President Bush has decided to allow U.S. companies to resume most trade with Libya and to buy Libyan oil to reward Tripoli for giving up its weapons of mass destruction, U.S. officials said on Thursday. (Reuters)
This is all well and good, but while they pat themselves on the back over Libya and spout off about the enemies of freedom and democracy in Iraq, the Bush administration is ignoring the true WMD threat:
North Korea is potentially more dangerous than the mess in Iraq. It probably has at least 1 to 3 nuclear weapons already, it is producing both plutonium and uranium, and it is on track to have close to 10 nuclear weapons by the end of this year.Yet because President Bush's policy has failed in North Korea, Washington is determinedly looking the other way. When we next focus on North Korea, after the election, it could be a nuclear Wal-Mart.
[...]
The latest disclosure, via David "Scoop" Sanger of The Times, is that the father of Pakistan's bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, claims that North Korea showed him three nuclear weapons in 1999. The Bush administration, after publicizing anything to do with Iraqi W.M.D., tried to keep that North Korean revelation secret.
Dr. Khan's report has not been confirmed. But this much is sure: The Bush administration has invaded a country on far less evidence.
Worse, North Korea is reprocessing enough plutonium to make an additional half-dozen weapons. It has also restarted one nuclear reactor and will soon replace the fuel rods there, producing enough plutonium for another weapon. All of that activity began during the Bush administration. North Korea is also continuing a uranium enrichment program that it covertly began in the Clinton years. (Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times)
It would be nice if Tommy Franks had something up his sleeve to help us out on this one. Of course, when a country has REAL WMDs, and not just fabricated ones, Bush's team prefers multi-lateral negotiations. How novel.
You people who don't understand the need for military secrets are just stupid! Wake up!! The enemy has satellite TV too. Anything the American public knows, the enemy knows too.
Yeah, Franks probably HAD a plan, but now that the North Koreans know we've discovered their nukes, the jig is up. The element of surprise that we could have used to our advantage is gone. When a criminal thinks he's about to be busted, a flurry of activity usually ensues. Evidence is destroyrd or put in better hiding places. Defense plans are begun or accelerated, and hiding the spoils of the crime (Nuclear-tipped ICBM's that can reach our west coast in this case) is given highest priority. So now that they know we know, our chances of conducting a single operation of pinpoint strikes to take out their entire program are next to nil. If we knew where they were, they've been moved. Surely they're doing everything they can to render any information we had useless.
So now, instead of having plenty of time to do our homework to take out their nuclear capability in one shot with minimal collateral damage (with the enemy blithely humming along thinking they were getting away with it), we now have a full-blown Cold War style high-stakes poker game, with Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles potentially in the crosshairs of a tinpot, wacko, murderous pajama-wearing dictator.
So the Korean nuclear threat has fully materialized, and thanx to "Scoop - of dog poop" blowing our cover, the apocalyptic sabre-rattling has begun. We have the "absolute proof" on the North Koreans, just like all you wackos wanted us to have for Iraq. What does that get us? Stalemate with another crackpot, communist dictatorship. Our only, perhaps longshot, option to use the element of surprise along with a (relatively) small amount of military force is gone. Our remaining options for preventing a massive buildup North Korean nuclear capability all involve substantial risk of the loss of millions of American lives. Negotiate you say? We did that in 1994, but President Penis failed to verify the Korean promise not develop WMD's. North Korea proved it can't be trusted to negotiate in good faith and keep their word.
So why did Bush go after Iraq instead of North Korea? Simple! To prevent the Iraqi nuclear threat from fully materializing, so we don't have two North Korean style nightmare quagmires to deal with instead of only one.
Posted by: Leo on August 22, 2004 05:03 AM
