North Korea and Star Wars Pork

As we commented yesterday the North Korean nuclear test is just another example of the failed foreign policy of the Bush administration. But is it a failure or exactly what the Bush administration wanted? In the latest edition of Newsweek Selig S. Harrison suggest that the Bush administration provoked the North Koreans to go nuclear.

North Korea: A Nuclear Threat

On Sept. 19, 2005, North Korea signed a widely heralded denuclearization agreement with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. Pyongyang pledged to "abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs." In return, Washington agreed that the United States and North Korea would "respect each other's sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize their relations."

Four days later, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sweeping financial sanctions against North Korea designed to cut off the country's access to the international banking system, branding it a "criminal state" guilty of counterfeiting, money laundering and trafficking in weapons of mass destruction.

The Bush administration says that this sequence of events was a coincidence. Whatever the truth, I found on a recent trip to Pyongyang that North Korean leaders view the financial sanctions as the cutting edge of a calculated effort by dominant elements in the administration to undercut the Sept. 19 accord, squeeze the Kim Jong Il regime and eventually force its collapse.

That's right, they signed an agreement with North Korea and broke it 4 days later, certainly a provocation. So why would the Bush administration actually want to provoke North Korea? Two words: "Star Wars". That's right the ultimate in corporate pork, the so called "missile defense system" which will never protect anything but the bottom line of selected defense contractors.