James Lewis, at American Thinker, explains how the domestic and international left are responsible for Iran and North Korea becoming nuclear powers.
The single most suicidal action by the Left has been its years of assault on President George W. Bush after the overthrow of Saddam. It has often been pointed out that every intelligence agency in the world believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction before the invasion of Iraq. UN inspectors like David Kay repeatedly said so. Democrats and European socialists alike repeated warned about the danger of Saddam’s weapons programs, knowing full well that his first nuclear reactor was destroyed by an Israeli air raid as long ago as 1981. Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and even the UN’s El Baradei pointed out the danger.
As we now know, Saddam has had 500 metric tons of yellowcake uranium in storage since 1992. But George W. Bush was assaulted by the Left, in the person of Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson and the New York Times editorial page, allegedly because Bush peddled the lie that Saddam wanted to obtain yellowcake uranium. But there was no lie; the whole phony brouhaha was a PR assault to destroy the credibility of the Bush administration. The end result was to make us helpless in the face of more nuclear proliferation. To slake its lust for power the Left was more than willing to sabotage our safety.
Did Saddam pose a plausible threat of nuclear weaponization? Of course he did. Did he pose an actual threat? That is, did he actually possess WMD’s ready to mount on missiles in a matter of hours, to shoot off at his enemies? Today’s conventional wisdom is that he did not. But that is pure post-hockery.
George W. Bush has been crucified for five long years in the media, by the feckless, hysterical and cowardly Europeans, by the United Nations, and of course by the Democratic Party, because he took the only sane action possible in the face of the apparent WMD threat from Saddam. Because presidents don’t have the luxury of Monday morning quarterbacking. They cannot wait for metaphysical certainty about threats to national survival and international peace. There is no such thing as metaphysical certainty in these matters; presidents must act on incomplete intelligence, knowing full well that their domestic enemies will try to destroy them for trying to save the peace.
But that is water under the bridge by now. What’s not past, but rather a clear and present threat to civilization are the consequences of the unbelievable recklessness of the International Left — including the Democrats, the Europeans, the UN, and the former communist powers. Because of their screaming opposition to the Bush administration’s rational actions against Saddam, we are now rendered helpless against two even more dangerous challenges. With Saddam there was genuine doubt about his nuclear program; the notion that he had a viable program was just the safest guess to make in the face of his policy of deliberate ambiguity. In the case of Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il there’s no guessing any more. They have nukes and missiles, or will have within a year.
The entire anti-proliferation effort has therefore been sabotaged and probably ruined by the Left. For what reason? There can be only one rational reason: A lust for power, even at the expense of national and international safety and peace. But the Left has irrational reasons as well, including an unfathomable hatred for adulthood in the face of mortal danger. Like the Cold War, this is a battle between the adolescent rage of the Left and the realistic adult decision-making of the mainstream — a mainstream which is now tenuously maintained only by conservatives in the West.
Andre Pachter makes the case for a US strike on North Korea.
Pyongyang is a proven proliferator of nuclear and missile technologies and clearly committed to an economic system that is inherently incapable of producing wealth for its citizens and competing in the modern world. It is therefore just a matter of time before North Korea sells a nuclear weapon to another rogue state or a terrorist group such as Al Qaeda. If allowed to continue adding to its nuclear arsenal–and one must assume that it will violate any agreement it signs and never submit to verification of nuclear disarmament–North Korea could also resort to nuclear terror to extract economic assistance and other concessions from Japan. (As of this writing, the regime has threatened Japan with “strong countermeasures” if it formally approves additional sanctions on Friday, including banning imports from North Korea and blocking North Korean ships from entering Japanese ports.)
Additionally, there is no precedent for permitting a mentally ill state to possess nuclear weapons. It would be incredibly irresponsible–in fact, suicidal–to let this happen.
Which brings us to the war option–more specifically, surprise attacks aimed at swiftly destroying and defeating the enemy using any and all necessary means and weapons available to the US military. Though it may seem extreme, the use of sudden, devastating force may be the only acceptable alternative. Kim and his cohorts are not likely to go quietly into the night. Retirement and exile are out of the question; rather than submit to strangulation by sanctions and a blockade, the regime can be expected to attack South Korea, where thousands of US troops are stationed, and fire missiles at Japan. Even if North Korea is not presently capable of putting a nuclear warhead on a missile, it can strike out with chemical and possibly also biological weapons; and analysts generally agree that the casualties of a new Korean conflict would surpass the numbers of dead and wounded in the Korean War.
Is preemptive war–crushing the enemy before it can attack South Korea and Japan–a realistic option for the US? It should be–better be–an option. If not, what was the point of spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on the Pentagon?
It won’t happen, of course, but he’s perfectly right.
North Korea has already manufactured several nuclear weapons and is ready to deploy these in the event of a war, a high-ranking North Korean defector claimed on Thursday.
Hwang Jang-yop, a former secretary of the Workers Party of Korea and one of the North’s top theorists, said the reclusive nation signed a pact with Pakistan in 1996 on the transfer of uranium-based nuclear technology.
US intelligence has detected an explosion of less than one kilotonne in magnitude in North Korea but has not been able to determine whether it was nuclear or not, a senior intelligence official said.
The official, who asked not to be identified, said that first-time nuclear tests historically have been in the several kilotonne range.
“We are aware that there was a sub-kilotonne explosion in North Korea,” said the official. “We have not been able to determine at this point whether it was in fact nuclear.”
I think you can go right back to Harry Truman on this one. He should have allowed MacArthur to win the war. Truman provided the still commonly-implemented model of wasting American money and lives in pursuit of lesser objectives than victory. In the case of Vietnam, avoiding aiming at victory ultimately produced defeat. The original version of the policy was so good a choice, that, technically speaking, we’re still engaged in Harry Truman’s unfinished war.
Results are ambiguous. But a nuclear bomb in the hands of the insane, utterly irresponsible North Korean communist regime will inevitably make its way into the hands of even-less-accountable non-state surrogate terrorist organizations.
Bad children are playing with matches. If any adults are present, they ought to put a stop to this.