TPM: Let me just touch on a couple of issues. Iraq is the major issue now, but there are a few others sitting there that could rise to the surface at any point. On the Korean Peninsula, is there a line that we have to say they cannot cross? And if there is, where is it?
CLARK: Well there was a line, we already set it, but this administration let it go by. This administration thought it was better for the country to permit North Korea to go ahead with the nuclear development program rather than to talk to it. In other words, this administration was more worried about embarrassing itself in front of its right-wing base by talking to the North than it was in preventing the emergence of another nuclear-armed power that could proliferate nuclear weapons. It was a tragic--it will be, it's possible that it could be, a tragic miscalculation. And like much I see in this administration, it's an administration that's put politics over sound policy. People on both sides of the aisle understood that the way to
resolve the North Korean problem was to talk to North Korea--honestly talk to them.
TPM: Which is what the previous administration was in the process of doing.
CLARK: It's what the Clinton administration had done. Is North Korea wily, tough, paranoid, nasty? Sure, it's all those things. Has to be. It's a twenty-three- twenty-four-million population impoverished country in Asia--in the land of super-giants. Its survival as a
separate state is an historical anomaly and nobody knows it better than the North Koreans. And that's why they're hyper and paranoid. That's why they built up an arsenal of weapons and forces that defies all rational explanation but is ultimately highly rational from their
perspective. And so why can't we talk to that regime? We talked to them in the past.
TPM: Given that we let them--we sort of gave them--a tacit green-light, and now they're clearly moving ahead with the plutonium process, the uranium process is probably not quite so far along, but they probably have--we at least assume that they have--some nuclear
weapons, but how do we deal with it now?
CLARK: It's not too late to talk to them.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/clark.interview.pdfKerry also stressed the importance of bi-lateral talks, including in one of the debates.
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