Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

The problem in dealing with someone whose word is no good

John Podhoretz:

THIS nation and the world have every reason to be skeptical about the supposed breakthrough announced yesterday with North Korea. Every five or six years we are told that the North Koreans have agreed to stymie their pursuit of nuclear weaponry in exchange for both tangible and intangible goodies from the West.

This time it appears the North Koreans have garnered two promises from the United States: First, that we'll consider diplomatic relations with Pyongyang, and second, that we'll consider helping them build a light-water nuclear reactor.

And what have we gotten in exchange?

Well, the North Koreans say they will end their nuclear program and readmit weapons inspectors. And, as chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill put it, "This is first time they have committed to completely dismantle their weapons in an international agreement. They cannot just stall and pretend it does not exist. I think they have gotten the message."

That's nice. But North Korea doesn't exactly have a good record when it comes to holding up their end of the bargain. Last time we made a big deal with Pyongyang, we shipped it $10 billion worth of aid and promised, as we did yesterday, to help them build nuclear reactors (ones that couldn't be used to generate material for bombs).

That was in 1994. It turned out that despite that agreement, North Korea never really stopped developing its weaponry. When, in 2002, the U.S. confronted the North Koreans with evidence of their duplicity, they announced publicly that they were going nuclear, and earlier this year announced they had a bomb.

American officials are most pleased by the fact that the deal doesn't call for a "freeze" on existing programs, as the Clinton deal did in 1994, but an outright destruction of them.

...

Kerry and other Democrats wanted to give the North Koreans what they wanted — to treat them as though they were the Soviet Union reborn and negotiate with them one-on-one. "We should have been engaged in bilateral negotiations from the get-go, from the beginning," he said in 2003. "And it was obvious that when you announce a policy of pre-emption and you invade another country, and you begin to build bunker-busting nuclear weapons, that Kim Jong Il was going to find a way to get the attention of this administration and he did."

Kerry's contention that the Bush administration's conduct somehow caused the North Koreans to abrogate its 1994 deal with the United States was contemptibly absurd. The CIA was warning as early as 1995 that the North Koreans were violating the "agreed framework" the Clinton administration had worked out with Pyongyang. By 1999, Clinton's onetime defense secretary, William Perry, declared: "What they're doing is moving forward on their nuclear weapons."