At Think Progress, Joe Cirincione reports (from an article in the Post) that “[s]enior Bush administration officials wanted North Korea to test a nuclear weapon because it would prove their point that the regime must be overthrown”. According to the Post article, these officials were actually “rooting for a test” (my emphasis).
Cirincione interprets this revelation as “evidence of how the administration’s national security policy has become completely divorced from reality”. I concur, although I was thinking in simpler terms: It’s yet more evidence of just how crazy both the people and the policy are. Containment and engagement — in other words, serious diplomacy, worked. The Bush approach, a combination of neglect and rhetorical aggression, has done nothing to diffuse one of the world’s most pressing crises.
And now we find that they were hoping for a nuclear test, for a rogue regime run by a brutal totalitarian to test a nuclear bomb and therewith to become a nuclear power, for an event that could ultimately provoke widespread destabilization in East Asia, perhaps even a regional arms race?!
I’d be surprised if it weren’t all so predictable. They’ve gotten so much wrong, why not this, and so much more wrong, and at a new level of craziness, than we thought?
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And, lest we forget, there’s Iran, which, according to the Post, “has taken another step in its ability to enrich uranium”. (Perhaps they’re rooting for a nuclear Iran, too, don’t you think?)
Good thing Bush is so focused on staying the course, or not, in Iraq.