According to Richard Lloyd Parry, writing in The London Times, North Korea wouldn't be any trouble at all if weren't for former President George W. Bush! Kim Jong Il was, apparently, not a bad guy until "Dubya turned [him] into a monster"!

Politics entirely aside, and fresh on the heels of remarks about the British problem with "irony" -- would you take political advice from a guy who writes like this?

Barack Obama has made it clear that, in principal, he will talk to anyone. But in eight years North Korea has become a different regime...

Yup. The author -- and apparently all the much-ballyhood multiple layers of checks above him, never heard (as most of us did in the second or third grade) that "the principal is your pal", and has no idea of the difference between one's abstract guiding moral rules ("principles") and the main person in charge of something ("principal").

(Oh, don't get me wrong -- I'm sure many Americans would make such a mistake too. But many of them are driving taxis, working with computers, or serving food -- not offering foreign policy advice and/or editing a newspaper.)

That aside, this is a an example of raw propaganda, attempting to convince the reader (no doubt effectively, from what I'm seeing) that history, as it was, never happened.

During the Clinton administration, we almost came to war -- real, actual war -- with Kim Jong Il. Much to Clinton's ire (initially), Jimmy Carter inserted himself into the situation, and brokered a "peace" agreement, whereby N Korea promised to be good (the agreement had no effective means of enforcement), shut down his nuclear development program, and in return we'd give him lots of money, food, and -- let us recall -- nuclear technology. Most of us predicted, at the time, that Kim Jong Il would continue to cheat, and that giving him nuclear technology and piles of money would only accelerate his program.

In short: Take a dictator who's interested in developing nukes, leave him alone, give him cash and nuclear technology, and ... he'll develop nukes! That would seem a rather obvious sequence of cause and effect, no?

The present Korean crisis is a by-product of the complex of instincts, prejudices and vested interests best identified by a single name: George W. Bush.

Ah, no, apparently. Kim Jong Il's nuclear program was apparently caused by George W Bush's 'prejudices'! Who knew?

At the tail end of the Clinton presidency, Kim Jong Il received a cordial visit from none less than the Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright. So one can imagine his confusion when Mr Bush came to power. The new Administration was not just cool towards North Korea, but grossly insulting to an extent rare even between countries at war.

Yes, Ms Albright even gave the Dear Leader a basketball. So was absolutely clear, despite what later evidence demonstrated, that they must have completely abandoned all nuclear weapons research and development. The basketball cannot lie.

Mr Kim, according to Mr Bush, was a "pygmy", and "a spoilt child". "I loathe Kim Jong Il," he told the journalist Bob Woodward, who described the President "waving his finger in the air".

This private conversation, recorded by Bob Woodward (the same Woodward who had CIA head Ben Casey giving him dramatic deathbed revelations) -- and published only a few years ago in State of Denial -- is what caused Kim Jong Il to resume his quest for nuclear weapons many years before that? Never mind evidence he'd been "cheating" all along, through the Clinton and early Bush administrations.

North Korea was lumped in with Iraq and Iran as the third member of the Axis of Evil. In 2003 Iraq was invaded. What North Korean dictator with his wits about him would fail to conclude that he might be next?

So if the US actually invading Iraq is what allegedly forced North Korea to develop nukes, then why were they also pursuing them in the first place, a decade before Bush took office? The narrative makes no sense: the problem (which came first) is supposed to have been caused by the reaction to it (which came later).

The risible Six-Party Talks, a round table intended to save the US from having to deal directly with the North, served only to distract attention from the staggering thing that was unfolding. In his final two years, finally sensing what they had allowed to happen, Mr Bush's people executed a panicky U-turn and engaged in direct talks. Far too late.

Actually the "risible six-party talks" happened because the left was criticizing the approach taken before that -- direct talks. It was folly, they said, that we should talk to Kim Jong Il without involving the other regional powers. Then, when Bush aligned his policy with that particular "wisdom", his critics simply switched views: "Four legs good, two legs better!" Oh sorry -- that was Animal Farm (no different, really, though).

... a covert nuclear programme would have taken years to come to fruition. As it turned out, Mr Kim was able to do it at speed, in full view, because the leader of the free world was too proud and stubborn to sit down and talk.

But North Korea did have a covert nuclear program, and was able to run it for decades. And Mr Parry himself admits that nothing short of an invasion would have halted the program, so it's no clear why he fingers the lack of direct talks as the crucial misstep.

But this is the way of the world, isn't it? Through newspapers and television, the left demands (and gets) its way: First, Carter's agreement, then ineffective UN inspections, then multiparty talks, etc. Each time, the right says: this ineffective, this will result in North Korea having nukes. Then, when each leftist program fails, right on schedule, it becomes their opponent's fault.

The peace agreement was scuttled not because Kim Jong Il was found to be cheating, but only because Bush had expressed dislike of a genocidal dictator (our leaders must only praise men like Kim Jong Il). Whereas Bush has been criticized for his allegedly unilateralism, now he's an idiot because he involved our regional allies in important talks, quite in line with what critics like Mr Parry were demanding. The decision to take a dictator's word that wouldn't cheat on an agreement -- and the decision to hand him nuclear technology -- played no role whatsoever. And the solution -- though rendered almost impossible now, because a non-leftist was once elected in the US -- would be even more talks, to take Kim Jong Il at his word yet some more.