While I'd like to see Kim Jong Il on a meathook as befits such a fascist dictator, it's hard to see how he would act differently. Bush invades Iraq precisely because Saddam Hussein doesn't have Weapons O' Mass Destruction, which would certainly have been a deterrent to said invasion. Why wouldn't Kim strap up?
Then there's the way the Bush Administration, all too ideologically bent on rejecting any policies of the Clinton Administration (you remember -- 8 years of peace and prosperity?), double-crossed North Korea, per Newsweek International:
On Sept. 19, 2005, North Korea signed a widely heralded denuclearization agreement with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. Pyongyang pledged to "abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs." In return, Washington agreed that the United States and North Korea would "respect each other's sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize their relations."
Four days later, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sweeping financial sanctions against North Korea designed to cut off the country's access to the international banking system, branding it a "criminal state" guilty of counterfeiting, money laundering and trafficking in weapons of mass destruction.
The Bush administration says that this sequence of events was a coincidence. Whatever the truth, I found on a recent trip to Pyongyang that North Korean leaders view the financial sanctions as the cutting edge of a calculated effort by dominant elements in the administration to undercut the Sept. 19 accord, squeeze the Kim Jong Il regime and eventually force its collapse. My conversations made clear that North Korea's missile tests in July and its threat last week to conduct a nuclear test explosion at an unspecified date "in the future" were directly provoked by the U.S. sanctions. In North Korean eyes, pressure must be met with pressure to maintain national honor and, hopefully, to jump-start new bilateral negotiations with Washington that could ease the financial squeeze. When I warned against a nuclear test, saying that it would only strengthen opponents of negotiations in Washington, several top officials replied that "soft" tactics had not worked and they had nothing to lose.
Nice way to anger an enemy without actually taking him down. Nice way to get the opposite of what you really want. Nice way to give North Korea a membership card (#8) in the nuclear nations club.
Even Bush family consigliere, James Baker, is on Fox News and Charlie Rose alike saying of course you talk to your enemies as he promotes his new book. El Presidente and Shadow President Cheney reveal themselves, once again, as foreign relations morons.
So can Bush/Rove grab this and make it a rallying point, crowd Mark Foley off the front page and distract enough voters from our abject failure in Iraq?
My guess is that much of this hinges on China, which is on the record as being against North Korea's nuclear ambitions. The White House released some wussish rhetoric, which you can read bits of here to see if it means we're attacking. It would seem unlikely, since Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld have just sent our naval fleet to Iran for an October 22nd arrival, obviously the set-up for their "October Surprise" -- whether for a provocative attack on Iran or a planned Gulf of Tonkin incident to drum up U.S. warcries, no one outside their circle can know for sure. But thanks to Nixon's grand opening and W's grand mortgaging, China calls the shots where it counts here. Expect to see some U.N. action, and maybe the Rethugs can call that a public relations success.
The options for the Dems are sucky once again. Do they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our acting government, or do they somehow bifurcate and at the same time slam them for how they allowed this to happen on their watch?
The former will allow the criminals to continue bashing the Clinton Admin for being "too soft" and somehow causing this result six years after. The latter could be too complex a story for the already headline battered average voter.
All I can hope is that smarter, more focused, more strategic and well-placed opposition brains than mine have the answer.
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