More on Korean nuclear ambitions

Empire Notes today has an excellent explanation of the US-North Korea foreign policy stand-off, faulting policy of both the Republican administration and the alternatives the Democrats propose:

Far from the narrative that Republicans and Democrats agree on, it was the Bush administration, not North Korea, that provoked this crisis. North Korea is a less-than-admirable state internally, but it has no interest in a suicidal confrontation with the United States. It just understands that weakness is not the best way to keep the United States from attacking you.

Mahajan attacks further the central foreign policy canard of Bush camapaign rhetoric, where it continually highlights the demonstration value of the conquest of Iraq:

One of the most absurd moments in a very absurd post-9/11 world came on April 9, 2003, when John Bolton, U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, used the war on Iraq to warn Iran, Syria, and North Korea: "With respect to the issue of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the post-conflict period, we are hopeful that a number of regimes will draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq that the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is not in their national interest".

This is an odd lesson to learn from a war in which Iraq was quite obviously attacked because it couldn’t defend itself, and the attack occurred while it was disarming, in particular while it was destroying its al-Samoud 2 missiles. The lesson that those countries, and virtually every other one in the Third World, obviously learned from the war was the opposite, articulated straightforwardly by North Korea: "The Iraqi war shows that to allow disarming through inspection does not help avert a war but rather sparks it. This suggests that even the signing of a nonaggression treaty with the U.S. would not help avert a war". (April 7, 2003, Howard French, New York Times)

On one perfectly valid point Mahajan makes, I too want to distance myself from the tough-minded liberal concensus:

The obvious implication being that the way to deal with North Korea's weapons was to be able to threaten them with the maximal number of troops. And in general he makes it a staple of his analysis that Bush has "underestimated" the threat from North Korea and Iran.

It's actually become quite a common refrain among liberals. Sometimes they imply we should have gone to war against Saudi Arabia rather than Iraq; sometimes that we should have gone to war against North Korea instead.

Careful readers of this blog might remember that a few posts ago, even I argued that,

Perhaps Pakistan or Saudi Arabia could have been better selections for last year's invasion, as the more likely source of such a surprise attack exists within these countries -- noting that the 911 plot was arguably centered there. And Pakistan is known to have nukes -- they tested one, remember? But Pakistan is President Bush's Terror War "ally", even as it is wrapped in layer after layer of secret machinations. What is the truth? Is the US afraid of Pakistan? Is that why it receives treatment far different than that given Iraq?

I just want to clarify that I agree fully with Mahajan and doubt the Kerry/tough-minded-liberal solutions to these confrontations -- troop strength and military threats -- are much better than the inflammatory approach of the Bush administration. In the earlier post, I merely was extending the internal logic of the administration's rhetoric, thereby highlighting the contradictions.

South Korean nuclear program
We have yet to hear much more about this very significant story:

South Korea - a strong ally of the US in its continuing quest to get North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions - stunned the region on 2 September when it revealed that, like its neighbour, it too had fallen foul of international nuclear accords.

A small number of South Korean scientists had conducted secret tests to produce 0.2g of enriched uranium in 2000, the government admitted. (BBC, 13.Sep.2004)

Doesn't this tell us that we need calming diplomacy, truth-seeking, international cooperation, and American willingness to back off of military solutions? Get-tough approaches will one day backfire as the United States neither today nor ever will have the power to put an iron lid on everyone elses ambitions to defend themselves from ill-considered use of that power, or from each other.