George Rodham Bush?

During the last five years of utterly ineffectual talks and not-talks, the North Korean regime (to the best of our knowledge) built four of five more nukes, sold uranium to the A.Q. Khan network, transferred nuclear technology to Iran, and bought itself some Tomohawkskis. While I can’t excuse the duration of this delay, I’ve still considered the Bush policy marginally better than the Clinton policy because I presumed we were going to insist on a deal that was in fact, you know, complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantling. So what do I see in the paper today?

A high-ranking U.S. official accompanying Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on a whistlestop tour of the region said Sunday the agreement meant Pyongyang would no longer call for mutual nuclear disarmament talks, while the U.S. would no longer insist that North Korea admits it has a highly enriched uranium program, according to Reuters.

If that is fact is to be the basis for this “breakthrough,” then I’m prepared to declare the Bush North Korea policy a Clintonian failure. We could have had this shitty deal in 2001.