North Korea With A Bomb

The North Koreans apparently exploded a nuclear weapon early Monday morning. I say apparently because it has not yet been confirmed to be nuclear but it did hit magnitude 4.2. My first thought was another failed Bush policy. Some people claimed this would be good for Bush if they spin the "fear" aspect of a nuclear North Korea. I don't buy it. This is failed policy where Bush wants nothing less than regime change... again. I'm no expert on the North Korea problem but I have found a few people with some very good info and well worth the read if you want to learn about the problem. From talking points memo His conclusion: But facts are stubborn things. The bomb-grade plutonium that was on ice from 1994 to 2002 is now actual bombs. Try as you might it is difficult to imagine a policy -- any policy -- which would have yielded a worse result than the one we will face Monday morning. Talking tough is great if you can make it stick and back it up; it is always and necessarily cleaner and less compromising than sitting down and dealing with bad actors. Talking tough and then folding your cards doesn't just show weakness it invites contempt. And that is what we have here. The Bush-Cheney policy on North Korea was always what Fareed Zakaria once aptly called "a policy of cheap rhetoric and cheap shots." It failed. And after it failed President Bush couldn't come to grips with that failure and change course. He bounced irresolutely between the Powell and Cheney lines and basically ignored the whole problem hoping either that the problem would go away, that China would solve it for us and most of all that no one would notice. Do you notice now? From The Mahablog Well, The Mahablog has dug up a lot of info, here's one snip she found in Newsweek (actually the current issue): On Sept. 19, 2005, North Korea signed a widely heralded denuclearization agreement with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. Pyongyang pledged to “abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.” In return, Washington agreed that the United States and North Korea would “respect each other’s sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize their relations.” Four days later, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sweeping financial sanctions against North Korea designed to cut off the country’s access to the international banking system, branding it a “criminal state” guilty of counterfeiting, money laundering and trafficking in weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration says that this sequence of events was a coincidence.