No Right Turn: The wrong target

Friday, June 10, 2005

The wrong target

While Bush was chasing Saddam's phantom WMD around Iraq, North Korea was busy building nuclear bombs. And now, they're building some more. Ever get the feeling Bush wasted his political capital on the wrong target?

4 comments:

Not sure if North Korea is the USA's problem except in as far as the US makes it so.

doing somthing about iraq is like mowing the lawn of a poor neighbour who cant afford to do it himself - dealing with nth korea is like mowing the lawn of a filthy rich neighbour who can afford to buy his own lawn mowing company.

Posted by Genius : 6/10/2005 08:05:00 AM

Genius: the USA is making it so. They have a policy that it is intolerable for small countries to get nuclear weapons (both because it destablises their region, and because it sets a limit on how far they can be pushed around), and so they get the joy of trying to enforce it.

Sock Thief: If you regard nuclear proliferation as a serious issue, then how can you not see Iraq as an enormous distraction?

Convincing countries to give up or not to pursue nuclear weapons requires sustained multilateral effort. Thanks to Iraq, though, the US has burned the political capital necessary to lead such an effort - and as a result, other countries are sitting back and saying "it's America's problem". Oh, North Korea's immediate neighbours care - but nobody else does.

Unfortunately, I do not see how the US can dig itself out of this mess - that sort of political capital takes years to build. Meaning they'll be dealing with North Korea pretty much alone. Fortunately, the fact that they're tied up in Iraq should prevent them from starting another war over it. I hope.

As for "Bush-bashing", this is a serious failure of Bush's policy. Or is serious failure not worthy of criticism?

Posted by Idiot/Savant : 6/10/2005 09:56:00 AM