While Bush's neocons forced North Korea to restart its nuclear program, a second attempt for a nuclear agreement was destroyed by Obama

globinfo freexchange

While Washington's hawks keep pushing for war in the Korean peninsula, the corporate media assist their effort through the ordinary propaganda, depicting North Korean leadership as, more or less, an evil regime. Very few things about the US destructive policies and actions in the region are known to the American public, like, for example, the fact that the US had put barriers to the unification of the two Korean states and had literally flattened North Korea in the Korean war.

While Jimmy Carter tried to put the foundations for a nuclear agreement with North Korea, all the US administrations afterwards seem to be pushing for war, sabotaging every effort for a viable agreement that would remove nukes from the Korean peninsula.

Tim Shorrock, journalist and expert on US-Korea relations, spoke to Abby Martin about the dirty US tactics against North Korea, especially when Bush's neocons - the ones who brought absolute chaos in the Middle East after pushing for US invasion in Iraq - decided to close all doors against any prospect for a deal with North Korea.

As Shorrock states:

In the late 80s, North Korea under Kim Il-sung were looking at having nuclear weapons and part of the reason was because until 1991, the US had hundreds of tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea, these kind of hand-held weapons that US soldiers would carry their nuclear weapons.

And, of course, the US 7th fleet is in Yokosuka-Japan and very close to Korea and there are ships there that have nuclear arms, planes, and Okinawa, the US bases are there, and so they saw building a nuclear capability it was a way of defending themselves.

Jimmy Carter went to North Korea, met with Kim Il-sung and they hammered out what became this agreed framework under which North Korea agreed to end its nuclear program, stopped its production of plutonium at this plant.

When Bush took over in 2001 with all these neocons in his government, like John Bolton and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, were against this agreement, any agreement with North Korea. And in his State of the Union address Bush labeled North Korea as part of the axis of evil with Iran and Iraq. So, this was like the last straw for the North Koreans. They said, 'OK we now see that you believe we're back in enemy status', and so they pulled out of the agreement themselves and started proceeding on their plutonium program. By 2006, they had built their first atomic weapon and tested their first weapon in 2006.

In 2005, there was a declaration by all South and North Korea, US, Japan,China and Russia, that Korea itself would not be nuclear, would not allow nuclear weapons north, or south. All countries agreed to that agreement and had been violated by the US because at the time the US was still imposing sanctions.

When Obama came in 2009, he and his people sort of had this idea that somehow the problem of North Korea would go away because it was going to collapse and they did not want to negotiate directly with North Korea. So, even Bush was willing to have direct talks to them, Obama was not.