Obama adviser: McCain is with the Dick Cheney wing of the Bush administration
North Korea has recently taken significant steps towards nuclear disarmament, leading the Bush administration to lift some sanctions and notify Congress that North Korea will be removed from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Susan Rice, a former Assistant Secretary of State and senior foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, told MSNBC's Joe Scarborough on Friday that these events represent "an important, albeit modest, first step."
"What we see is that diplomacy, direct diplomacy, can in fact yield modest results," Rice stated. "We would not have gotten this far if the Bush administration had not belatedly ... [turned] to negotiations. Now, John McCain is with the Dick Cheney wing of the Bush administration ..."
Scarborough interrupted Rice at that point to challenge her use of the word "belatedly." He also asked her, "Are you just saying that this is 'a modest step' because you're in the middle of a political campaign?"
"It's in fact what President Bush said yesterday," Rice explained.
"There's a lot we still don't know. We don't know what's happened to North Korea's suspected uranium enrichment program ... the nuclear material that it's already made ... whether it's proliferated its technology to Syria or other places of concern."
Rice then returned to her suggestion that "had we listened to Dick Cheney and, indeed, John McCain, we would not have this progress today."
"John McCain opposed negotiations," Rice emphasized. "In 1994, he advocated airstrikes against North Korea and threatened North Korea with extinction. Had we done that we would be in a very, very different place than we are today."
This video is from MSNBC's Morning Joe, broadcast June 27, 2008.
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