October 9, 2006

North Korea

Some are suggesting North Korea's nuclear bomb test was a dud or a fake, but I'm not sure it matters all that much. If this test was a dud, that just means North Korea and its tyrannical homicidal maniac ruler Kim Jong Mentally Il will try again. Until they succeed.

Some bloggers and pundits are blaming North Korea's progress on the Clinton administration which, after all, told the world that Kim Jong Il had given up his pursuit of nukes in exchange for a $4 billion reactor. Turns out, the North Korean madman didn't stop starving and murdering his own people long enough to keep up his end of the bargain. Shocking, but true.

And therein lies the problem.

Only one side wants a deal. The other side wants nukes.

It hardly mattered what Clinton did or what Bush has done - I'm fairly certain that even if we had a president who combined the intelligence of Einstein with the wisdom of Solomon, that Kim Jong Il would still have tested a nuke today. Clinton was just naive in even bothering to bargain with him.

You could have one-on-one talks with U.S. diplomats across the table from North Korean diplomats, or six-party talks involving the U.S., North Korea, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea - or talks involving the leader of every nation on earth all eating kimchi off the finest china and chatting things over with Kim Jong Il, and though it might result in a "deal" written on paper and announced with great fanfare, it wouldn't change the fact that the madman of Pyongyang wants his nukes.

Ditto the Iranians
Just like Kim Jong Il, the mad mullahs of Tehran - Shi'a muslims - don't want a deal. They don't want an agreement. They want nukes - and they want them so they can obliterate Israel, and usher in the reappearance of the "12th Imam" and the new global Islamic reign.

They won't be stopped by bargains or sanctions or UN resolutions - madmen never are. They can only be stopped by one of three options:

1. A complete and total embargo, enforced by armed forces, which is an act of war.
2. Regime-change via internal revolution backed secretly at first and then openly by the West. (This isn't an option for North Korea, where the police-state tyranny is total and the people are starving, but it might work in Iran.)
3. Direct military force.

All three options have risks. None is guaranteed to work. But there is no real alternative. Bribing the North Koreans didn't work for Clinton and Madeline Albright, and it won't work now. Neither will bribing the Iranian regime, which is driven by the fanatical Shia muslim belief in a coming religous apocalypse and its Allah-ordained role in bringing it about.

They want nukes, period.

There simply are no good options vis a vis North Korea or Iran. There haven't been good options for at couple decades, just bad options. And those options are all getting worse the closer Iran gets to nukes, and the closer Kim Jong Il gets to having a nuke that he can stick atop a missile.

Once both those countries have nukes, it is only a matter of time before they slip one to an al Qaeda cell, and it explodes in Israel or London or New York.

It's a shame the Democrats forced the Bush administration a few years ago to cease funding for the perfecting of nuclear-tipped "bunker buster" weapons that could have destroyed North Korean and Iranian nuclear sites even though they're underground and hardened.

Update: This blog post from Donald Sensing that underscores the higher value of the blogosphere than the mainstream media in stories such as North Korea's nuke test. Watch the networks and read the papers about North Korea today and you'll get pretty much the same story - the facts, and the political reaction to the test, all written by journalists whose expertise is journalism, not nuclear weapons science. But what you won't get is in-depth analysis by people with real expertise in the field.