BRAGGING ABOUT APPEASEMENT:

U.S., North Korea near war in 1994: Clinton got no-nuke vow (KENNETH R. BAZINET, 10/18/02, NY DAILY News)

The U.S. was on the brink of war with North Korea in 1994 before Pyongyang agreed to halt its nuclear weapons program, sources said yesterday.

"It went down to the wire," said a diplomatic source in the Clinton administration. "The American people will never know how close we were to war." [...]

"Had they not accepted, we had 50,000 troops on the [demilitarized zone]. We were hell-bent about stopping them," the ex-State Department source said.

Clinton also dispatched Assistant Secretary of State Robert Gallucci to Pyongyang to urge the Communist regime in 1994 and again in 1995 to accept two light-water reactors — which do not produce weapons-grade nuclear material — from South Korea in exchange for an agreement to suspend its nuclear weapons program.

"He kept us out of a ground war," the source said of Gallucci's effort.

The strange thing is that when Bill Clinton leaks these stories he thinks they make him look good. In reality, he needs to explain why he didn't go to war to prevent an enemy from developing nukes. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 18, 2002 2:39 PM