BOOM!

So Kim-Jong Il has the bomb....so what now?

I hate to engage in a battle of "I told you so..." but here goes.

I've been reading former president Carter's text Our Endangered Values, and I've enjoyed it a lot. So Sunday morning in the tub I'm reading a chapter on how we (that is the Bush administration) has engaged in a series of political actions that have undone the good work done on behalf of peace on the Korean Penninsula. This culminated in 2000 with the announcement of a formal cessation of hostilities by both the North and South Koreans. In fact Kim Dae Jung won the Nobel prize in 2000 as a result of this. Talk about prophetic, and for me to read this only hours before Kim pushed the rosy red button.

As our part of the deal with North Korea, we pledged to provide aid as well as technology to build CIVILIAN nuclear plants in order to help provide power for the striken nation. However the Bush administration almost immediately began dismantling the agreement and alienating the already paranoid nation of North Korea.

In Carter's conclusion to this chapter he states that he expects for North Korea to continue pursuit of nuclear technology motivated by fear, paranoia, and a sense of threatened sovreignty from the USA. Carter's book was written and published 18 months ago, and has accurately predicted the assembly and testing of a nuke by the North.

Lot's of people bitch about what a lousy president Carter was. I think it's time that we exonerate that administration and recognize that Carter was fighting an no-win scenario, and actually did a damn fine job. Furthermore, I think that cousin Jimmy would make a fine addition to the '08 ticket. Hell, he's a better predictor than both the Horoscopes and Nostrodamus.

Anyhoo, I just felt compelled to say this outloud.

I hate the fact that Korea has a nuke, and I think that it's primarily our fault. If one looks at US involvement following any major conflict, it seems that we do OK for a while and then screw it up in the end. WWII wouldn't have happened had we (and Europe) felt the need to isolate Germany and rub their noses in the mess that they made. One could use the previous sentence as a rubric and insert the nations of Panama, Grenada, Yugoslavia, Nicaragua, Iran, Iraq as well as a host of others and come out with a pretty accurate model.

So in closing,

1. Nukes suck.
2. Carter doesn't suck
3. The current US foreign policy sucks
4. North Korea sucks, but mainly because we suck (and have for the past 50 years!)
5. Scarlatti sucks (see posting from last week)
6. An axis is "...the center around which something rotates" All this talk of Axes of evil, and the only common center seems to be the US. That sucks.

There we go, I feel better now.