DUBYA STANDARDS: The Sydney Morning Herald subhed (link via Amptoons): “A contract for atomic power plants is a breathtaking example of Bush’s double standards.” The story: In Iran, Russians want to build six nuclear power plants. The Bush administration wants the Russians to stop, to keep Iran from using the stuff to make weapons. But in North “Axis of Evil” Korea, “if all goes well, today [Pyongyang] will pour the concrete foundation for the first of two US-supplied nuclear reactors, from which it will be able to extract sufficient ‘near-weapons-grade’ plutonium to make dozens of bombs.” The Russians, predictably, are pissed.

Now this seems like a dumb thing to do. Why are we giving Dear Psycho Leader nuclear materials? The SMH explains: “A deal between the US and North Korea in 1994 calls for the North to abide by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, especially its inspection provisions, and for a freeze on Pyongyang’s nuclear program. In return, the US will build it two big nuclear-power plants; and until they are up and running, Washington is pitching in half-a-million tonnes of heating oil each year.”

Well, this tit-for-tat might have been a good idea, might not have; I really don’t know. But do note who was in the White House in 1994–someone whose name is never mentioned in the SMH article.

More: “The point at which Pyongyang was to be subjected to inspections is in dispute–the 1994 agreement stipulates a non-specific time when ‘a significant proportion’ of the reactors is complete. The [International Atomic Energy Agency] argues that thorough inspections will take so long that they should have started months ago. But the fear in the north is that Washington only wants inspections now in the hope that they will throw up sufficient reason to abandon the project. …When Bush refused to certify North Korean compliance with the 1994 agreement earlier this year, Pyongyang railed against the ‘nuclear lunatics’ in the White House, it threatened to abandon the deal and it put out feelers for nuclear assistance in Moscow.

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Is it just me, or does this article make it sound like Bush is trying very hard to get out of the nuclear-plant commitment Clinton made? Again, maybe that’s a bad idea–those “feelers to Moscow” don’t sound promising–but this article really doesn’t make the case that Bush is “soft on North Korea.” In fact, the article reads like a warblog (North Korea really is evil; it really does share features in common with Iran and Iraq; the State Department is a bunch of starry-eyed wusses; Clinton got us into this big mess by appeasing rogue regimes) with an anti-Bush-screed coating.

I don’t get it.