Bush blames Clinton for Christian approach on North Korea

Mr. Bush cannot continue to wear the mantle of Christianity, while blaming his predecessor peace-makers for North Korea's nuclear ambitions and arguing that what's needed are more threats and economic sanctions.

As the fourth anniversary of the Senate’s Iraq War authorization vote quietly passed, the world press found itself obsessed with a new threat. North Korea detonated what appears to be their first nuclear test explosion, and the Bush Administration was clearly delighted to have the public’s attention diverted from the spiral of violence in Iraq, new intelligence data showing that the Iraq War is making world terrorism worse, and the coverup of the Foley Affair by the Republican House Leadership. When life gives them lemons (Hurricane Katrina, the 9/11 attacks, the 2001 recession, a nuclear North Korea), no one makes lemonade like Karl Rove and the Bush Administration.

The apparent rush to develop a nuclear capability in North Korea was superceded only by the Republicans’ rush to blame the Clinton Administration for the problem. Condemning the conciliatory behavior of Madeleine Albright and the Korean Sunshine Policy that won the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize, Senator John McCain and President Bush tried this week to shift the balance of public opinion away from dialogue and toward the use of threats in dealing with Kim Jong-Il. They seemed oblivious to the obvious: 6 years of Administration threats to build Korea-targeted "defensive" missiles, to resume nuclear testing of our own, and to develop new “bunker-busting” nuclear weapons probably targeted at the Yongbyong nuclear facilities had successfully provoked the obvious self-defensive behavior on the part of the North Koreans. Rarely mentioned in press accounts is the fact that General Douglas MacArthur had sought to use nuclear weapons during the Korean War, and Pyongyang could easily have become the third Hiroshima.

From a Catholic standpoint, the destabilization of the Korean peninsula under Mr. Bush is a classic illustration of how threats of violence only beget mutual threats of violence. It may be popular to portray the North Korean leadership as “unpredictable and unbalanced,” but in fact nothing is more predictable than the human instinct to fight back when threatened. It’s a story straight from Genesis–Cain-vs-Cain all over again—with the lives of millions of South Koreans and Japanese in the balance.

As Catholics, we must utterly reject the use of threats and the devaluation of human life to solve the world's problems, big and small. The Clinton Administration so clearly had this one right. The current Bush efforts to belittle Madeleine Albright and Korean détente are a bald attempt to follow that other deeply un-Christian human dictum: the best defense (rhetorically) is a good offense.  Mr Bush cannot continue to wear the mantle of Christianity, while blaming his predecessor peace-makers for the problem and arguing that what's needed are more threats and economic sanctions.