A 1^st Bat­tal­ion, 9^th Field Artillery sol­dier from Fort Stew­art, Ga. looks out over Udari Range in North­west­ern Kuwait, dur­ing a live fire exer­cise. (Photo by Sgt. 1^st Class David K. Dis­mukes, CFLCC Pub­lic Affairs)

Hello all — I’m back from the hin­ter­lands of Arkansas, and boy am I glad to be back in New York. I took a break from the site for the last week, since much of the news out of Iraq seems to be of the “hurry up and wait” vari­ety. (In a minor update, the United Nations says Iraq has given it the names of more than 500 sci­en­tists involved in its arms pro­gram.)
How­ever, what’s more inter­est­ing is how the cri­sis with the Demo­c­ra­tic People’s Repub­lic of Korea (that’s North Korea for the Bushies read­ing this) is start­ing to inter­sect with the Iraqi cri­sis. Now, I know this site is called “Back to Iraq,” but the ways in which the Bush admin­is­tra­tion is deal­ing with North Korea is reveal­ing vis a vis Saddam’s abat­toir.
First off, North Korea has expelled UN weapons inspec­tors, removed mon­i­tor­ing equip­ment and started up reac­tors that can make weapons grade plu­to­nium in six months or so. The Stal­in­ist play­ground has also moved light machine guns into the (for­merly) DMZ between North and South. Pres­i­dent Bush’s response, in marked con­trast to his bel­li­cos­ity regard­ing Iraq — which doesn’t as yet have nukes, doesn’t seem much of a threat to its neigh­bors and doesn’t seem to be cozy­ing up to Al Qa’ida — is to threaten North Korea with eco­nomic col­lapse if it doesn’t aban­don its nuclear aims.
One ques­tion: Is he fuck­ing seri­ous?
Threat­en­ing the north with eco­nomic col­lapse is like wav­ing a gun at a dead man. Peo­ple are eat­ing grass, for God’s sake. (George Paine over at war​blog​ging​.com has a good entry on this.
With his “with us or against us” rhetoric, Bush has drawn a line in the sand in which all ter­ror­ism and weapons of mass destruc­tion in the hands of axis of evil char­ter mem­bers are “evil.” But with one mem­ber, we go to war, although the evi­dence that Iraq poses an exis­ten­tial threat to the United States is sorely lack­ing. With another mem­ber, which can threaten the cities of major allies and would be the most likely to sell anthrax and loose nukes to Al Qa’ida, we threaten it with grow­ing eco­nomic and polit­i­cal iso­la­tion, called “tai­lored con­tain­ment.“
“It is called ‘tai­lored con­tain­ment’ because this is an entirely dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tion than Iraq or Iran,” a senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial said. “It is a lot about polit­i­cal stress and putting eco­nomic stress. It also requires max­i­mum multi­na­tional coop­er­a­tion.“
That sounds an awful lot like sanc­tions to me, which I thought the Bush peo­ple had dis­missed in Iraq as unwork­able. And why is this an “entirely dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tion than Iraq or Iran”? Is it because if we go to war with North Korea, the North Kore­ans might shoot back? All in all, it sounds like the Bush pol­icy with North Korea is to piss them off as much as pos­si­ble.
At any rate, Bush’s pol­icy of pre­emp­tive self-defense has just come back and bit him in the ass. This action by the North Kore­ans is directly related to his good guys-bad guys rhetoric, because they are threat­ened and they’re look­ing to beef up their deter­rent before the United States can act mil­i­tar­ily. The United States is not the only coun­try that can act before some­one threat­ens its exis­tence, and Dear Leader has just acted. Per­haps every­one is gear­ing up to fin­ish that busi­ness from the 1950s once and for all.
I’ll be hon­est, North Korea isn’t some­thing I’ve paid a lot of atten­tion to, see­ing as my focus has been on Iraq. It turns out I have some­thing in com­mon with the Bush White House after all…