Who is shamed now?

More shameful Bush lies

By Carl Senna, 2006, all rights reserved

“Rice Says U.S. Will Not Invade N. Korea,” Wednesday October 11, 2006 2:01 PM By FOSTER KLUG Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says the United States would not attack North Korea, rejecting a suggestion that Pyongyang may feel it needs nuclear weapons to stave off an Iraq-style U.S. invasion.
Rice said that President Bush has told the North Koreans that “there is no intention to invade or attack them. So they have that guarantee. … I don’t know what more they want.”
[Yet]Rice told CNN Tuesday that Bush “never takes any of his options off the table. But is the United States, somehow, in a provocative way, trying to invade North Korea? It’s just not the case.”…
Asked whether North Korean leader Kim Jong Il may have felt that he needed to stage an apparent nuclear test this week to prevent an invasion similar to the U.S.-led attack on Saddam Hussein, Rice said Iraq “was a very special situation.”
“Iraq was a desire to finally deal with a threat that had been there for too long,” she said.
It is just as well for her credibility, such that Rice still has, that she did not attempt to describe the threat that Saddam Hussein represented to the U.S.  After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, who in the international community trusts the word of Bush, when he tells any country that the U.S. is no military threat to it? The U.S. military ring around North Korea must speak louder than the administration statements to the contrary: presently, 30, 000 American troops in South Korea face the DMZ between the North and South Koreans; there has been in place not a peace treaty but only a ceasefire between the DPRK and the ROK/U.S. -led NATO forces since the end of the Korean War (1950-53); U.S. military spy satellites fly over the DPRK; and U.S. spy planes continue to violate North Korean airspace; and while U.S. supersonic bombers with nuclear weapons on Pacific islands stand ready for action against North Korea,  American nuclear submarines prowl the oceans around the Korean Peninsula,  and a U.S. battle fleet is maneuvering continually for possible support of our forces in South Korea. The U.S. also has stiff trade, currency, banking and financial sanctions against North Korea.
Without any sense of irony, or humour, given all the hostile U.S. overtures to the DPRK, Rice assures the North Koreans that they are expected to trust Bush, while the U.S. military options remain “on the table.” That must be welcome news to the North Koreans who can now assure the U.S. that its nukes are only for deterrence, but that henceforth, while it negotiates with the U.S.,  it, too, “retains its nuclear military option on the table.” Both countries now have each other in their sights and their fingers on the nuclear bomb trigger.  Nothing could be more suicidal than a firing squad arranged in a circle.

Any one who claims that North Korea must be considered more of a threat by the U.S. than China when it first detonated nuclear weapons is ignorant of the Congressional and administration reactions of the time. If anything, the Chinese explosions instigated predictions of imminent Doomsday, just as the hydrogen bomb explosions of the USSR in the 1950s led to nuclear bomb drills in all our schools and the sales of nuclear bomb shelters for each home and workplace. The 1950s U.S. government instigated public hysteria over the communist atomic bomb threats look ridiculous today.
Only a Democratic President or a Republican President who repudiates Bush will be able to make such assurances with any credibility to North Korea or any other country. It won’t be Bush, reported to be responsible for 655,000 Iraqi deaths (and counting. (See October 11, 2006 The New York Times, “Study: 655, 000 Iraqis Die Because of War,” By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, Filed at 6:12 a.m. ET). This is the same Bush who defends torture, arbitrary arrests and imprisonment without trial, and who started a war with Iraq on the basis of lies! Never mind that the leader of North Korea is equally untrustworthy! This Bush is now someone the North Koreans (or the American people)ought to trust?
When Bush appeared on Oprah’s televison show after the 2000 Presidential election, he was asked why during the campaign he had concealed his criminal conviction for drunk driving in Maine. He responded that he had done so because he wanted to win the election and that revealing it might have hurt him with voters.
The Oprah appearance was a rare view of his character and integrity, which are nothing if not about telling the truth, and about a refusal to lie by commission or omission. Bush was forced to admit to his criminal record on the program, because it had already been publicly revealed by a whistleblower familiar with the case, which the Bush family had attempted to purge from the court records. Before Oprah and the audience, Bush reluctantly confessed that he was a very untrustworthy man. Since then, he often tries unsuccessfully to make light of his character flaw, attempting to recall for public consumption, the Jamaican folk expression he learned from Colin Powell (without attributing it to Powell), “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
Shame on us! Bush has now fooled us twice. If only now he can fool the North Koreans and the Chinese? Bush, of course, has a tendency to manipulate people and governments, in a kind of diplomatic billiards (that is, pressuring one country or one set of countries to pressure another, since as Bush admits of North Korea, he has not enough credibility to directly engage in a dialogue with the intended target of the pressure). But his diplomatic billard strategy seems to have failed here. For the past four years Beijing has repeatedy assured Bush that they had control of Pyongyang, so that the DPRK would never conduct a nuclear bomb test without China’s okay. Hahaha! Shame on Bush.