Musing's musings

Booyah!

I have little doubt that the Boy Who Would Be King and his flacks are going to spend a lot of time crowing over the recent successful negotiations to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. Indeed, it seems they're already on the job, at least if the lede to this story in today's Washington Post is any indication:

The six-nation deal to shut down North Korea's nuclear facility, four months after Pyongyang conducted its first nuclear test, was reached yesterday largely because President Bush was willing to give U.S. negotiators new flexibility to reach an agreement, U.S. officials and Asian diplomats said yesterday.

(Emphasis added)

The fly in the ointment of that rosy glow of victory, however, is devastatingly portrayed in Tom Toles's latest editorial cartoon:

To wit, Bush has spent the last six years bobbing and weaving, twisting and turning, engaging in dangerous brinksmanship with an unstable regime led by a man who may well be one of the very few in the world even less stable than our preznit--just to get us back to the place we were when President Clinton left office in 2001. Our Dear Leader's flunkies demur, claiming that the new agreement is significantly better than the one President Clinton negotiated in 1994:

Administration officials stressed that the agreement was an improvement over a bilateral deal reached in 1994 under then-President Bill Clinton, which collapsed after the Bush administration accused North Korea of conducting the clandestine uranium program. Under that agreement, North Korea froze the Yongbyon facility and agreed to "eventually dismantle" it in exchange for fuel oil and light-water reactors. Bush administration officials noted yesterday that the new agreement was signed by all of North Korea's neighbors, which they said would make it more difficult to break. Any suggestion of building light-water reactors for North Korea has been pushed far into the future.

Pardon my skepticism, but at least on the evidence of that quoted paragraph, the only differences between the two agreements are that we're not going to build any light-water reactors in North Korea for a while, and there are more guarantors of the DPRK's good behavior than before. That's not what I would call a significant achievement--especially since it probably wouldn't have taken this long to arrive at an agreement if Bush and his band of bungling boobs hadn't been hell-bent on beating their chests and engaging in a dick-measuring contest with Kim Jong Il. Moreover, given that Bush spent a fair amount of time last year stumping for his new energy plan, the centerpiece of which is the construction of new nuclear plants here in the U.S., I have to wonder if the postponement of the North Korean construction isn't going to cost him a few brownie points (or favors) with nuclear power providers. According to Open Secrets, donors from the energy sector kicked in close to $5 million to Bush's 2004 presidential campaign. Much of that money most likely came from oil companies, who have always enjoyed good relations with having the preznit in their back pocket--but if I had the time and the inclination to dig through the FEC reports, I bet I'd find a number of contributions from representatives of the "stagnant" nuclear power industry as well. Building light-water reactors in the DPRK would represent a significant infusion of cash for those companies, not to mention giving them a chance to refresh their memories on how to build one of these things, given that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission hasn't issued a license for a new nuclear power plant in the U.S. since 1979. I can't imagine they're going to be too happy about seeing that plum taken out of their Christmas pudding.

Mirabile visu

Quoth The Times (the real one, not the ersatz versions on this side of the pond):

IRAN’S supreme leader is considering a change of policy on the country’s nuclear programme in an effort to defuse growing tension with the West, according to senior sources in Tehran.

Alarmed by mounting US pressure and United Nations sanctions, officials close to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei favour the appointment of a more moderate team for international negotiations on the supervision of its nuclear facilities.

The move would be a snub to the bellicose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose threats to destroy Israel have left Iran increasingly isolated and facing a serious economic downturn.

Half of me is ready to break into the "Hallelujah" chorus. That is until the other half reminds me that just because one of the few men in the world more wingnutty and hard-line than the Boy Who Would Be King has apparently decided to behave reasonably, that's no guarantee that the Boy Who Would Be King Even If It Takes a Nuclear Götterdämmerung to Keep Him on the Throne will respond in kind.

It's a truly saddening commentary on how low America's fortunes have sunk under the Shrubbery that it is a fundamentalist cleric that came to his senses in this risky game of nuclear chicken, and not the self-styled leader of the free world. I wish I lived in a world where (a) this report proves to be true and (b) there could be no possible doubt that the White House would consider it a positive development and seriously pursue continued negotiations to defuse the situation.

Unfortunately, that perfect world looks nothing like the actual world in which I do live. Here in the reality-based community, we're all in dubiety about just how Bush and his minions will respond. They seem heavily invested in making Iran the next global boogeyman, with which they apparently hope to frighten the American people (and anybody else they want to influence to support them) into the kind of unquestioning obedience demanded by their irrational "unitary executive" theory of constitutional government. The Deciderer has made it abundantly clear that Iran is, both now and forevermore, one of the Baddies of the world--and once you get on Bush's shit list, there doesn't seem to be any way of getting off of it short of dying.

Let's hope (and pray, this Sabbath-tide) this time is the exception that proves the rule.

Matthew 24:6

So I woke up this morning to the news that North Korea is denouncing U.N. sanctions imposed on it in the wake of its purported nuclear weapons test last week. According to an AP report in the WaPo:

The North broke two days of silence about the U.N. resolution adopted after its Oct. 9 nuclear test, issuing a Foreign Ministry statement on its official Korean Central News Agency.

"The resolution cannot be construed otherwise than a declaration of a war" against the North, also known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The North warned it "wants peace but is not afraid of war" and that it would "deal merciless blows" against anyone who violates its sovereignty.

It would appear that we must add strategery to the lengthening list of things which the Boy Who Would Be King and the passel of chickenshit chickenhawks who advise him on war and foreign policy folly either don't know or failed to remember. North Korea is already the most isolated nation on the face of the earth. There are tinpot dictatorships in the middle of the African rain forest that have greater access to what we're pleased to call the First World and all that comes from it than do Kim Jong Il and his sorry, downtrodden people.

Now, before the conservacon-artists accuse me of getting all touchy-feely about the sufferings of the poor North Koreans, let me make it perfectly clear that I'm not suggesting we should send over a brigade of clinical psychologists to give them emergency "I'm OK, you're OK" therapy sessions. That would be both pointless and stupid--which would, however, represent a significant improvement over what the Bu$hevik Brigade has been trying, which has been pointless, stupid, dangerous, and almost completely based on wishful thinking instead of hard evidence.

Et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis...

It's been a hard 36 hours (or however long it's been). Two of Tom Lehrer's classic 1960s songs ("We Will All Go Together When We Go" and "Who's Next?") have been running through my head (competing with the Dona nobis pacem from Haydn's Mass in Time of War), I've been reviewing things I used to know, and wondering just how--and how badly--the Shrubbery is going to fuck up this latest crisis.

On the one hand, there is speculation in the international community that the North Korean "nuclear test" may not have been nuclear at all. I'm not sure I believe it completely, but since the people who are pushing the hypothesis know more than I do about such matters, I can't just arbitrarily dismiss it, either. If true, however, I don't think it much matters, as I pointed out yesterday in a comment on one of my earlier posts. One thing on which all analysts seem to be able to agree is that this announcement was Kim Jong Il's version of a two-year-old's "I'm going to hold my breath until I turn blue!" temper tantrum. Kim hasn't been feeling any love from the Shrubbery these days, so he did what he could to get his best boy girl friend to pay some attention to him again.

He accomplished that goal in spades. Though I can't say as I think he's going to like the kind of attention he's about to attract--whether from Bush or from any other world leaders. Even Kim's staunchest allies have very sternly rebuked him for upsetting the local balance of terror along the Asian Rim. Bryan has a good summary up, which you should go read if you haven't already done so.

But there, too, I can't say as I particularly like the way that kaleidoscope falls into focus. South Korea, for all its positives, is not what I would consider a tremendously stable nation--even if its instability is orders of magnitude smaller than that of the World's Worst Elvis Impersonator. So I don't really like the idea of them getting into either an arms race or a nuclear pissing contest with their neighbor to the north. I don't know precisely how I feel about Japan considering bucking the provisions in its MacArthur constitution that prevent it from being a militaristic society and also from having nuclear weapons. I don't like the idea of anybody having the damn things, but if there's one country that could legitimately claim to have a right to them, it would have to be the only country in the world ever to have been bombed with them in wartime.

But I can absolutely, with no hesitation, predict the reaction of Japan's neighbors--to say nothing of her former partners victims in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere to such news. To put it mildly, they will soil themselves. Repeatedly. And then they'll start clamoring to be allowed to buy defense technology from somebody--whether that be us or the Russians, or some other supplier. And while the world markets seem to have reacted with a "ho-hum" to the news that North Korea has openly proclaimed its membership in the Nukular Kidz Klub, I have to think the reaction to a remilitarized Japan, a nuclearized South Korea, and an Asia-wide arms race-cum-mutually assured destruction pact is not going to be as rosy as all that.

Some days, I can almost understand why people drink the Kool-Aid. Life's a lot easier when one has only to listen to all the pundits telling one to relax and not worry, better minds than one's own are working on the problem and will ensure that it all turns out for the best.

Yeah. 'Cuz their track record on that front is just sooooooo good.

The Republicans are fabulists

Etymological note: I said "fabulists," which does not mean "wonderful people" à la Carson Kressley. It means someone who spins tales, or who invents falsehoods. Either of the latter two meanings would seem to apply.

So late last night (or early this morning, depending on your perspective), I heard California Republican Dana Rohrabacher being interviewed on the BBC news program "The World Today." (Sorry, I can't seem to find a link to the interview at Auntie Beeb.) His take was, essentially, "Woo-hoo! Finally! Now we get to say 'Fuck you in spades' to all the critics of our wunnerful missile defense system, without which we'd be in a world of shit right now."

That was the first fantasy Mr. Rohrabacher spun last night, that we actually have anything that could reliably be described as a "missile defense system." What we have is a largely non-functional series of things that could, if everything went perfectly (meaning that the North Korean government told us exactly when they were going to launch their missiles, from what coordinates, and where they were aiming them), fail to knock the rockets out of the sky nine times out of ten--and that's if the North Koreans had also been kind enough to attach homing devices to their warheads.