The Bush administration appears to be readying a new round of Washington’s oldest game, the blame game, on the North Korea nuclear “situation.” But the public record shows there is a lot of blame to go around ... and if George W. Bush wants to know more about how this fiasco evolved, he might want to pick up the phone and call dear old dad, George H. W. Bush.

While the current Bush administration is right to criticize the Clinton presidency for making a bad deal with Kim Jong Il and his father, Kim Il Sung, the Clintonites were faced with a fait accompli when they entered office in 1993. According to the latest CIA assessment of the North Korean nuclear program, sent in November to Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., “the North has one or possibly two weapons using plutonium produced prior to 1992.” In 1992, of course, the president was Bush’s father. So by the time the North was rattling sabers in 1994, the Clinton administration knew they were probably dealing with a nuclear power.

In fact, the CIA first revealed the North’s nuclear capability on Feb. 25, 1992, when then-CIA Director Robert M. Gates shocked the House Foreign Affairs Committee by saying his agency’s best guess was that North Korea would have a nuclear capability in “a few months to as much as a couple of years.” A year later, a few weeks after Clinton took office, Gates successor James Woolsey left open the possibility that North Korea may already have enough plutonium for a bomb.

Arf