Get PJ Media on your Apple

The Rosett Report

by Claudia Rosett
Page 1 of 2  Next ->   View as Single Page

Jimmy Carter’s Consistent Message to North Korea

November 27th, 2010 - 2:24 pm

For almost three decades now, it has been a regular feature of almost every U.S. foreign policy showdown that Jimmy Carter will jet in, or at least pipe up  –  almost always in ways that advance the interests of whatever despot, rogue regime, or terror group happens to be grabbing headlines in its quest to harm America and America’s allies. Drawing on the gravitas of his former office, ignoring his own disastrous record (for which Americans voted him out after a single term that brought Iran’s Islamic revolution, the Iranian hostage crisis, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — progenitor of the rise of al-Qaeda & cohorts), Carter has made it his stock in post-presidential trade to extend a hand to everyone and everything from Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, to the Hamas terrorists ruling Gaza, to the totalitarian regime of North Korea.

Thus did North Korea’s latest threats and attacks produce an op-ed in Wednesday’s Washington Post by Carter, “North Korea’s Consistent Message to the U.S.,” in which he reminded Americans that he had just visited North Korea this summer. Carter went there at the invitation of North Korea’s government, to obtain the release of an American, Aijalon Gomes, who had been imprisoned in North Korea and sentenced to eight years of hard labor for crossing illegally into the totalitarian state. But the grotesque brutality of North Korea’s system did not figure in Carter’s op-ed. Carter ignored such matters as North Korea’s prison labor camps, international criminal rackets such as counterfeiting U.S. currency, and a state system so rigid and controlling that under Kim Jong Il’s rule famine has killed more than one million North Koreans.

Instead, Carter informed his readers that “Pyongyang has sent a consistent message that during direct talks with the United States, it is ready to conclude an agreement to end its nuclear programs, put them all under IAEA inspection and conclude a permanent peace treaty to replace the ‘temporary’ cease-fire of 1953.” He urged that America respond to this offer, or else…

A small fraction of Carter’s claim is true. Pyongyang has indeed sent a consistent message to the U.S. But that message has consistently been the very opposite of any attempt to negotiate in good faith. If you look at deeds, not words (though even North Korea’s words veer often toward outrageous threats, such as “seas of fire” and war), Kim’s Pyongyang regime has sent a consistent message that it will cheat on any deal, violate any agreement, bully, threaten, extort, and — as Gordon Chang noted yesterday on PJ Media – kill people in the cause of sustaining itself in power. The vaunted Six-Party Talks deal in 2007 for denuclearization turned into a bonanza for Kim Jong Il, providing him with free fuel, food aid, and hard cash and leading to U.S. removal of North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Then, in late 2008, with Kim enjoying his new hoard of pay-offs, the whole deal collapsed over North Korea’s refusal to allow any real verification. While the first load of goodies was flowing to Pyongyang, in the summer of 2007, North Korea — even while promising to give up the development of nuclear weapons — was secretly helping Syria build a clandestine reactor on the Euphrates River, a plutonium factory in the Middle East. What ended that, in Sept. 2007, was not a gesture of North Korean good faith, but a strike by the Israeli Air Force.

Continued on Next Page ->
Page 1 of 2  Next ->   View as Single Page
Click here to view the 53 legacy comments

Comments are closed.