Conversation with a revisionist history professor

Dear Professor:
In your NYT's op-ed "What does North Korean want..." you state that the agreement negotiated by Secretary Albright "crumbled in the wake of the administration's preemptive doctrine and charges that a second nuclear program was up and running."

You seem to be blaming Bush for igniting the current NK problem, yet earlier in your opinion you state that NK produced several bombs from their enriched uranium stock pile. Was that part of the Albright agreement or violation thereof?

Dear Stan:
Bush failed to follow through on the missile agreement, something that Albright has complained about ever since. Michael Gordon wrote a full investigative report on all this on March 6, 2001 in the Times. Powell wanted to follow on with the agreement, but hardliners blocked him.

Meanwhile, the entire plutonium complex was frozen for eight years, until Bush (1) announced his preemptive doctrine in September 2002, saying NK was a target of it; and (2) he sent James Kelly to Pyongyang the next month to accuse them of having a second nuclear program in highly-enriched uranium. The North says screw you, leaves the NPT, gets their reactor back, plus the 8000 fuel rods that were put in concrete casks in 1994.
Result: North Korea still has all its missiles, may have 5 or 6 more atomic bombs, and may have a highly enriched uranium program--and they have paid no penalty for this. A catastrophic failure, if you ask me.

Dear professor:
As I understand it, NK secretly developed nuclear weapons from the get go. The devil is in the details..What did we have to do to follow up on the Albright policy -- pay NK more blackmail? Bush is sending aid to NK now. Albright appeased NK and now Kim Jong Il will not accept less. 2) I don't remember Bush saying NK must change regimes, although it was obvious even to The Clinton administration.

All Albright and Clinton did was kick the problem down the road for another president to handle. If Clinton had not shored up NK, who knows, perhaps there might have been a revolt and a regime change.

It's ludicrous to claim that join war maneuvers is the reason NK started this latest missile brouhaha.What has really pissed Kim off is the Bush administration's move against Kim's laundering of counterfeit 50s and 100s through a Macoa bank. Bush is messing with Kim's slush fund with which he buys loyalty.

Do you think that NK is justified in developing long range nuclear missiles. Do you think Bush should meet with Kim, unfreeze his bank accounts of counterfeit dollars and increase the amount of paid blackmail.Your bias against Republicans and particularly Bush is palpable.

Dear Stan,
Just a suggestion: how about learning something before entering a discussion you seem to know very little about? For starters try Michael Gordon's 3/6/2001 investigative report on the missile deal in the NY Times. Next look up RIMPAC-2006--running just between the dates when the Korean War began and ended.
Third, try to explain to yourself why Bush has failed in every important way with Iraq, Iran, and North Korea--his very own axis of evil?

Dear Professor:
You didn't answer my question, Do you think the true villain in this recent brouhaha with NK is the U.S. and that Kim Jong has the right to develop long range nuclear missiles? Please answer. I challenge you to read the following en totus.

Evidently, the Wall Street Journal has entered an argument it doesn't know anything about either, Kim Jong IL's negotiating history, and ours. As it states: "The conventional view is that he (Kim Jong Il) wants direct talks with the U.S. leading to security guarantees, normalization of ties and an end to Pyongyang's economic isolation. And this, it is further said, is the happy state toward which North Korea and the U.S. were headed in the late 1990s until the Bush crew started talking about the "axis of evil" and pre-emption, thereby provoking Kim's current discontent.

"All will be well, moreover, if President Bush drops his gratuitously hostile attitude toward Kim and picks up where the Clinton Administration left off. The amazing thing is that serious people purport to believe this after 20 years of contrary evidence.

"Contrary to myth, the Bush Administration continued to honor the terms of the Framework, despite its obvious misgivings. In August 2002, Charles Pritchard, Mr. Bush's special envoy to North Korea, attended the groundbreaking of one of the reactors; State Department spokesman Philip Reedker praised the event as "tangible progress made in construction and the importance to the reactor project's ultimate success."

Albright's Agreed Framework was a bust from the start and Clinton refused to accept its failure. He just pushed the NK problem down the road to another president and the press went along.

"A 1999 congressional study determined that Pyongyang was cheating on the agreement, but Albright disregarded the warning and continued to claim that the Agreed Framework was a success."

"Ex-President Bill Clinton knew that North Korea had resumed its nuclear weapons program at least two years before he left the White House - long before he now claims -- according to former Clinton White House insider Dick Morris."After citing the Post report, Morris told O'Reilly: 'For [Clinton] to take the position he didn't know North Korea was cheating is absolutely disingenuous. Not only did he know, but while he knew, he was pressing Congress to give them food and fuel to honor his '94 agreement [with Pyongyang]."

Today's news tells us what Kim Jong ll is really pissed off about and it's not RIMPAC - 2006 (Pacific war games) as you assert. According to the LA Times "North Korea will return to talks on its nuclear program if the United States releases $24 million in frozen funds held in a bank in Macao, a senior diplomat said in an interview published today (7/8)....The Macao money has been a bone of contention between the United States and North Korea since September, when the U.S. Treasury Department accused the Banco Delta Asia, in the tiny Chinese enclave, of laundering proceeds of counterfeiting and other illicit activities on behalf of North Korea.
"Regarding the investigative piece in the NYT regarding Bush and North Korea: the Times has no credibility after the recent examples of their anti-Bush, ant-war, leftist agenda. As far as Bush's failure with the Axes of Evil; didn't I read somewhere that a despotic Iraqi leader was deposed - and regarding the other two evils, the "fat lady hasn't sung yet"