Thought For The Day

Yesterday's rant, an attempted fisking of an editorial piece from The Toronto Star, left me with a warm, pleasant satisfaction. I'll admit, my writing is not as coherent as it could be, but I hope to improve with practice. So I'll practice. Here's an item that caught my eye in today's editorial section. I don't have time this evening to give it the full treatment, so I'll just interject as the mood takes me:

Sifting through claims on nukes by Stephen Handelman

North Korea could now have as many as 10 nuclear weapons. Iran may be building its first. All of a sudden, the world looks a little more dangerous than it did last month.

Except we don't know whether these allegations, both of which surfaced in the past week, are true.

Here's the scenario: two nations identified by Bush as part of the "Axis of Evil" might have WMD. Or maybe not. The world looks a little more dangerous. Sort of. It's a conundrum.

Blame it on the global atmosphere of mistrust, which is turning out to be one of the most notorious consequences of the Iraq war. Analysts are now paying more attention to the sources of intelligence reports than the intelligence itself.

Damn that Bush! Until this vary moment, I was sure that a lack of trust between different human collectives (tribes, city states, nations, planets, whatever) was a condition as old as the human condition itself. It turns out that it's all a consequence of Bush's warmongering. And to think I would have voted for the guy, if I lived 100 miles south of here. I feel betrayed.

Considering how often "intelligence" ends up being the opposite, that should be healthy. But, in some areas, it can lead to paralysis.

Tee hee. Military intelligence is an oxymoron. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. Any other lefty cliches from the seventies we need to get out of the way?

The pseudo-proofs of Iraqi nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the months before the war have done incalculable damage to the science and politics of curbing arms proliferation. That's a shame, because the threat posed by such weapons falling into the hands of what academics call "non-state-actors" (read: terrorists) has never been greater.

There's nothing wrong with damage being done to the endless jaw-jawing that passes for "the science and politics" of arms reduction. The multilateralist hand-wringers who are so fond of UN chit chat will never, NEVER, take the steps necessary to ensure peace. The only thing that ever had an effect on arms proliferation was the will to match the enemy weapon for weapon and then raise production, and thereby prove to him that we had the capacity to continue raising the stakes until we had won. John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan won the cold war. The self-congratulatory pacifists of the UN Central Committee for Western Self-Loathing did not.

During the U.S. presidential campaign debates this fall, John Kerry and George Bush were asked what they considered the most serious challenge of the next four years. They each answered WMD proliferation, a remarkable show of agreement that was buried in reporting about the campaign.

Where they differed, of course, was how to deal with the issue. Kerry was committed to direct negotiations with the two most worrying would-be nuclear powers (Iran and North Korea), while Bush preferred to operate on two tracks: first, through a coalition of countries that could offer economic and energy assistance in return for nuclear concessions, and the second through unilateral pressure that ranged from sanctions to outright military attack, in what one U.S. official last week called the "good cop, bad cop" approach.

It is now, of course, Bush's approach that has carried the day, though, since the issue never became part of the campaign, it's hard to claim any electoral mandate for it.

Not that it would matter: No voter was ever asked to approve the "pre-emptive foreign policy" which the president used to justify the Iraq invasion.

That's just beautiful. During the campaign, Kerry promised to negotiate with North Korea directly. Didn't Clinton already go that route? Didn't it turn out to be a miserable failure, leading directly to the current crisis? Bush promised, by running for re-election, to continue pursuing the strategy he'd been persuing since the Korean duplicity was discovered in 2002. The voters knew what Bush was all about, and they voted by an overwhelming and uncontestable majority to keep him. How can he be lacking a mandate on any issue, let alone one he's been dealing with for half of his presidency? Same goes for his "pre-emptive foreign policy" - when the voters decided to re-elect him it was a vote of confidence on all of his policies, pre-emptive and otherwise. Whining that he didn't have public pre-approval for them is moot.

In any case, the problem of winning over foreign skeptics — particularly in Asia and the Middle East — overshadows the policy choices themselves. It may even undermine them.

What can we, in fact, believe?

This passage is confusing. Is Stephen saying he's a skeptic from the Middle East? How does his skepticism overshadow US foreign policy? Is he a magical being whose very thoughts can undermine the policy steps taken by the United States government?

The allegations about North Korea's nuclear weapons come from a prestigious international organization, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, which lists former Canadian policymakers on its board.

Whoa-hoa, time to bring in the heavy hitters. With ex-pat Canadian policy wonks on board, you just know this group is totally legit. AND they're based in Belgium. "International Crisis Group" - sounds like a gang of would-be Nobel laureates just itching for a cause.

The ICG, which has been paying close attention to the North Korea issue for several years, says now that any doubts about that country's nuclear capabilities should be removed.

"It almost certainly has enough bombs to deter an attack and still have some to sell to other states or even terrorist groups," the ICG concluded in a 36-page report released Nov. 15.

Got that? Let me clarify: Prior to the recent invasion of Iraq, it was the considered opinion of every intelligence agency IN THE WORLD that Saddam Hussein had WMD. Throughout the nineties, international arms inspectors had seen and reported on the weapons. Iraq didn't deny having them. Between 1998 and 2003 the weapons were disposed of by some as-yet unknown method, and there is a reasonable likelihood that they still exist, either buried in the desert or secreted away in a neighbouring country. It may take years or decades for the full truth to become known. No matter. The Left insists on unshakeable proof of WMD N-O-W. Anything less is a total failure on the part of the Bush administration and furthermore BUSH LIED!!!

Now comes a report from a collective of washed-up policy nabobs, slogging through their investigations in the rough-and-tumble quagmire of Brussels, to inform us that all doubt can be removed about the capabilities and intentions of the North Korean regime. Thanks for the input, guys. I assume you'll be taking the blame if the whole North Korean thing turns out to be a dud? No? It's still Bush's fault? But then it's alway's the American president's fault, isn't it?

Anyway, the article continues on like this for a while more, and there's a really good part where the above mentioned ICG policy boobs make the suggestion to try negotiating with North Korea for a change, because we really don't know it'll work unless we try, at which point I put the imaginary gun to my head and pull the trigger. You get the picture.

It's nearly one in the morning, so I'm going to bed now.