Nuclear Diplomacy

By Cernig

It's been interesting, to me, to watch the almost total silence from the Right on the Bush administration's laudable success in talks with North Korea over it's nuclear weapons program. Yes, I said laudable - they've done a good job since they returned to Clinton's original plan and heaved the Bolton/neocon no-talks-but-tough-talking crap into the dumpster where it belongs. It's years later than it could have been but it is still a notable success.

Now, North Korea will dismantle its weapons program and the State Dept. intend removing NK from the list of nations it says support terrorism.

Could it be that the reason we're hearing so little about Bush's belated but welcome successes in this regard precisely because the Bush administration is still blindly following the neocon format for dealing with another nation they say (without proof) has a nuclear weapons program? If they were serious about wanting to defuse the threat of any Iranian nuclear weapons plans, serious about even thinking Iran actually has such a program, shouldn't they be pushing ahead as rapidly as possible with more of the North Korean same? The carrots offerable to Iran are pretty obvious, just as they were for North Korea, and there are plenty of candidates for joining the US and Iran at the table in order to facillitate an agreement.

Yet even when the Right mentions North Korea, the obvious connection isn't being made. I conclude, perhaps erroneously, that they aren't serious about defusing Iran's supposed nuclear threat and are instead more interested in drumming up support for an attack on the nation that impugned America's manhood way back in 79.