N Korea policy under Bush: Talk tough, don't act

Josh Marshall has a succinct summary of the history of North Korea's nukes and the Bush policy for "dealing with" the problem:

"The salient fact is that under Clinton plutonium reprocessing stopped and under Bush it restarted. The Bushies angle was that you don't coddle bad actors like the North Koreans. You deal with them in the language they understand: force. But the NKs called their bluff, they weren't prepared to use force. So they decided to forget about the whole thing.

That's the record. That's the policy. A total failure. "

Go to his blog and read the history for the full story of how the Bush administration really screwed the North Korea situation up.