By Scott Italiaander

Let me see if I have this straight. The position of the Democrat party is that we should be engaged in bi-lateral talks with North Korea, and it is the failure of the Bush administration to so engage the NoKos that led to that country’s enrichment of uranium/plutonium and its “nucular” test of last week (a little Bush lingo). Now, if I was a respected professional journalist rather than a mere amateur blogger, I might have engaged in a few seconds of internet googling to find this item:

In the days before the [last round of Six-Party] talks formally began, several bilateral sessions were held among the parties, a meeting format that would dominate this round where large and unwieldy plenary sessions had been the norm in the past. On July 25, 2006 U.S. delegation chief Christopher Hill met with his North Korean counterpart Kim Kye Gwan in the first of what would be as many as nine hours of direct U.S.-North Korea face time. These bilateral sessions represent something of a middle ground between the two countries' previously opposed positions on the appropriate format for the talks. (PINR, Oct 2006)

Now, what’s really interesting is that the NoKos have been insisting on bi-lateral (that means 2-party) talks since the 1970s—that’s right, for 30-odd years. It seems that what the regime has wanted is to formalize a peace treaty that would replace the 1953 armistice agreement, and has sought for decades to engage the U.S. directly in order to enhance its own prestige.

Last time I checked we have had two Democratic administrations and several Republican ones since the 1970s and yet not once have I heard any political party or media pundit call for bi-lateral negotiations with the North Koreans before President Bush took office. It seems that refusal to confer the prestige on North Korea it so dearly desires has been a bi-partisan affair for many, many years, but nobody thought to make it an issue until it became politically expedient to do so.

So I guess if I were a paid journalist writing for a newspaper or a TV news guy interviewing a Democrat who insists on bi-lateral negotiations with NoKo, I might ask him or her why, if this is such a good idea, it wasn’t tried by Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, or Bill Clinton.

Oh, I forgot. Two-party talks were tried by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. And that resulted in the 1994 A Greed Frame-Up in which we gave North Korea fuel, technology for nuclear reactors, aid, and a promise to normalize relations.

And all we got in return was a nuclear enrichment program, missile tests, and a North Korea well on its way to nuclear status, and perhaps nuclear proliferation.