Quote:
Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
here's where we get back to whether you know what you're talking about or whether you're parroting what you have read from biased sources and written in the last year or so. sure as shit I ain't a troll and ain't slinking anywhere, but I do believe someone should. And the certainty that you bring to the quoted post just shows why you would benefit from leaving. The board would really benefit too.
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Hank -- you've been talking smack about this for days.
Turns out your much touted 2000 documents were weak, and Ty just blew you up. Once you goaded him into documenting the issue, he pummeled you. Its not as bad as SEF's self-inflicted wound, but come on . . . .
While I do not have personal knowledge of this, I do understand that the U.S. (and similarly advanced nations) can monitor and detect plutonium production more easily than uranium enrichment.
The consensus is that NK did have plutonium by 1994. Putting aside inherent distrust for a regime of crooks and liars (no, not Bush) we have seen nothing to indicate that the North Koreans were continuing to create plutonium before they threw out the international monitors during the first term of the current President. Why wouldn't they? They knew we could detect it -- and they wanted their goodies.
You seem to get most upset by the _way_ Ty speaks -- with certainty, but on this one the evidence he mustered certainly rises to at least the normal standards applied on this informal discussion board.
On the substance, I'd say that reasonable people can differ about whether the 1994 Agreement was a good one, although I can recall a reasonably broad consensus supporting it at the time. No one wanted to fight North Korea then, but we came fairly close. I was among the many thousands of soldiers on 2 hour alert then, and our troops in South Korea were on a hair trigger and kissing their asses goodbye. (The war plan assumes they will be wiped out before we can reinforce.)
I'd also even concede that, while I think Bush's "F-You" approach has been counterproductive on this issue, and people much smarter and more credentialed than I (including his former Secretary of State) agree, reasonable people can also differ about that.
We can also disagree, I suppose about "whose fault" this whole mess really is -- although that kind of simplistic bullshit makes about as much sense as fighting over who "lost China" and why we lost the Vietnam War.
Bottom line is that Bush said early in his administration that this was a critical problem, which it is, but he hasn't been able to fix it. In fact, he spent a boatload of time and energy on other stuff -- including most prominently a war he started where he guessed wrong about WMD and then proceeded to thoroughly fuck up.
As a result, Bush gets the heat on NK until it is fixed or he goes back to Texas. Fair or not, it goes with the job
[P.S. As a younger relative's third tour in Iraq gets closer, I get more upset about the whole thing. His quote: "I've lost so many friends, I have to believe in it." But he's struggling.]
S_A_M
