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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name, been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, y'all.
Introducing the great Gareth Porter.
Of course, he's a historian and investigative journalist.
He wrote Perils of Dominance about Vietnam and Manufactured Crisis.
The truth behind the Iran nuclear scare.
The book, the book on Iran's nuclear program debunks it all in the most meticulous detail.
The threat of Iran's so-called nuclear weapons or development program, anything.
And man, he's written a ton of great stuff over the last, say, 11 years or so as we've been talking here on anti-war radio, such as it is.
And on Iraq, Iran, of course, Afghanistan, some pretty good stuff on Syria.
Once you got the Iran book out of the way now and he's got this great one on Korea.
Can you tell him Stalin for time as I'm trying to find the damn link?
Welcome back to the show.
Oh, you know what?
I reprinted it at the Libertarian Institute because I took the liberty, so to speak, to do so.
So that's a Libertarian Institute.
It's called how Cheney and his allies created the North Korea nuclear missile crisis.
Welcome back to the show, my friend.
How are you?
I'm fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back on the show.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Happy holidays to you too, Scott.
Cool, man.
All right.
Hey, listen here.
This is such a great piece.
This is, you know, just like always, you write exactly what I would have had you do the work.
I could have never done this.
And this is exactly the article I would have wanted to write.
But I could have never done this.
But you did it.
This is the comprehensive take on how Cheney pushed the North Koreans to nuclear weapons.
Let him have it, Gareth.
Well, yeah, I mean, this is this is really a big part of the history of this whole issue of North Korea's missile and nuclear program, because what what most people in the country, I'm sorry to say, don't understand is that the North Koreans have essentially used their missile program and their nuclear program as a means of, I mean, historically, I'm not talking about today at this moment, but historically, beginning in the 1990s, late 80s, 1990s, they were clearly using their nuclear program and later their missile program as a way of getting the United States to negotiate with them on an agreement that would, from their point of view, hopefully have the effect of ending this extraordinary enmity that the United States government has had toward North Korea from the Korean War on.
Now, I know that sounds like a familiar theme because that's exactly, not exactly, but roughly what the Iranians did as well, although the Iranians, of course, as you know better than anyone else, were never interested in getting nuclear weapons for that purpose.
They merely use their nuclear program.
But nevertheless, the general concept was the same.
They recognized that their security depended on getting the United States to change its policy toward North Korea, and they realized that this was essentially the only path they had open to them for accomplishing that.
So, basically, that was what happened during the Clinton administration, the Clinton administration, somewhat late in the game, perhaps, in 1994, after having threatened war against North Korea, negotiated something called the Agreed Framework, which was an agreement, without going into detail, basically, it would provide for North Korea to end its war with North Korea.
Its plutonium reactor program and all of the related facilities, on one hand, and the United States would agree to provide a light water reactor to North Korea, fuel oil, in the meantime, before the light water reactor was built, which would take years, and to take steps toward normalization of relations.
Now, that agreement, in 1994, was never fully carried out, and I don't want to go into details on that, but it was still sort of in the early stages, shall we say, of being carried out, when, in 1998, the North Koreans tried to get the Clinton administration to go further by carrying out a long-range missile test, the Taepodong-1, if you will, missile test, which got the attention of the administration, and they then went ahead and started negotiating a follow-on agreement, on top of the Agreed Framework, the North Koreans were negotiating on and were ready to sign with the Clinton administration, at the very end, really, in 2000, at the very end of the Clinton administration.
It was never signed, unfortunately, and that's when you get the part of the story that involves the Bush administration and, of course, Dick Cheney as the Rasputin, if you will, the power behind the throne, who was clearly at the center of North Korean policy from the beginning of that administration.
So, my piece really details the ways in which Dick Cheney and his key allies, in both the first and second Bush administration, essentially sabotaged not just the Clinton administration agreement, or agreements, if you will, with North Korea, but then, a few years later, in 2008, 2009, deep-sixed an agreement that the Bush administration, well, at that point, it was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, negotiated with North Korea that would have dealt with not just the plutonium program of North Korea, but the uranium program, the uranium enrichment program that had not really started, but the North Koreans had indicated interest, they had already made first moves toward having such a program.
So, this is the story of really how the Cheney gang, if you will, really took down not just one, but two viable agreements that could have prevented the situation that we now face with North Korea having an ICBM program that is now considered to be quite credible in terms of being able to produce within a reasonably short period of time, whether it's months or years, not yet clear, an ICBM which could carry a nuclear weapon and hit the United States.
And so, this is really worth people understanding and taking account of in terms of what should be done about the present situation, essentially.
All right.
So, broad overview, Bill Clinton had a deal, the Bush people came in, they ruined that deal, and then, when Condoleezza Rice made a second deal, they ruined that too.
That's the broad overview.
We're going to go into the details now.
So, January 2001, George W. Bush becomes the president.
Shortly thereafter, I'm almost positive this is in Norman Solomon's movie, and there's a book about it too, War Made Easy, which is all about their manipulation of the media in Vietnam and then again in the Bush years.
And I'm almost positive that's where people can find this clip.
It's just from memory there.
But the clip is the new Secretary of State, Colin Powell, saying, oh yeah, you know, it ain't perfect, but we're going to more or less keep the Clinton administration policy on North Korea because it's working and it's going to be fine.
And yet, in the background, as he's saying that, and he's kind of going on and on and on, and in the background, Bush and Cheney and I guess Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and some of the other bad guys, worse guys, are back there, and Cheney is looking at Powell like, yeah, that's what you think, and just snarling, and you can just see that whatever Powell says is not the policy here.
He may think he's the Secretary of State, but he should have made himself vice president if he really wanted to be in charge.
So explain about that.
In the very early part, the very first part of 2001, and even before then, you talk about in the transition, after the Florida recount was resolved in the Supreme Court, and you have the transition team, Dick Cheney has his guy Robert Joseph come in, and he's working with Bolton, is that right?
Well, at that point, Bolton didn't come in until a few months later, actually.
Bolton had some problems with confirmation, and so he wasn't actually on the job until May of 2001, so there were a few months, I should say, at the beginning of the Bush administration where Robert Joseph was really carrying the heavy lifting for Cheney within the National Security Council staff.
He was the guy who was in charge both of proliferation policy and missile defense policy.
Now, you know, there is a certain logic from the point of view of the Bush national security team in having Joseph have both of those portfolios, because as I show in my piece, in the whole storyline of the piece, what they cared about was primarily to get a national missile defense system set up as soon as possible.
They wanted to get the funding going at a very high level.
They wanted to eliminate all the diplomatic and political obstacles to this.
That meant getting out of the ABM Treaty, getting the Russians to go along with that, which they succeeded in doing.
But they had the political obstacle of this agreed framework agreement that they needed to get out of the way because that provided the potential for North Korea to be on a path that would tend to reduce the rationale or be a problem in terms of the rationale for the missile defense system.
After all, North Korea was the only country of the three axis of evil countries, as they would later be called, that had both a nuclear weapons program and a long range missile program.
So they were obviously in the bullseye here politically.
It was very important for them to be able to show North Korea was the danger.
And so Joseph was the guy who was pushing both for a national missile defense system as the new centerpiece of national strategy for the United States, for deterrence strategy, and who was in a position, therefore, to help to push the agreed framework out of the way.
Until, as you properly point out, Bolton came in and then took on the position as the primary policymaker on North Korea on proliferation issues in the State Department.
And that's when he took over in May of 2001.
And now I understand Colin Powell later complained to Bob Woodward that Cheney created a separate government inside, you know, meaning the neocon network and referring to Bolton and Wormser as Cheney's men inside the State Department running interference against him and his buddy Armitage.
But so he was still the Secretary of State.
So, I mean, I don't I certainly don't want to paint him as a white hat because he's Colin Powell, for Christ's sake.
I mean, he wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for covering up the My Lai massacre in the first place.
That's how he got his first promotion back when.
And then, of course, the deliberate targeting of Iraq's civilian, never mind Panama, but then in Iraq, the targeting of their their water and sewage and electricity and all of this.
I mean, yeah, he's a horrible bastard.
He's a horrible bastard.
But so anyway, and he's the guy who lied us into war with Iraq officially in front of the U.N., too.
But on this, it seems like he was a little bit less worse.
But so I wonder if you know much about the conflict inside the State Department at the time as as Bolton was doing everything he could here to ruin the agreed framework that Powell seemed to breathe pretty solidly for keeping.
Right.
The reason that Bolton was really the guy who was key beginning in 2001, after the first few months after after Bolton took over, is that the State Department's East Asia Pacific office was very eager to negotiate with North Korea.
They recognized the importance of the agreed framework.
They understood its importance.
They understood that it was in the national security interest of the United States to make sure that that something was was going on in terms of encouraging North Korea to believe that, you know, they had an incentive to continue down the path that they started on and that that the Cheney idea of of trying to deep six this was extremely dangerous.
So they got the approval, interestingly, with the support apparently of Condoleezza Rice as the national security advisor to they got Bush's approval for at least beginning with low level talks with North Korea in the anticipation that that would lead them to something more substantive in over a period of months.
And and that's what really got the dander up for for Bolton.
He was he was determined to shut down any diplomatic contact with with North Korea.
And so so he was trying to do his best during 2001 to oppose that.
But but he was at a disadvantage during that first year.
And it was only at the end of 2001 as my piece shows that Cheney and and Rumsfeld together working on Bush for the preparation for his State of the Union message in 2002 were able to get Bush to agree to this language that was the axis of evil language, which they knew was a key.
Signal that that the deal with North Korea was not going to go forward.
And at the same time in late 2001 the the thing that Robert Joseph had initiated or helped to initiate into in early 2001 the nuclear posture review the NPR was coming to a conclusion.
And in that process, which excluded, by the way, anyone representing Colin Powell's group in the State Department, the the NPR managed to compile a new list of countries that could be targeted with nuclear weapons different from anything that had been done before.
It was a cockamamie argument that if if there was any unpredictable scenario that they could cook up that involved any of these countries, then they could be targeted with nuclear weapons.
And of course, North North Korea, Iran and Iraq were were key members of that elite club.
And so and they knew perfectly well that this was another way to deep six the agreed framework because that agreement had called for the United States and required the United States to give assurances to North Korea that it would not use nuclear weapons against or threatened to use nuclear weapons against North Korea.
So this was in a direct violation of the agreed framework and again signaled to North Korea that there wasn't going to be any agreement.
They could forget about it.
And so it was a combination of those two things that really then created the backdrop for the next move in this strategy of of destroying the agreed framework, which was for Bolton to carry out this bureaucratic offensive to to essentially kill officially the agreed framework.
And the way he did that first was to try to accuse North Korea of having violated it, violated the agreed framework by not being in compliance with its IAEA agreement.
It's it's it's agreement on inspections and so forth with with the IAEA.
Well, that, of course, was not really part of the agreement.
It was only to take place on at a later stage of the agreement long after Bolton was pushing this idea.
So it was it was a very dishonest starting point for trying to to kill the agreement.
But later, then they latched on to a much more powerful tool, which was an intelligence finding intelligence assessment.
It wasn't an IAEA.
Lord knows who who actually did it.
You know, people undoubtedly that Bolton was in touch with and was cultivating in the CIA's analytical group.
But but this intelligence finding said that North Korea had violated the agreement by by starting down the path of having a uranium enrichment program.
And it cited evidence alleged evidence that that that the North Koreans had shopped for the the machinery or the technology needed for uranium enrichment in 2001 and then in 2002 it had gone further.
And so he was determined to use this to get an official policy statement that the agreed framework was dead.
And it was quite successful.
The State Department had trouble figuring out how to oppose it.
And and really, that was the thing that was used successfully in the end by the end of 2002 to to get an official policy statement by the White House that the agreement framework agreed framework was dead.
Yeah, that's a great that's a great quote.
And there are a number of great quotes.
In other words, the cynical excuse.
This was this was a policy decision looking for a reason.
Yeah.
And as again, as as I said before, I mean, the real reasoning behind this, the real motivation, I should say, behind this series of a very, you know, sort of behind the scenes, maneuvering, you know, to get to the bottom of this.
Yeah.
And as as I said before, I mean, the real reasoning behind this, the real motivation, I should say, behind this series of a very, you know, sort of behind the scenes, maneuvering bureaucratically by Cheney, Bolton and Joseph was that they wanted to eliminate any possible competition politically or problem politically for the National Missile Defense System.
And and at one point, Bolton even says in his memoirs that the reason that they were so eager to get out of the ABM treaty in 2001 was precisely because they wanted to avoid people in Congress raising political arguments that could stand in the way of full funding for that program.
All right.
And then you have here, you mentioned that this guy Bush's negotiator with North Korea.
So is this a guy that worked for the White House or worked for Colin Powell, Charles L. Pritchard?
Pritchard would have worked for for Powell.
He was under State Department.
Yeah, that's my assumption.
But just clarifying.
But so and he was saying, well, I know.
Hey, man, let's bring up to the North Koreans the uranium enrichment and get them to include that in the agreed framework since it's not really a violation of it.
But like, hey, let's make it a thing where that would be a violation of it.
And maybe we can get them to do that.
But I guess everybody in the room looked at him like, hey, shut up, dude.
We're not trying.
We're not trying to keep them from nukes.
We're trying to make them a threat so we can put our friends on welfare.
Right.
Just to go back to to that point and elaborate a bit further.
This was, as I said, the key bureaucratic move by Bolton citing this this intelligence assessment of uncertain basis and origins to as as the signal that the North Koreans are in fact violating the agreement.
Well, you know, Pritchard, who who was involved in negotiating the agreement, you know, basically pointed out that that was he was a holdover from Clinton years.
That's right.
OK.
He so he was involved.
He worked for Bush at this point.
He worked for Powell, but he actually had been involved in negotiating the agreed framework in the first place.
That's right.
OK, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
He was a deputy to Galushi at that point, as I recall.
So so he he pointed out that it wasn't a violation of the agreement.
In fact, you know, the idea that the the notion that Bolton put forward was that that that part of the agreement was that North Korea promised to carry out the north south declaration of denuclearization, which was a 1991 agreement between North and South Korea.
And that was that was mentioned in the text of of the agreed framework.
But Pritchard pointed out that that this was not.
I actually I thought it was Carlin.
My recollection was now that it was Carlin who was pointing this out.
Maybe I'm confusing two different situations in my addled brain.
But but anyway, it was pointed out that that in fact, this was not a is not considered a key element of the of of that agreed framework.
It was just an afterthought is what he called it.
And so, again, Bolton was simply being dishonest and using the usual sort of neocon logic and and calculation to carry out a a an action that was really not in the interest of the United States.
And you have that right.
It's the paragraphs are right here next to each other.
First is Carlin was saying that the denuclearization agreement thing was an afterthought.
And then it's Pritchard next is saying, if there's a problem with the uranium, let's bring it into the agreed framework discussions.
That's what, you know, a national interested party would do.
But not these guys.
I want to work in an anecdote here real quick about from from Andrew Coburn's book on Donald Rumsfeld.
First of all, it was Rumsfeld's company that he was CEO of at the time that got the contract and probably got the check to build the light water reactors in North Korea as part of the agreed framework that never did get built.
I forget now whether they got the money or not.
I'm going to go ahead and probably assume that they did.
But here's the other thing.
Our current director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, at the time was a senator or maybe he was already a former senator at that time.
I think he was still a senator.
And they were interviewing him to be the secretary of defense for the Bush Jr. administration.
And what happened was, and I guess this would have been in the transition period or in the fall of 2000, something like that fall or late, early winter 2000.
And they interviewed Dan Coats and everything was going fine until he said, oh, missile defense, man, that's just a big boondoggle.
You know, no fiscal conservative can get behind that.
And after all, I mean, who's a threat to us?
North Korea?
We can negotiate that.
Something along those lines.
And they said, oh, yeah, great interview.
Don't call us.
We'll call you, pal.
And so he was out.
And he was like, you know, he was the heir apparent.
He was supposed to be the defense secretary.
That was already the plan.
And then he goofed up and said that.
And then I'm sorry, I have to finish the anecdote, even though now we're off topic.
Cheney said, well, you know, I got my old friend Rumsfeld.
But, you know, the problem is your father hates him.
And Bush Jr. said, oh, yeah, bring him on in.
You know, of course, Jr. hates his dad, too.
We all do.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
So, yeah, I think that it's important to understand that there was a proposal discussed, you know, being put forward by the State Department that, well, look, the logical thing to do here is to bring the uranium program, the notional uranium program, because it really hadn't started at that point.
There was no evidence that they had that they had actually begun, you know, to enrich uranium or even, you know, completed anything that was going to allow them to enrich uranium.
But they had indicated interest in it.
But the logical thing to do is to bring that issue into the framework that we already have and use what we know is the North Korean eagerness to have the United States normalize relations with them as the incentive for the North Koreans to shut that down, too.
And in fact, as I think I mentioned, the North Korean official.
No, I didn't mention this.
The North Korean official who met with the assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific in October 2002 explicitly stated that we're ready to give up all of our uranium enrichment, whether it's plutonium or uranium, as part of a deal in which, you know, we get the security that we are after with uranium.
With regard to the United States.
So so there was a very strong case to be made that that was the thing to do.
But again, that was not the interest that was motivating the Bush administration and certainly not the Cheney group that was the inside the insiders who were determining the policy toward North Korea.
Well, in bad timing, too, you know, they could have at least gone so far with the deal to make sure that the North Koreans had destroyed the Yongbyon nuclear reactor, the heavy water reactor there that the Soviets had built for them before they provoked this crisis.
Because as soon as they provoked the crisis and the North Koreans withdrew from the treaty, I'm sorry, I'm getting ahead.
But once they decided to start making nukes, hey, they had a heavy water reactor which produces weapons grade plutonium as waste.
And so they started harvesting that plutonium and making nuclear bombs.
And now they have a couple or a few dozen.
Nobody knows.
And they're working on miniaturizing them.
So.
Geez, you know, they could have waited.
They could have let Donald Rumsfeld cash his welfare checks and build the light water reactors.
Right.
And then go ahead and provoke this fight and claim that their missiles are a threat or whatever it is.
You know what I mean?
But instead, they actually push them to the point where, as you were saying at the beginning of this thing, they could in the event that America picked a fight with them, which is not completely unlikely.
That they could nuke American cities now.
They could certainly I think.
Well, not certainly.
But it's even more likely that they could nuke Tokyo or Seoul.
Well, you know, I didn't talk about that in my in my piece, but I think it's very likely that the reason that the Bolton and Cheney and all these people who were primarily motivated by national defense missile system, national missile defense system, what they were calculating was that North Korea, the North Korean regime is so weak.
It's so shaky.
It's so unstable that all we have to do is wait a few years and it's going to pass into history.
After all, and Bolton even talks in his memoirs about someone who was part of the negotiating team in the in the Clinton administration saying, well, we never thought this agreement was actually going to be fully carried out because we thought the regime wasn't going to last very long.
And, you know, we know and I do mention in the piece that Cheney and Rumsfeld were proposing to Bush a set of steps, a strategy that was based on the idea that we would be aiming at regime change in North Korea.
We would isolate and and, you know, choke off the economic requirements for North Korea to continue a viable economy.
And that would be the way that we would essentially get rid of the problem.
So so they simply did not worry.
They chose not to worry about the North Korean missile and nuclear nuclear programs.
It was the most remarkable exercise in what me worry that I can think of in terms of U.S. national security policy in the history of the whole history of U.S. national security policy.
Yeah, it's pretty bad.
I mean, and I guess there were the slogan was that the Iraq war was just going to take a few weeks.
And from there they were is just going to be a matter.
And of course, it did.
Right.
It was the stay.
And that was the problem.
It was the right.
It was picking sides in a civil war and all that that that lasted eight years.
But but yeah.
So I mean, I guess they thought, you know, it would resolve itself before they got any nukes together.
And then, boy, they sure got sidetracked.
So now let me make sure that I got this right, because I already have the list in my head.
But you you really flesh this out so much better here about the different provocations, the different things they did.
They named them in the axis of evil.
They named them in this nuclear war preemptive strike strategy review document.
They accused them and renounced the agreed framework in the name of the uranium agreement.
They announced the proliferation security initiative, which was a way of saying that they made up their own law where they could just seize North Korean boats on the high seas.
And it went further than that.
I forget the details.
Maybe you can fill me in on that.
And then and I'm leaving out more things.
But so tell me.
And of course, there are new sanctions.
But so tell me all the things.
Flesh out my list here of all the things that they did before the North Koreans finally said, all right, then, uncle, we quit the NPT.
We quit the safeguards agreement.
We're starting our reactor back up now.
Well, I think, you know, you could you could list.
And in fact, in an earlier draft of my piece, I did bring that in.
Condoleezza Rice wrote a piece in foreign affairs at the just at the beginning or before Bush actually entered the White House.
It was would have been published in December, I think, late December of 2000, in which she outlined the thinking of the new administration.
And she was quite explicit in sort of saying that, you know, diplomacy is worthless.
I'm not quoting her here, but but it was very clearly stated in her piece that that a diplomatic agreement with North Korea is worthless.
That's not the way to go.
We have to go missile defense.
That's that's the key to dealing with the problem of North Korean missiles.
And we can always deter.
We can always use our our nuclear threat to deter them so we don't have to worry about the missiles.
This was a remarkable statement in itself.
And it wasn't it turned out not to be the exact argument that the the Cheney group decided to to emphasize.
But nevertheless, she was very clear that the that it was the National Missile Defense System, not an agreement to limit or to get rid of of the North Korean missile and and nuclear weapons programs.
That was really the strategy that the new administration was going to embrace.
So I think that was another major signal to the North Koreans in case they needed yet another one.
Yeah.
And now I have to I have to say this one out loud so I can just try to extra remember it for later, too, because it's got to go on my list.
In December 2002, you write the Bush administration strong armed its Japanese and South Korean allies to end their supply of oil to North Korea, officially terminating the agreed framework.
That was the last.
That was the official move to to formally deep six the agreement.
I think it's safe to say that that was the final.
That was the final move.
And then, you know, it's interesting to me, too, that if I remember this right, the North Koreans stayed within the letter of the treaty and said, we announced that in six months we're going to withdraw from the treaty, which they had every right to do in the treaty itself.
And so they did.
And then six months later, they withdrew, kicked the IAEA right out and started making nuclear bombs.
Very interesting point.
Important point, actually, that the North Koreans were fairly punctilious, I would say, very punctilious in their approach to negotiation and to abiding by or or or withdrawing from an agreement reached with the United States.
I mean, they are acutely aware, I think it's safe to say that that they have to abide by the letter of the law and at the same time that that they are that they're only going to be able to justify moves that are against any existing agreement in response to a move by the United States that is not abiding by the agreement.
And that has been really a very strictly abided by rule that North Korea has followed for the last 20 years, essentially.
It's at foolserend.us.
And also get The War State by my friend Mike Swanson.
It's a great history of the rise of the military industrial complex after World War Two.
The War State by Mike Swanson.
And also follow his investment advice at wallstreetwindow.com.
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All right.
Now, I sure appreciate your patience, Gareth, and audience.
I know I'm taking a long time to get to the second half of this interview here, but Christopher Hill.
I remember the way Ray McGovern told the story.
He's like, you know what happened here?
He may have been citing The Washington Post at the time.
I think the way they told the story was it was Condoleezza Rice and Christopher Hill cornered Bush Jr. on a Friday afternoon when Dick Cheney was out of town.
He was touring the Middle East, threatening Iran from an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, as I recall.
And they said, hey, man, would it be all right if we go to Korea and do this thing?
Because we got an idea.
And Bush was like, gee, you're the last guy to talk to me today.
I quit in time.
So go ahead.
And that was the end of that.
And so Cheney was out and Rice and Christopher Hill had their big chance.
So what happened?
Wait, and when was that?
I don't even have it right.
It was 07.
I was right.
OK, that's what I thought.
2007 was when they reached an initial agreement, matter of principles, for a new agreement that incidentally, not incidentally, I think it's important to understand that that agreement did not comprehend, did not include the North Korean missile program.
Now, why that's the case, I don't know.
I don't have any evidence to tell me what their thinking was about that.
But for whatever reason, they never bothered to try to get North Korea to agree to include their missile program as part of this new framework agreement.
And so this was the beginning of a new series of negotiations between the Bush administration and North Korea, which then resulted in a 2008 more detailed agreement on how to carry out the earlier principles.
And so this was the follow on, if you will, that the Bush administration itself generated because of Condoleezza Rice realizing that they didn't have a policy toward North Korea.
There was nothing.
They had nothing.
And that they stood to be accused of essentially standing around twiddling their thumbs while the North Koreans were pushing ahead with a missile program that could have nuclear weapons on it.
And I should have mentioned too, it was 06 was when they tested their first bomb.
And I forget when it was, if it was the next year that they tested their second.
But it's clearly what caught Condoleezza Rice's attention.
It looks like our plan isn't working too well, guys, unless this was our plan, which maybe it was.
Yeah.
I mean, her memoirs are all about the fact that that really wasn't working.
We weren't doing anything.
We had to do something.
So so she was mobilized to to try to restart the whole process.
And the North Koreans said, OK, yeah, we'll do it.
And now.
So this is a big deal.
They were they did shut down the Yongbyong heavy water reactor for a time.
That's right.
And this is important because, you know, this was a later this was to be a later stage of the agreed framework after the United States had basically produced the light water reactor.
That that is it's not absolute proliferation proof, but it's pretty very proliferation proof because you can't unlike the the plutonium reactor where, you know, you you can generate the plutonium.
And I mean, I should say the plutonium reactor is is not proliferation proof because all you have to do is stop the reactor and you can pull out the the plutonium and and use it.
Then you can convert it into a plutonium bomb.
But, you know, that this this was this destruction of of the plutonium reactor and all the facilities that went with it meant that that was the end of of their ability to do anything like that.
And they were essentially accelerating what had been a much longer timetable for carrying out what they promised to do in the agreed framework.
So so they were making concessions in that regard to the Bush administration.
Yeah.
And then.
So what happened?
How they ruin it?
Well, I mean, here here's where Cheney comes in in 2007 with his brilliant idea for deep sixing another agreement with North Korea, and that is to use the alleged North Korean assistance to the Syrian government to build a nuclear reactor on in the desert near Deir ez-Zor in Syria.
Not that old lie.
That old lie, indeed.
At that time, it was a new lie, of course.
The Israelis tried to convince and succeeded in convincing the Bush administration that that the that the North Koreans had indeed helped Syria build a nuclear reactor and that somebody had to do something about it.
And they want the United States to go bomb it, as well as some other targets in Syria.
And so let me just say real quick that we've known all along.
And, you know, there's that small community of sort of former CIA guys who still have friends in the agency and stuff.
And they were all debunking this right from the beginning.
People like Phil Giraldi and those guys.
But also so we have your most recent take here, which is really important.
And we talked about on the show Israel's ploy selling a Syrian nuke strike.
And this ran at Consortium News dot com on November 18th.
I know people will want to read up on this.
Yes.
And so, you know, I cited that as the evidence that what Cheney was using here as a ploy to kill the we'll call it the Condoleezza Rice agreement with North Korea was was based on a lie.
And, you know, American officials should have been able to see that.
But it wasn't politically convenient or diplomatically convenient or convenient for their various policy initiatives.
So, you know, they they went along with the Israeli ploy.
Nobody in high levels of the Bush administration questioned it.
And we know.
Well, I won't get into it.
But but CIA director was in on this and had his own reasons for Hayden had his own has his own reasons for wanting to go along with it because he was joining Cheney in wanting to kill the North Korean agreement.
And so so he and Cheney were were a duo working together to to kill the North Korean agreement by using this argument that the North Koreans had carried out proliferation in Syria.
So so what Cheney did was to get Bush and and and the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the same room and get them to agree that if it could be shown that North Korea was refusing to admit that they had proliferated in Syria, that was a deal breaker, it would kill the deal.
And so in that one fell swoop, Cheney essentially got Condoleezza Rice to agree that her negotiations with North Korea, the agreement that she'd reached with North Korea, were resting on such a fragile base that it would be impossible to continue it in its present form.
So what happened was that she had to change her whole approach to negotiations with North Korea on carrying out this agreement that had been reached in 2000 in 2007.
And and now instead of merely having to carry out the the demolition, the disabling of their their plutonium program, they now had to agree to a verification agreement that would allow the United States essentially to go wherever it wanted in North Korea, whether it was a military site or not, regardless of the evidence that were put was put forward.
And take environmental samples wherever it wanted.
And the North Koreans balked at that.
They wouldn't go along with it.
They were not ready to sign such an agreement.
And I'm in a way sort of shortening the time frame here.
I'm I'm pulling together two different phases of this of this process.
But essentially, he used that basically what what Cheney did was to use that as the basis for saying, OK, now there's no longer any there's no longer an agreement with North Korea because North Koreans won't go along with the verification agreement.
And so that that's the shorthand version of of how Cheney killed the second agreement in the Bush administration.
Yeah, I remember when Bush came out, I guess it was the summer of 08.
Right.
And and put them back on the terrorist list.
The terrorist list.
What the hell?
These guys, you would think they'd have a little bit, you know, smoother of a way of doing it.
But it doesn't matter, I guess.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you know, Condoleezza Rice even even admits in her memoirs that North Korea should never have been on the terrorist list in the first place.
They didn't really have evidence that that they'd done anything in recent years.
And so, you know, she was really not very impressed by the by the argument.
But she she was she was cornered, basically.
She she didn't know enough to challenge Cheney on what it what she had to challenge him on.
And therefore she had to go along with a scenario for forcing the North Koreans to agree to this verification agreement, which was impossible to get them to go along with.
They were too smart for that.
Yeah.
And now, you know, I don't know, but it's 19 early 50s, I guess, or maybe late 40s technology to miniaturize a plutonium bomb to where you can fit it on a missile.
So we don't know if they're really able to make a an A-bomb that, you know, however many 10 or 20 or more kilotons that could fit on the end of an intercontinental ballistic missile.
But they do have intercontinental ballistic missiles now.
And so that's yeah, you're right.
We don't really know.
We don't really know what their technological achievement really amounts to at this point.
We don't know how long it will take them to achieve that that point.
And, you know, or whether, in fact, they can do it.
But, you know, there there is a strong, strong tendency within, shall we say, the the present Trump administration to assert that they do have that.
At the same time, by the way, that I think Mattis himself has expressed the caution about whether the North Koreans have that capability at this point.
And so that's another indication that Mattis is not on board with the the proclaimed policy of the White House of preemptive, not preemptive, but preventive strike against North Korea if they don't cease and desist on their development of a missile program.
Yeah.
Now, I mean, I don't know.
I'm not a fly on the wall or Bob Woodward or anything like that.
But it seems pretty clear, I guess, from the tea leaves and all the Kremlin ology and all that kind of crap that Trump has asked for options and they've tried to come up with ways to tell him.
And I really have not been doing a good enough job of reading about this lately.
But they've been presenting him with options where, like, hey, maybe we'd be able to take out some of their nuclear nuclear capability in a limited way that would they would just sit there and take it and not fight back.
And wouldn't be a full scale invasion or war.
And I don't know, maybe they would call them on the phone and tell them this is not an attack as they go ahead and attack them, something like that.
And I guess so Mattis's job is to come up with stuff like that.
Right.
Well, I mean, I think he doesn't want to stand behind it and recommend it.
That's what Trump asked for is I give me a plan A, B and C for attacking these guys.
That's what they're.
And isn't that what they're doing right now?
Yeah, that that you're right.
Mattis Mattis's job is to come up with options.
And that has been done.
The options have been turned over to the White House.
We don't know what the what the material that was turned over to the White House says about how viable the option is.
And but but we can guess, I think, pretty safely that that the options that they've given them do not involve anything that does not does not imply hundreds of thousands of deaths in South Korea and perhaps in Japan as well.
And so, you know, that's that's another question of whether they're viable options that make any sense is a very distinctly different question from whether he has options that involve attacking North Korea.
Well, Mattis has said, and, you know, hopefully this is not a sales point, but it's something to be avoided, depending on what Trump what mood Trump is in.
He has said this would be the most bitter fighting of our lifetimes.
And his lifetime includes Korea before and includes Vietnam.
Yeah, yeah.
No, he's he's he's taking the line that that we have to be ready for terrible, terrible fighting that would involve many, many deaths.
That that's part of his his posture publicly with regard to North Korea.
And at this point, you know, one has to make judgment about what that really means in terms of what the thinking is secretly in the in the talks within the White House.
And I don't want to go further because I'm going to be writing about this in the coming weeks.
So I don't want to.
Well, let's go back then and talk more about Barack Obama and what he did and didn't do about any of this for eight years.
When it you know, as we were talking about, Bush had a perfectly good deal till he blew it up.
Obama never even tried in eight years.
He had these bogus six party talks that never went anywhere.
They just put a bunch of sanctions on them and and sit around twiddling thumbs as they amass dozens of nuclear bombs.
Right, right.
Right.
What the hell is going on there?
Is he just he's just selling missile defense welfare program for his corporate buddies, too?
Well, I would put it slightly differently.
I would say that what happened in the Obama administration on North Korea is pretty much the same.
I mean, it's equivalent to what happened in the early stage of the Obama administration with regard to Iran.
I mean, I think it's certainly true that Obama came to office intending to do something positive with regard to negotiations with with Iran.
But look, I mean, he he was subject to all of the carryover programs that the intelligence community, the NSA and the CIA had ginned up under the Bush administration to carry out a cyber attack against against Iran.
And so what happened was that that he found himself mousetrapped into going along with a major initiative to carry out a cyber attack against against Iran, against Natanz.
If the Iranians didn't go along with the U.S. demand for negotiations to basically end the North Korean enrichment program, excuse me, the Iranian program.
And so so I would argue that it is the the momentum that is built up through the national security bureaucracy that is the permanent government of the United States, regardless of who's president.
They come in with their programs and their policies and their perspectives, their analyses of whether it's Iran or North Korea.
And the president has to calculate, well, you know, what's the cost of saying no to these people and being accused later of somehow being soft on fill in the blank Iran or North Korea?
Yeah, well, I guess it seems just as easy, obviously, on any of these where, well, look at the Iran deal.
I mean, he did the Iran deal.
That was the best thing he ever did.
I mean, right wingers for it, but everybody is not a right wing pro-Israel warmonger thinks it's the best thing he ever did.
He could have done the same thing on all these issues and said, look at me.
I'm a bomb of the great.
I make peace everywhere I go.
And people would have cheered for that.
But Scott, he waited until after he was reelected in 2012 before he was willing to make the concession, the key concession that made it possible to negotiate with Iran, which was that they could keep their enrichment program.
Yeah.
Although we would try to impose some limits on it.
And before that, he wasn't willing to go that far.
So, you know, look, I think I think Obama is a weak is a weakling politically, a weakling in terms of his psychology.
He's not a strong president.
That's why I hate him so much.
You know, as much as Bush and Bill Clinton before him, I guess.
But maybe even a little bit more is because I know he knows better on all this.
Like Bill Clinton and George Bush, like those are just terrible men in every way.
They're just bad men.
But Obama, he's good enough to know better than to do every evil, horrible thing that he does anyway.
And that's that much more contemptible.
You know, we know he has the imagination to see himself in the dock for war crimes or George Bush.
Yeah.
Yeah.
God, Afghanistan is the number one piece of evidence for your thesis.
And I have always cited the fact that he absolutely was was against the United States continuing to fight a major war in Afghanistan.
He knew it wasn't worth American deaths.
He knew it wasn't worth the war, just like Kennedy knew it wasn't worth the war to send troops to South Vietnam.
But but he went along with it because he's a weak president.
And again, you know, he was he was willing to to to abide by the advice of his political advisers that the president never goes against the consensus of his national security team.
So for eight years, I mean, I mean, OK, even the last four years, there was no one really in the National Security Council working for Obama.
He said, hey, let's really try to crack this egg open, try again, do something about Korea rather than just the status quo.
I can't say that nobody was taking that position.
I'm sure there was somebody, but I don't think that they represented the consensus within his national security team.
And and Obama, as a weak president, you know, named people who were hawks to his key positions, you know, starting with with Robert, with Robert Gates, the secretary of defense and Gary Seymour as his advisor on WMD.
I mean, those were problematic, problematic nominations in terms of moving to a diplomatic solution with with Iran.
Yeah, well, that's fine.
I hope I didn't sound like I used to believe in the guy or anything like that.
I actually can prove it.
I actually have the audio from the chaos report from January 2007, which is the first time I ever heard of the guy.
Whereas CNN tells me he's a rock star and I'm supposed to like him.
So he must work for the Bush's basically my first take.
But anyway, yeah, no, I mean, what a bastard.
But I just I just appreciate that.
You can tell by looking at him in the same way with Trump and George Bush.
You can see the gears turning in his head.
And, you know, he's just smart enough to know better.
I shouldn't say good enough.
He's smart enough to know better, but still.
Right.
I think I think the analysis is right on.
Absolutely.
Yeah, man.
All right.
Well, so and well, I guess I'll just wait around for your next article about whether Trump's going to get us all killed or not.
Well, here's the thing.
Now, you know what?
I want to talk about that.
I got I got four more minutes before this is a solid hour.
Three.
Listen, what if there's a war with Korea and it turns into a war with Russia and China?
Do you think that that's a thing that could happen and we all die or that's just bullshit?
Well, it seems it seems relatively unlikely that that North that North Korea and a North Korean U.S. conflict would involve China and Russia if it remained a nuclear a nuclear exchange or, you know, an exchange of of air of air assets, some nuclear, some conventional.
But but certainly, you know, the role that China and Russia would play in a crisis is is worth contemplating.
There's no question about that, because they would be highly concerned and it would it would be a factor in in a crisis that needs to be taken into account.
I agree with that.
You know, Doug Banda likes to point out that.
Remember, Vladivostok is just up the coast there, a couple of hundred miles.
Yeah, it's not just China.
You always think of China.
Shanghai is right there, Jason, and all that.
But the Russian territory is right there as well.
And they both have an incredible interest in the future of, you know, what's at stake on that peninsula.
Agreed, agreed.
And you know what?
Here's one for all the liberals, too.
What about if Vladimir Putin says, hey, Trump, stop.
And now Trump has every liberal to his left saying, if you do what Putin says, you're a traitor.
Yeah.
And all of that pressure against him in the opposition is to do more war.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think Trump's personal, you know, orientation, personality and everything incline him towards the the very people who he's demonized as his enemies, political enemies domestically.
That's that's the strangest thing about this.
Right.
I mean, he's he's bought into their he's bought into their cold, new Cold War with Russia.
He's bought into, you know, the general orientation that the holdovers from the Obama administration have had on Afghanistan and and Syria.
Just just on Syria, there's more nuances, obviously, that need to be introduced in the picture.
But generally speaking, I mean, he has he has ingratiated himself on his national security policy with the very people who are his his enemies politically.
Yeah.
By the way, speaking of which, and this is totally off topic, but it's so important.
Is it though your understanding that he has truly ceased all CIA support for Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham and their friends in Syria?
Because that's a pretty big one.
That that is my understanding.
I mean, you know, maybe there's something I don't know, but but it's from what I know, that is the case.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, at least there's that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is these are things we're left to celebrate.
At least he stopped support for Ayman al-Zawahiri's men in Syria.
Yeah.
I don't know how direct support anyway.
I don't know how much of a toast that deserves.
Maybe not much.
All right, y'all.
Well, check out again Gareth's great work.
It's at Truthout.org.
And I'm rerunning it at the Libertarian Institute as well.
How Cheney and his allies created the North Korea nuclear missile crisis.
This is the definitive take on how they blew up two major opportunities for peace and denuclearization and created this current crisis.
And, you know, I mentioned it, so I'll mention it again for you in case you're Googling along here.
Israel's ploy selling a Syrian nuke strike on that story that was a lie that was used to scotch the second deal there.
The great Gareth Porter, everybody.
Also read his book Manufacture Crisis.
It's awesome.
And you know me.
I'm Scott Horton.org for the show.
Libertarian Institute.org for the Institute.
Antiwar.com for all the viewpoints I want you to read.
Buy my book Fool's Errand at foolserrand.us.
It's all about ending the terror war there, especially Afghanistan.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
