A senior Bush administration official suggested Saturday that the nuclear crisis with North Korea was the predictable result of a flawed 1994 agreement signed by the Clinton administration with Pyongyang that “frontloaded all the benefits and left the difficult things to the end” — for the next president.
The comments marked a sharp change of direction from the administration’s insistence in recent weeks that only North Korea was to blame for the crisis. As recently as last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell said he gave “great credit” to the Clinton administration for freezing North Korea’s plutonium enrichment program with the 1994 Agreed Framework.
We have seen this numerous times before: the Bush Administration policy versus Colin Powell’s policy. Powell is a rogue and Bush is to blame for tolerating brazen dissension. The fact is that the Clinton Administration is to blame, and that the Bush Administration is a failure in dealing with the inherited crisis.