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SOTU Speech Fails to Mention North Korea

I heard “Korea,” and I think I  probably heard  “North” somewhere, but I did not hear “North Korea.”   It’s  nice that President Bush stands against genocide in  Sudan.  Seriously.  It would be better than “nice” if  Bush would do something meaningful to stop it.  It’s too bad, of course, that he chose to end his term as  an abettor of  a genocidal regime  in North Korea.  North Korea was even left out of his catch-all  list of repressive  nations  abroad.  I remember hearing Belarus, Zimbabwe, and Burma, but only the latter of those is even in North Korea’s league.  Charles Krauthammer  thinks  this means that Bush has given up on nuclear non-proliferation.  Brit Hume also  noticed that Bush  mentioned Zimbabwe and Burma, but not North Korea.

The bad news is that Bush didn’t mention North Korea.  That’s also the good news.  If Bush  felt optimistic or confident about his new North Korea policy, don’t you suppose  he’d have at least  mentioned it?  He didn’t tout it, he didn’t draw attention to it, and he didn’t expend any capital on it.  (Kudos to Krauthammer for reminding us why he had no reason to.)  There wasn’t even a velvet-glove warning for Kim Jong Il to deliver  a complete declaration.   Draw your own conclusions about what that means.

Update:   Scott Johnson at Powerline noticed it, too:

Beyond references to the Afghanistan and Iraq fronts, the second half of the speech was notable less for what it said than what it didn’t say. Where the Bush administration has focused its diplomatic efforts, its diplomacy has traced a Clintonian arc. North Korea was not even mentioned. How go the efforts to hold North Korea to its commitment to declare its nuclear programs? Interested listeners will have to look elsewhere for an answer.  [Power Line]

That “elsewhere” link leads to  a  Real Clear Politics piece by Richard Halloran.  Halloran is a deep thinker, but his piece is an  effort to educate an audience that hasn’t been following the issue as closely as you have.  He  reviews the  stalled  state of  Agreed Framework 2.0 and narrates the rising conservative disgust with it.

4 Responses

  1. What if North Korea never declare its nucs until the US remove it from the black list? And what’s the use of the six party talks if the deal is between the US and Pyongyang only?

  4. I’d agree with that. I drove through Zimbabwe in 1990, which seems like a long time ago, but really isn’t. My impression of the place was that while it was no model of economic vigor, the roads were getting fixed, the kids were going to school, and the infrastructure mostly worked. Yes, you could see some of the signs — you had to watch what you say and cops were corrupt. Still, Zim exported a lot of food and other products to the neighbors.

    I understand that today, comparisons to North Korea aren’t all that wildly off-base. That’s hard for me to imagine.