Today's New York Times article on North Korea is really a significant (and excellent) piece of reporting. It give a good history of the issue, explaining the different policies and programs over the last two administrations, but then kind of obscures the fact that evidence increasingly shows that the Bush administration basically allowed North Korea to make nuclear weapons through sheer diplomatic idiocy.
Yglesias got to writing about it before I did, and I don't think I could improve much on his analysis, so go check it out. He even uses bullet points for expediency. Money quote:
The odds look decent, in other words, that the administration effectively let the DPRK build nuclear weapons for absolutely no reason at all other than its generally bad attitude toward diplomatic agreements and "stuff Bill Clinton did."And for a brief primer on the plutonium versus uranium (and other similar background) check out this analysis from back in October.
