The World According to Oatney

Where is the call to arms?

In the last 24 to 48 hours, we as a nation, have been collectively treated to the reality that North Korea, a Communist state known to have a leader (Kim Jong-Il) that is a maniacal lunatic, has Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles in its possession. Further, these missiles have been tested-it would seem that the tests in question were quite deliberately carried out on the Fourth of July to draw our collective national attention to them. Meanwhile, we are being told by the White House that we have nothing to worry about because the missile tests failed badly.

If North Korea can produce enough missiles to have multiple failed tests in a two-day period, Kim can eventually produce ICBMs that will reach the West Coast and beyond if we do not stop him. I have long said that North Korea is the greatest terrorist threat in the world today. When certain of our leaders were busy preparing for war with Iraq because Saddam threatened the world with weapons of mass destruction, I wondered why we were not first preparing for conflict with North Korea, where Kim Jong-Il threatens the world with weapons of mass destruction.

To understand just how loony this character really is, I recommend viewing the Frontline documentary Kim's Nuclear Gamble [You can view it by clicking on the link]. This is a man who once kidnapped a South Korean movie actress and director to try and force them to show him how to make movies. He didn't do this so that he could use the knowledge for propaganda purposes (though I am sure it would come in handy for those reasons), he did it because he wanted to be a movie director. Rather than go somewhere to learn the art, he simply tried to kidnap the knowledge.

If you think we are at a point where we can wave some magic wand and bribe the nukes away from this man (as apparently the administration thinks, and as Clinton thought in the last administration), we are deceiving ourselves. With all of the President's "Axis of Evil" talk, he has done little up to now to try and deal with the most threatening member of that axis. We are now paying the price in terms of a very serious and imminent threat to our national security and the security of East Asia, and we do not have the ability to deal effectively with that threat because our forces are stretched thin in Iraq.

If "regime change" is now a legitimate foreign policy, why did we not first do this in Pyongyang?

posted by Deacon David Oatney @ 10:44 PM