Roadkill Journal

Well, it looks like as America slept last night, the Doomsday clock ticked ahead another second: North Korea – excuse me, The Democratic People's Republic of Korea – set off an atomic bomb.

Unofficial sources claim George W Bush immediately called Kim Jong-il, President of the DPRK, and thanked him for diverting public attention from Foleygate…

Ta Da Bum!

For a look at what people were saying yesterday, Fred Kaplan over at Slate is as good as any:

“Kim Jong-il and His Quest for the Magical Atom Bomb”

http://www.slate.com/id/2151039/?nav=tap3

Doesn’t look as if Mr. Kaplan will have too much crow to eat… Like most of yesterday’s analysts, he didn’t expect the test so soon, assuming “the bomb” would be used as a bargaining chit – as it has been used before.

For an early appraisal of where “we” are today, The Washington Post is a good start:

“Reported Test 'Fundamentally Changes the Landscape' for U.S. Officials”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/09/AR2006100900047.html

I’d like to be in the first wave to offer my thanks to Kim Jong-il…Thanks, shorty. You have done us all a stack of favors…

You have done much to relieve the anxiety that uncertainty always adds to any plan and you have replaced that with happy certainty!

First off, we are now happily certain you had a bomb… Had… You now have a radioactive coal mine. We can furthermore be comfortable in the likely certainty you either have a few more or at least can make more.

We’ve been arguing about this for years. Now we can argue about something else…

But most importantly, we can now be certain that the Bush foreign policy is a complete disaster without even the slightest glimmer of success to show for it…

This is, after all, the direct result of one more of the shrubs geopolitical miscalculations. As the Post notes:


“When Bush became president in 2000, Pyongyang's reactor was frozen under a 1994 agreement with the United States. Clinton administration officials thought they were so close to a deal limiting North Korean missiles that in the days before he left office, Bill Clinton seriously considered making the first visit to Pyongyang by a U.S. president.

But conservatives had long been deeply skeptical of the deal freezing North Korea's program -- known as the Agreed Framework -- in part because it called for building two light-water nuclear reactors (largely funded by the Japanese and South Koreans). When then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell publicly said in early 2001 that he favored continuing Clinton's approach, Bush rebuked him.

Bush then labeled North Korea part of an "axis of evil" …”


You know the rest. The shrub turned Slick Willie’s patient, almost successful negotiations into a pissing contest. The DPRK fired their reactor back up, started reprocessing spent fuel rods for plutonium… And now they have pissed on the toe of our cowboy boot…

It’s probably callous to say it, but this really doesn’t threaten us directly. North Korea has no suitable long-range delivery capability. North Korea is pretty much cut of from the rest of the world – except their communist Chinese brethren – and today we’re threatening to blockade their sealanes, which we can easily do. That action, normally an act of war, is considered “legal” in this sense because the blockaders would be looking for contraband nuclear materials. So the chances of them getting near America proper with a bomb are pretty small.

Our allies, on the other hand… This must be a blow to the South Koreans. And Japan – the world’s most nuked nation – is clearly worried about nuclear weapons in the hands of people they brutally oppressed for most of the first half of the last century…

They’re not going to use it. A nuclear arsenal is only really valuable as a deterrent. A single bomb, or even a dozen, has no deterrent value against the thousands of bombs the US possesses. Once the bombs – or in their case, probably bomb – flies, retaliation sufficient to guarantee “regime change” is inevitable. Their bomb is only valuable as a tactical weapon in a conventional war, and only if they are losing. They won’t use a bomb unless they are directly attacked.

And if they are, I wouldn’t want to be a US soldier on the DMZ… Or anywhere else in Korea, for that matter.

Besides, they don’t have to use it. They have made their point: America doesn’t rule the world, and an American administration that tries to do so will exhaust itself in conflict on one level or the other. In “winning” the cold war we lost many things – one of which was respect for the ability of others to fight back. Even small fry can be more fight than the fight is worth. We’re learning it in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now here.

So thanks again, shorty! And congratulations on the timing: America needed another reminder of just how far into that state of denial the current administration is, and how chimeric is the Republican claim to being “better” on national security issues. The Iraquagmire, the NIE… And now this. They’re batting zero in this game of chess…

Maybe they would do better if they stopped batting and started playing the game as it is, instead of as they wished it was.

And hopefully the people will begin to understand the failures, and send the failing parties packing next month.

If the Republicans do lose the majority, maybe we should give Kim a medal…