Gilligan wrote: crap snipped

"President Bush came to office believing that Clinton's policy amounted
to appeasement. Force and strength were the way to deal with North
Korea, not a mix of force, diplomacy and aide. And with that premise,
President Bush went about scuttling the 1994 agreement, using evidence
that the North Koreans were pursuing uranium enrichment (another path to
the bomb) as the final straw.

Remember the guiding policy of the early Bush years: Clinton did it=Bad,
Bush=Not whatever Clinton did.

All diplomatic niceties aside, President Bush's idea was that the North
Koreans would respond better to threats than Clinton's mix of carrots
and sticks.

Then in the winter of 2002-3, as the US was preparing to invade Iraq,
the North called Bush's bluff. And the president folded. Abjectly,
utterly, even hilariously if the consequences weren't so grave and vast.

Threats are a potent force if you're willing to follow through on them.
But he wasn't. The plutonium production plant, which had been shuttered
since 1994, got unshuttered. And the bomb that exploded tonight was, if
I understand this correctly, almost certainly the product of that
plutonium uncorked almost four years ago.

So the President talked a good game, the North Koreans called his bluff
and he folded. And since then, for all intents and purposes, and all the
atmospherics to the contrary, he and his administration have done
essentially nothing. "

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/010275.php