North Korea is sorry!
That’s correct the President’s policies toward N. Korea are indeed working. All the nay sayers and all of the second guessers were wrong about N. Korea. N. Korea’s Kim Jong Il told Chinese State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan that "we have no plans for additional nuclear tests," Yonhap news agency reported, citing an unnamed diplomatic source in Beijing.
Kim also told the Chinese that "he is sorry about the nuclear test," the mass-circulation Chosun Ilbo daily reported, citing a diplomatic source in China. The North Korean leader also raised the possibility the country would return to arms talks. That is the six-party talks that the Bush administration has been saying all along were the way to deal with the N. Korea leader.
President Bush chose to work diplomatically through China which was able to broker this apology from Kim.
After N. Korea tested Nuclear weapons underground Some leading US Democratic senators joined a growing chorus of voices calling on the Bush administration to engage in bilateral talks with North Korea to persuade the communist state to abandon its nuclear weapons programmes.
Carl Levin, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said President George W Bush should abandon his resistance to one-on-one talks with North Korea and appoint a special envoy to deal with Pyongyang.
"Providing our allies and partners want us to talk with the North Koreans, bilaterally, one-on-one, we should do so," he said, adding that he believed South Korea, China and Russia supported such talks.
"Our refusal to do so just plays into the hands of the North Koreans," Levin said.
Levin said Bush presented a "false choice" between multilateral talks and going it alone – as Washington did when it struck a nuclear freeze pact in 1994 which unraveled in 2002 after Pyongyang was found in violation of that deal.
The False Choice which Levin addresses as the Washington nuclear freeze pact of 1994 which was a bi-lateral agreement between the Clinton administration and N. Korea which failed or unraveled according to Levin.
So why would he think that bi-lateral talks would work between the Bush administration and N. Korea?
Former U. S. Senator Sam Nunn, a Democrat and former chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, also called for direct talks between the U. S. and North Korea, after the Asian nation stunned the world by conducting a nuclear test.
Nunn called the Bush administration's reluctance to meet with the North "counterproductive."
Nunn is a supposed expert on nuclear proliferation who co-founded the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative after leaving office in 1996.
In spite of all of the second guessing it was the diplomatic work of Secretary of State Codelezza Rice with China that turn the N. Korean dialogue around.
Chinese banks said they have suspended financial transactions to North Korea under orders from Beijing. China is the North's main trading partner, and the step could be a serious blow to its frail economy.
"If the U.S. makes a concession to some degree, we will also make a concession to some degree,whether it be bilateral talks or six-party talks," Kim was quoted as telling a Chinese envoy, the newspaper reported.
After negotiation with Secretary Rice China put the breaks on N. Korea’s economic transactions to which Kim Jong Il said he was sorry and Pyongyang didn't plan to carry out any more nuclear tests. He also expressed regret about the country's first-ever atomic detonation.
You were right again President Bush and nay sayers were wrong!
