval Office instead of George W. Bush, would we have even gone to war in Afghanistan to go after the Taliban and al-Qaeda after the events of September 11, 2001? When our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed in 1998, what did President Bill Clinton do? He lobbed a few cruise missiles at some training camps in Afghanistan and not much else. While I don’t blame him for 9/11, we shouldn’t forget that it was under Clinton’s watch in 1996 that Osama bin Laden issued his fatwa, his declaration of war, against the United States.

How would John Kerry have handled North Korea if he’d won the election of 2004? Any differently? He probably would have signed more agreements with the North Koreans that they would have violated – because who can really trust a dictatorial regime that spends millions on R&D for nuclear weapons while the vast majority of its people starve? Since the North Koreans had already violated all their past agreements with Washington, what would have been the point of wasting the paper on another one?

I don’t disagree: the way the war in Iraq is being run is laughable, dangerously so. I don’t see what benefits Donald Rumsfeld brings to the Pentagon, and now that I’ve heard the Army is lowering some of its standards because it wouldn’t otherwise meet its recruitment goals, my opinion on the matter is only strengthened – and this is the case even when taking into account that a person’s worth to the Army, and America, might be more than their test scores or criminal records would lead one to believe.

It would be better if President Bush stopped talking about the need to “stay the course in Iraq”, and instead spoke of a need to “do the job right in Iraq”. But given that President Bush, far from going it alone, got the Chinese, the Russians, the South Koreans and the Japanese involved with the effort to disarm North Korea through negotiations, he can hardly be blamed for dropping the ball on this one. I mean, how often have the Democrats (along with the French) deplored this administration’s “unilateralism”? Would they have done any different?

No. They probably would have, once North Korea threatened a ballistic missile test like it did in July, agreed to the talks demanded by Pyongyang in return for scrubbing such a test. Then, seeing that they’d gotten away with that sort of blackmail, the North Koreans likely would have threatened to detonate a nuclear weapon to drag any sort of Democrat-run White House back to the negotiating table in order to butt-rape America once again and get something else they wanted.

And the Iranians, seeing this, would be even more assertive than they have been about their own nuclear program. The Iranians would’ve demanded direct negotiations, and any Democrat who was in the Oval Office would have agreed, and like their allies the North Koreans, the Iranian state-sponsors of terrorism would have publicly agreed to suspend their nuclear research program in English while in secret they would have – in Persian – ordered their scientists to continue development of nuclear weapons.

I’m sorry, but I don’t buy the argument of New Jersey’s Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat, that Bush “went to sleep at the switch” over North Korea “while he pursued his narrow agenda in Iraq.” I cannot picture, at all, Howard Dean or John Kerry being able to take a tough, meaningful stance against North Korea. John Edwards, maybe. Joe Lieberman, maybe. Not all Democrats are as weak on national security as Republicans make them out to be, and some likely do have the guts to defend the United States in the necessary manner.

Yes, Bush might have ignored warnings about an impending Islamist attack in the summer of 2001. Yes, Bush focused on Iraq more than on North Korea.

That’s the past.

We’ve got to deal with the present.

Whether the bomb the North Koreans detonated on Monday was a full-fledged nuclear weapon or a wanna-be nuke, their actions and declarations related to it have shown that the course of negotiations as prescribed by Democrats, the Russians and the Chinese – as well as the South Koreans – were too weak, too spineless, and not at all appropriate. China and Russia, North Korea’s two best friends, have a record of obstructing the imposition of meaningful sanctions by the U.N. Security Council – will this remain the case with the sanctions now under consideration in New York?

I can’t blame Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe for voicing his opinion that his country’s constitution needs to be revised to allow Japan to more vigorously defend itself. I prefer a strong Japan to a weak diplomatic process in northeast Asia that got, well, pretty much nothing in return for its existence except missile tests and test explosions. Thanks, in no small part, are to be directed toward Moscow and Beijing.

I think it’s time the Democrats stop telling us what they wouldn’t have done in Iraq or wouldn’t have done with regards to North Korea. Now’s the time to demonstrate what they will do with these situations. If all they will do is pull the troops out and champion an ass-covering National Intelligence Estimate that says not that others are choosing terrorism, but that we are causing it – wasn’t it an NIE in 2002 or 2003 that said Iraq had WMDs? – what good will that do us?

Should we negotiate in good faith with those who only negotiate in bad faith?

Didn’t Bill Clinton try that sort of thing with Pyongyang?

Didn’t it kind of, like…um, y’know…not work?

When it comes to the present situation involving the world and the undemocratic Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, let’s judge President Bush in the coming days and months by not only what he says, but what he does – just like the Democrats should be judged. They can blame Bush all they want right now for letting things get to this point, but they can’t prove that they would have acted any differently.