Senator Kerry, Meet Ambassador Bolton

This is great…

KERRY: But this has been going on for five years, Mr. Ambassador.
BOLTON: It’s the nature of multilateral negotiations, Senator.
KERRY: Why not engage in a bilateral one and get the job done? That’s what the Clinton administration did.
BOLTON: Very poorly, since the North Koreans violated the agreed framework almost from the time it was signed. And I would also say, Senator, that we do have the opportunity for bilateral negotiations with North Korea in the context of the six-party talks, if North Korea would come back to them.
KERRY: Mr. Ambassador, at the time — Secretary Perry has testified before this committee, as well as others — they knew that there would be the probability they would try to do something outside of the specificity of the agreement.
But the specificity of the agreement was with respect to the rods and the inspections and the television cameras and the reactor itself.
BOLTON: Senator, the agreed framework requires North Korea and South Korea to comply with the joint North-South denuclearization agreement, which in turn provides no nuclear weapons programs on the Korean Peninsula.
So it was not limited only to the plutonium reprocessing program.
KERRY: Mr. Ambassador, the bottom line is that no plutonium was reprocessed under that agreement. No plutonium was reprocessed until the cameras were kicked out, the inspectors were kicked out, the rods were taken out, and now they have four times the nuclear weapons they had when you came on watch.
BOLTON: Because the North Koreans…
KERRY: The question here is — I mean, a whole host of people have testified before this committee and others.
I mean, my objection is that if you look at the policies across the board, and we’re not going to resolve it here now, obviously, I understand that.
(CROSSTALK)
KERRY: But here’s another good reason to think about this.
It’s hard to pick up the newspaper today, it’s hard to talk to any leader anywhere in the world, it’s hard to travel abroad as a senator and not run headlong into the isolation of the United States and the divisions that exist between us and our allies on any number of different issues.
Now, it is very hard to sit here and say that the six-party talks have been a success.
BOLTON: I don’t believe I’ve said that.
KERRY: I know. I didn’t suggest you have. But what I’m trying to get at is the policy foundation itself — why insist on a six-party talk process which, it seems to me, never joins the fundamental issues between the United States and North Korea, which go back a long, long time, over Republican and Democratic administrations?
BOLTON: I think the reason for that is that the disagreement is not fundamentally a bilateral disagreement between North Korea and the United States. It’s a disagreement between North Korea and everybody else about their pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability.
And the aspect of the six-party talks that we think was most important was not negotiating over the head of South Korea, which was the consequence of the agreed framework, but bringing in all of the regional partners, South Korea, Japan, Russia and China, to address this question collectively, since it was in all of our interests to do so.

Kerry is flat-out lying about North Korea not developing plutonium until the IAEA inspectors were kiced out in October of 2002:

July 1999: A U.S. intelligence report claims that North Korea has between 25 and 30 kilograms of weapon-grade plutonium, enough to make several nuclear warheads.
October 2000: The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assesses that North Korea has processed enough plutonium for at least one, and possibly two, nuclear weapons.

Texas Rainmaker has more.