Bravery and Buffoons
This past Sunday, John Kerry took it upon himself to call up a reporter at the New York Times and discuss North Korea and how President Bush has let us all down. (Does this count as a break in Kerry's embargo on press conferences with others besides Jon Stewart and MTV? No.) It's pretty clear that Kerry was moved to do this by what he and many Democrats actually hope was a detonation of a nuclear or nuclear-related device in that sad little country last week. We still don't know exactly what it was ---except an opportunity for Kerry to wax wroth.

Mr. Kerry's basic argument, that the Iraq war has diverted attention from more dangerous nations like North Korea, is one he has often used on the campaign trail and in interviews over the past several months. But his language on Sunday, calling the situation "a nuclear nightmare" and directly accusing Mr. Bush of leaving the United States more vulnerable to North Korea, was far harsher and more incendiary than the language he has used before.

It is also highly unusual for Mr. Kerry to seek out a reporter on a Sunday, when he had no public appearances scheduled, to attack Mr. Bush. This comes as Mr. Kerry and his aides, during this final 50 days of the campaign, have promised to draw more consistent and sharper contrasts to Mr. Bush in response to criticism from supporters that their message has been too weak.

One of the points I raise among Leftists in the blogosphere that always goes unrebutted is that there is no good solution to the North Korean problem. And certainly none that they, as anti-war types, could possibly countenance. We do not want to have to resort to an all-out pre-emptive strike on the North because we know that they will get their licks in, too, at the expense of tens of thousands of innocent lives. There's no doubt about that. And, although it would be nice to think that there could be a palace coup against the Kimchi Pot there someday, it's really nothing very plausible at this point.

So, that leaves us with the third option, which was tried during the Clinton Administration. With the self-aggrandizing moron Jimmy Carter's [help], the North Koreans agreed to be bribed out of pursuing their nuclear weapons programs with promises of fuel oil, food aid, and ---incredibly--- assistance in building light-water nuclear reactors for the generation of electricity. This was done on the reasoning that we could maintain inspections of the spent fuel coming from these types of reactors and keep them from being reprocessed into the weapons-grade plutonium needed for their nukes.

Which is where naivete becomes negligence.

It is, in fact, exactly how the Kerrion want to handle Iran: help them develop one kind of nuclear technology and hope they're open and honest enough to not transition it to another kind. Idiocy!

Mr. Kerry argued that it was the Bush administration's refusal to follow Mr. Powell's advice in March 2001 and continue the Clinton administration's direct diplomacy with North Korea that created the conditions for the current crisis. Mr. Kerry has said for months that the United States must deal directly with the North Korean government - just as it dealt directly with Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis, and directly with China as it became a nuclear power in the 1960's.

But we are not obligated to maintain the facade or the substance of that diplomacy when it is clear that the North Koreans were cheating all along! Jesus! The Clinton-Carter-Albright Scheme was built on a false premise: that the Dear Leader was going to allow long-term inspections of his programs. Why did they think that such a thing was viable?

And you can also enjoy this, comrades: Bush withdrew from bilateral talks with the North Koreans because he knows that there are other countries in that region that have at least as much of an interest in keeping Kim in check as we do. That is to say, Kerry is criticizing the President for moving towards multilateral diplomacy in one place (North Korea) while falsely claiming that he has unilaterally acted to enforce the United Nations' resolutions in another (Iraq). Is that not absurd? In North Korea, where the risk of a nuclear holocaust is actual and imminent, President Bush has done what he should to involve other major actors in neutralizing the threat; in Iraq, where the risk of a nuclear holocaust was gathering, yet still only potential, he acted with force and a willing Coalition to preclude that threat from ever manifesting itself. And the geniuses on the Left can't see the wisdom in that? Ridiculous.