How I Learned To Stop Worrying...

How many people are going to use that line? Lots, I'll bet. It's appropriate. That North Korea felt that now was the time to test a nuclear device says a lot about the opinion held by them of the United States. President Bush has his trifecta-- he has managed to take his "Axis of Evil" and make our situation with each worse. Forget Teddy Roosevelt: Bush has his own policy: "Speak loudly, but carry a limp dick." And there's no chance of scoring any Viagra until January, 2009.

Here's David Wallechinsky in The Huffington Post. It's short, so I am copying the whole thing.

In his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, President Bush dubbed North Korea, Iran and Iraq an "axis of evil." When he invaded Iraq fourteen months later and overthrew Saddam Hussein, many Americans thought that this would teach a lesson to the leaders of the other two axis members, Kim Jong-il of North Korea and the ruling mullahs of Iran.

They did learn a lesson...but it wasn't the one the Bush administration intended. The North Koreans and the Iranians looked around the world and saw that countries that had nuclear weapons, like Pakistan and China, were not in danger of being invaded by George Bush, while Saddam Hussein, who didn't have a nuclear weapons program, was in prison and being tried for war crimes. If you were the leaders of North Korea or Iran, what would you do to ensure that your country would not be invaded by the United States? Easy call: you build nuclear weapons, which is exactly what both of them are doing. Nice going, Mister President.

Here's a brief excerpt of what Glenn Greenwald has to say:

Independent of how well or poorly the Clinton administration dealt with North Korea -- and there is room for reasonable debate on that question -- there is no getting around several facts: (a) the North Korean threat has grown substantially during the Bush presidency; (b) the course we have followed for managing that threat has failed on every level; and (c) our ability to credibly threaten any military confrontation is virtually nonexistent.

It may seem to be a sideshow, that there is all this finger-pointing going on: shouldn't we be working on resolving the issues? Well, that would be nice, but a) we should know how we got to this point so that we don't repeat our mistakes, and b) from a political standpoint, you know the right is going to be vigorously pointing the other way (Clinton, anyone?). There has been one party in charge for the last six years, and it ain't been the Democrats, and Bill Clinton hasn't been President.

Here is Eric Alterman, in his new Altercation blog site, with some background, taken from The Book on Bush. He has much of interest; read the whole thing. This is a sample:

Bush had already undermined the extremely sensitive negotiations under way to bring the North Korean regime into the international system. When South Korean president (and Nobel laureate) Kim Dae Jung visited Washington six weeks after Bush took office, Bush humiliated both his guest and his own secretary of state by publicly repudiating the negotiations after both had just publicly endorsed them. (Powell had termed their continuation "a no-brainer.")

Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly floats the possibility that the test may have been a dud. Brad Plumer has a post up in which he discusses the situation, with many good links to more information.

And Kevin Drum (again) quotes Glenn Kessler reporting that administration officials have been eagerly anticipating the North Korean's test. Kevin sums up:

Let's recap: The Bush/Cheney administration took a bad situation with Iraq and made it even worse. They've taken a bad situation with Iran and made it even worse (see here, here, and here). They've taken a bad situation with North Korea and made it even worse (see Fred Kaplan here). At every step along the way, they've deliberately taken actions that cut off any possibility of solving our geopolitical problems with anything other than military force.

Once is a singular event. Twice might be a coincidence. But three times? That's a policy. Encouraging these "clarifying events" appears to be the main goal of the Bush administration. This is not the way to make America safer.

The Armed Forces is in no condition to invade Grenada again, much less face North Korea. Air strikes, naval bombardment, cruise missiles, sure; and the response to that will be a massive land attack over the DMZ. South Korea will enjoy that scenario. And what of Japan? I wouldn't be surprised to learn they are cranking up their own nuclear research-- the Israel of the Far East. Who could blame them? Thank our Limp-Dick Diplomacy.