Walrus-Face Bolton - Still Koo-Koo-Ka-Choo

By Cernig

Whenever John Bolton opens his hirsute mouth to advocate attacking Iran or Syria or North Korea or [insert latest enemy de jour here], it's worth reminding ourselves that he really is out there on the far fringe of the insane wing of the Republican Party

The man who once wrote that he bodyswerved Vietnam because he had "no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy" and "considered the war in Vietnam already lost" (not knowing that one day his fellow-travellers would say it was a win after all), really does want war forever to assuage his endless paranoia. To get it, he's willing to call his old boss's only real diplomatic success as a snow-job.

The Hill reports:

Former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton is urging GOP lawmakers to oppose the Bush administration’s recent agreement with North Korea to end its nuclear programs, according to House Republican sources.

While Bolton’s skepticism of North Korea is well-known, this is believed to be the first time a former top adviser to the president has taken the unusual step of lobbying against a pillar of the administration’s current foreign policy. It is particularly surprising given the value the administration has placed on loyalty.

...in an address last week to a joint meeting of Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans and Republican Policy Committee members, as well as in a separate session with the Conservative Opportunity Society, a group of right-leaning Republicans founded by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). In both meetings, Bolton expressed his concerns about the nuclear agreement reached by the U.S., North Korea and four other countries earlier this month.

Forty-two members attended the joint meeting where Bolton reiterated his longstanding position that trusting North Korea to abide by its promises is the wrong approach, according to a GOP aide who attended. He also spoke about North Korea's role in Syria's nuclear ambitions and encouraged members to review controversial testimony he gave to the Foreign Affairs Committee in September 2003 that figured into his contentious Senate confirmation battle.

Some House Republican lawmakers share Bolton’s view, but members and staff who attended the meetings with Bolton were wary about opposing the Bush administration publicly, and most contacted for this article declined to comment about the meeting’s contents.

Those too feardy-cat to confirm even knowing what Bolton was ranting about include Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), the guy who organised the joint meeting as well as Reps. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) and Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).

It's a soapbox Walrus-face has been pounding for a long time, and Bush comes in for more of the same in his book Sanity Surrender Is Not An Option in which he writes that:

the loss of “hardliners” like himself made the administration vulnerable to a “bureaucratic offense.”

“Our historical experience tells us that North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons voluntarily, and that it is only a matter of time before their cheating is exposed, at which point one hopes that Bush will repudiate this charade that the Risen Bureaucracy has perpetuated,” he wrote.

And Iraq's WMD's were smuggled out to Syria by the Russians, and that's what Israel bombed last month and the Syrians are now bulldozing - which is why Iraq had WMD's and we know it but now can never prove it! But not being able to prove it proves it's true!

Yeah, John - have you tried anti-psychotics?

Who Is the Senior Administration Leaker?

By Cernig

Who exactly is the senior administration official who anonymously leaked national secrets at a time of increased tensions and careful diplomacy over nuclear proliferation in the Middle East?

A remarkable claim by the Washington Post that North Korea "may be cooperating with Syria on some sort of nuclear facility in Syria" - and that, presumably, that facility was the target of a recent israeli strike, contains this passage:

The new information, particularly images received in the past 30 days, has been restricted to a few senior officials under the instructions of national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, leaving many in the intelligence community unaware of it or uncertain of its significance, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

So if only a few senior officials knew about the details, it could only have been one of them, right?

It shouldn't take Hadley long to find out who it is and slap cuffs on him. I'll give Hadley a hint - start over at the Fourth Branch of government.

The article goes on to say that:

cautioned that initial reports of suspicious activity are frequently reevaluated over time and were skeptical that North Korea and Syria, which have cooperated on missile technology, would have a joint venture in the nuclear arena.

Which is what every other news service has said over the past few days after trying to substantiate lurid anonymously-sourced stories about North Korea or Iran giving Syria nukes or nuclear technology, which the Israelis then bombed. There's no there there. But John Bolton, neoconservative loudmouth and war-fiend, says it is "legitimate to ask questions" - and that will be the war-hypers' defense as they bang the drums ever louder.

Are the entire mainstream media asleep at their keyboards? Or are they just so addicted to their "anonymous official sources" that, like heroin junkies who know how damaging their addiction is, they can't give those sources up even when they have been f**ked over so many times?

A case in point is the developing news of CONservative man Alexis Debat - luminary of the Nixon Centre, speaker to The National Interest and ABC consultant. He's been caught making up interviews with prominent names and making up academic credentials - which casts every piece of reporting he's ever been involved with into doubt.

Prominent among those is a recent article by reliable foreign conduit for neoconservative propaganda, Sarah Baxter at the London Times which said, again resting on what high-level anonymous sources had supposedly told Debat, that the U.S. was preparing plans for an airstrike on Iran.

I'm with Will Attywood, Debat has a serious whiff of Fourth Branch too.

How long before the MSM simply refuses to quote, and even outs, these anonymous high level sources at the White House? My guess is never, but I'd love to be surprised.

Reasonable paranoia

Yesterday Kevin Drum pointed to an article that reported the Swiss do not believe that the near perfect $100 counterfeit bills that have been circulating around the globe are actually being made by North Korea. The US government has accused North Korea of significant counterfeiting operations in the past and it has been a hurdle to negotiations. There is an odd paragraph that describes the sophistication of the operation involved in producing the bills:

For years, analysts have wondered why the supernotes — which are detectable only with sophisticated, expensive technology — appear to have been produced in quantities less than it would cost to acquire the sophisticated machinery needed to make them....."What defies logic is the limited, or even controlled, amount of 'exclusive' fakes that have appeared over the years. The organization could easily circulate tenfold that amount without raising suspicions,"....

Moreover, it noted that the manufacturer of the supernotes had issued 19 different versions, an "enormous effort" that only a criminal organization or state could undertake

Cactus as Angry Bear is a good analyst and he makes a point I would have easily jumped to only a couple of years ago --- when the data makes no sense, reexamine the data and the assumptions for usually there is a dumb mistake somewhere in the data processing:

I don't know. I play with a lot of a data. Its been my experience that if the results are just flat crazy, and don't fit any reasonable scenario, when you go back and check the data its wrong. My guess... there are a heck of a lot of fake dollars out there, somewhere. They're either not in use right now, or they are in use, and not being detected. Which makes them equivalent to the real thing.

This is a very reasonable line of reasoning; either a massive data processing error or more likely the known universe of high quality fakes is massively smaller than the actual universe of high quality fakes circulating. However there is a third option that is hinted at in the article.

This is an option that I would have rejected out of hand five years ago but there is excellent evidence available to suggest that the United States government, or individuals associated with the United States government had no problem arranging for the forging of critical 'evidence' of Iraqi attempts to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.

Is there any chance that the counterfeit bills are being produced by an agency, contractor or associate of the United States government as a false flag operation to lay some more blame at North Korea and preclude attempts at talks and normalization of relationships?

This is a paranoid option, but unfortunately given the recent history of this country it is not a fantastic option it may have been ten years ago....

Weapons, Weapons, Everywhere...

...But none to pin a war on.

First, there's a great bit of proper journalism in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune yesterday, as reporter Susan Taylor Martin examines some of the evidence from recent US military briefings about alleged Iranian weapons in Iraq. It's a reminder that the mainstream still has advantages on certain kinds of story that blogs simply cannot match, resources and contacts that can open up avenues unavailable to bloggers. If the Minn. Star-Trib can dig up this information, imagine what the WaPo or NYT could do if they weren't stuck in stenography mode.

In a series of briefings this month, the U.S. military has displayed mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and a particularly lethal type of roadside bomb made in Iran. The military has acknowledged there is no direct evidence the Iranian leadership is responsible.

But skepticism abounds about the origin of the weapons, with critics wondering why those alleged to have been made in Iran had markings in English, not Farsi. And Monday, the New York Times printed a letter from an Iranian who said dates on some of the weapons -- including one dated 5-31-2006 -- prove the claims are "preposterous."The dates are in the American date format -- month first, day second -- whereas the rest of the world does not use this format," wrote M.A. Mohammadi of Iran's U.N. mission. Iran and most other countries put the day first, followed by month and year.

Yet photos on the DIO website [Iran's arms company - C] suggest Iran does use English lettering on at least some weapons in accord with international standards. However, none of the weapons shown on the company's site appears to be dated.

There are also visible differences between 81-millimeter mortar shells known to be made by Iran and those displayed Feb. 11 by the U.S. military in Baghdad. The Iranian mortar shell has four horizontal ribs below the lettering and no date; the one shown in Baghdad has three ribs above the lettering and the date 3-2006.

Indeed, as skeptics have pointed out, the shell displayed in Baghdad looks more like a munition that was made in Iraq around the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. After the 2003 invasion, coalition troops found caches of munitions throughout Iraq but failed to secure many of them. Tons of weapons fell into insurgent hands.

Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, says Iraq at one time would have been able to manufacture many of the types of weapons now being seized by U.S. forces.

"Truth is, any really good machine shop with automated metal lathes and normal tools could make them," Cordesman said.

Iran began developing its weapons industry during its 1980-88 war with Iraq, when the United States and other Western countries supported Saddam Hussein's secular regime and slapped an arms embargo on Iran's Islamic government.

"They [Iran] got really tight with countries like China and North Korea to make sure they had a domestic arms industry that would to the fullest extent possible make them an independent player," Pike said. "They're quite energetic and they're open for business."

Which means that the Iranian arms industry, like many another nation (The UK exported $13 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia alone last year, the US exported $10 billion to the same country), is open for business.

What does that mean for claims of Iranian complicity?

"Nigeria is as crooked as the day is long, so if Nigeria bought arms from Iran, no telling where they are going to show up," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org. "And if Iran is supplying arms to Hezbollah, no telling where those are going to show up, either."

It means resale is a booming business too and some nations are using it as a fast means of making hard cash - so weaponry from just about any nation can quickly turn up anywhere else nowadays, via a third party and with national leaders none the wiser. No justification for belligerence there.

So how about a do-over? [See edit below]

Fox News has a breathless report of what they describe as a "quickly called" press conference at which Republican senators Rick Santorum and Pete Hoekstra announced "We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons."

Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Santorum said: "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist."

"The purity of the agents inside the munitions depends on many factors, including the manufacturing process, potential additives and environmental storage conditions. While agents degrade over time, chemical warfare agents remain hazardous and potentially lethal," Santorum read from the document.

"This says weapons have been discovered, more weapons exist and they state that Iraq was not a WMD-free zone, that there are continuing threats from the materials that are or may still be in Iraq," said Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Breathless stuff, holding out the hope that the first justification for a war of aggression against Iraq and the bloody quagmire which the occupation became was always the alleged threat of Saddam's WMD arsenal. (That was before the White House started spinning the story. Does anyone actually remember how many different "justifications" they've used now?)

Fox News writes that the finds "show that Saddam Hussein was lying when he said all weapons had been destroyed, and it shows that years of on-again, off-again weapons inspections did not uncover these munitions." Are the neocons now vindicated?

Well, no.

Burying chemical weapons in the desert is tantamount to destroying them as weapons. Without climate controlled storage, the compounds involved quickly break down into toxic products that are still dangerous - to those handling them or living nearby - but are useless as weaponry. Saddam was, as we knew even then, short of cash and not exactly concentrating on environmentally-friendly policies. It would be far cheaper for him, right after Gulf War I, to just to bury his chemical weapons and foregt about them. He wouldn't have gone to all the trouble the US military does with secure storage tanks and expensive special incinerators.

Offering the official administration response to FOX News, a senior Defense Department official pointed out that the chemical weapons were not in useable conditions.

"This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991," the official said, adding the munitions "are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war."

If these things had been buried in the desert for more than a year or so, they were effectively unweaponized, destroyed as weapons. They had been buried far longer than that. They were not in any way useful, not even to reconstitute a WMD program if inspectors stopped paying attention. Got that Mr. Santorum? Rick?

"This is an incredibly — in my mind — significant finding. The idea that, as my colleagues have repeatedly said in this debate on the other side of the aisle, that there are no weapons of mass destruction, is in fact false."

Oh, good grief! [EDIT: it took Nell in comments to point out the obvious - this story is months old. It appeared on the aggregators as new this morning for some reason and, not being fully ceffeinated, i didn't check the dateline. My bad. I apologize. Still - a useful reminder of how the uber-right hates saying it was wrong, ever,]

Update Although the MSM has resources unavailable to bloggers, it's sometimes possible to find stuff people aren't already pointing to. I am indebted to regular reader Rudi, who went digging and found this at John Pike's GlobalSecurity.Org:

Shaped Charges in the Oil Industry

The most extensive use today of Shaped Charges is in the oil and gas industry, where they open up the rock around drilled wells. Shaped charges are used in the oil and gas industry and in other fields to pierce metal, concrete, and other solid materials. In an oil or gas well, a metallic casing is cemented to the borehole walls to maintain the borehole integrity. Shaped charges are incorporated in a hollow carrier gun or a strip positioned in the casing. The shaped charges are activated to pierce the well casing and the geologic formation at the hydrocarbon producing zone. The hydrocarbons enter the casing through such perforations and are transmitted to the well surface.

Doesn't Iraq have something to do with the oil industry? And isn't that industry mostly concentrated in the South, a predominantly Shiite area? And isn't it the Shiite militias that the US military are having so much trouble with because they use EFP's? Those are pretty easy dots to connect.

Now a shaped charge improvised explosive device is not, quite, an explosively formed projectile device. But it is it's close kin in practical terms. Just add the liner to be deformed by the charge. Rudi, in his email, said "It seems absurd that in the oil rich ME only Iran would take the civial use of EFP and apply it to military use. Any high level oil employee, working in drilling, would have experience in the use and (maybe) manufacturing of EFP's. Extending this out, a Saudis drilling techician or engineer could be a source of EFP's in Iraq."

Update 2 Yet more fixing the facts around the policy - now, after months and years of talking up the threat, Bush administration officials are admitting they may have been wrong about North Korea's uranium enrichment program. Over to Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings:

Let's be very clear about what this means. We used to have a deal, the Agreed Framework, that kept North Korea from getting plutonium. We supposedly discovered that they were cheating on that deal by enriching uranium. Personally, I did not think that was a good reason to scrap the Agreed Framework -- making a uranium bomb takes a lot longer than making a plutonium bomb, and I didn't see why the discovery that North Korea had embarked on a slow, cumbersome process of developing nuclear weapons, one that wouldn't actually produce any weapons for years, was a reason to say: well, go ahead and develop nuclear weapons much more quickly, then!

All this time, though, I was assuming that the North Koreans actually had a uranium enrichment program, and that they actually were cheating on the Agreed Framework. That's what this article calls into question.

If they didn't have a uranium program, then we scrapped the Agreed Framework, and let North Korea access its plutonium and build nuclear weapons, FOR NOTHING.

...Every time I think that nothing this administration can do could possibly surprise me, I turn out to be wrong.

North Korea's October Surprise

The uber-rightwing commentators at National Review are all over the North Korean nuke test, setting out the GOP spin early with a flurry of statements and teasers for later punditspeak.

They have the Bush statement:

THE PRESIDENT: Last night the government of North Korea proclaimed to the world that it had conducted a nuclear test. We're working to confirm North Korea's claim. Nonetheless, such a claim itself constitutes a threat to international peace and security. The United States condemns this provocative act. Once again North Korea has defied the will of the international community, and the international community will respond.

This was confirmed this morning in conversations I had with leaders of China, and South Korea, Russia, and Japan. We reaffirmed our commitment to a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula, and all of us agreed that the proclaimed actions taken by North Korea are unacceptable and deserve an immediate response by the United Nations Security Council.

The North Korean regime remains one of the world's leading proliferator of missile technology, including transfers to Iran and Syria. The transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States, and we would hold North Korea fully accountable of the consequences of such action.

The United States remains committed to diplomacy, and we will continue to protect ourselves and our interests. I reaffirmed to our allies in the region, including South Korea and Japan, that the United States will meet the full range of our deterrent and security commitments.

Threats will not lead to a brighter future for the North Korean people, nor weaken the resolve of the United States and our allies to achieve the de-nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Today's claim by North Korea serves only to raise tensions, while depriving the North Korean people of the increased prosperity and better relations with the world offered by the implementation of the joint statement of the six-party talks. The oppressed and impoverished people of North Korea deserve that brighter future.

Thank you.

Which appears to leave open the possibility of a military option, although that appears to be restricted by a pledge to have full UN Security Council backing for any actions.

Then they have the statement from Mitch McConnell (whom they bill as future Senate Majority Leader):

“Though it has not yet been confirmed as a nuclear test, this is a confrontational move designed only to destabilize the region. This test should demonstrate to other members of the United Nations Security Council, particularly those in North Korea’s neighborhood, that a stronger stance is necessary to restore stability and protect the region and the world from this dangerous regime.”

And an absolute cracker from House Majority Leader John Boehner:

"The North Korean government's claim that it has tested a nuclear weapon is a desperate and dangerous provocation. The United States can not afford to stand idly by as rogue regimes flout international treaties and threaten America and our allies.

"It is critical that we support President Bush and our diplomats as they work with other members of the international community to demand North Korea's immediate disarmament. And we must work swiftly to ensure that the North Korean government is not supplying or shipping its technology beyond its borders. We cannot tolerate nuclear weaponry in the hands of rogue regimes or terrorist organizations that threaten the international community.

"This reckless move by North Korea, coupled with their attempted missile test in early July, highlights the importance of a U.S. missile defense shield capable of protecting America against madmen with weapons of mass destruction. It is time for Democrats to recognize the need for missile defense technologies and abandon their long-standing policy of voting against missile defense programs. It is now clear that such a position would weaken America's national defense and put Americans in danger."

That should earn him a few all-expenses paid golf trips. It manages to push a multi-million boondoggle bit of cost-plus-pork military contracting which will only work, at best, 25% of the time while simultaneously putting a new and topical angle on the spin that Dems are soft on national security.

Then, in time-honored weaselling "a reader emails" Jonah Goldberg style, we have this:

Jonah,

I certainly agree that NK's nuke represents a failure of US policy. That policy has been to rely on the UN and "multilateral" engagement. This is the same policy we are using with respect to Iran. That will also fail. (I suspect that the American electorate will real soon become *very* frustrated with Bush's approach to Iran.)

However, the NK development presents Bush with a strategic opportunity. He can now say that multilateral negotiations that are ultimately predicated on the sanity or trustworthiness of America's enemies are simply insufficient to stop a rogue state from getting a nuke. "We tried that road, and it did not work." And after this morning, who could argue?

Bush is now free to abandon these useless multilaterial dances, and go right to where I believe he knows he must ultimately go: US enforcement of the peace. If he reasserts the Bush doctrine, and if the GOP ruthlessly draws the distinction between that doctrine and the "let's-retreat-to-Okinawa" party, they win next month.

If they don't, then our serious efforts to deal with an incipient nuclear crisis or holocaust will be hamstrung by unserious and juvenile Dems controlling the House.

My best,

Bush doesn't seem inclined to take Jonah's reader's advice - but that actually doesn't matter to the uber-right. The important thing is that they believe he could if he wanted to.

The reason he can't, as pointed out by Fester in an email, is that the U.S. has 5.5. active duty divisions. 2 of those are in Iraq, 1.5 are resting from Iraq and 1.5 are getting ready to go back to Iraq. 0.5 divisions are in South Korea. [Correction: That should read "5.5 heavy divisions - Armored/Heavy Mech Infantry - are on active duty". Thanks Fester!] There's another 2 divisions worth of equipment stockpiled there but no spare bodies to man them. Somehow, the uber-right will turn that lack into the fault of the UN and the Dems too. However, it doesn't matter that the Army is incapable of acting. The political mileage is more important to the GOP and is a ready-made opportunity to spin and to distract from Bush's disasters in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Given the fast and glib spin which is appearing as if it had been carefully written ages ago, I have to ask. Is this the "October Surprise" that Rove promised the GOP when he told them all they should run on national security despite the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan? If so, how long ago did the administration know this was coming and exactly what did they do to head it off, knowing that it was a disaster for world stability but a gift-horse for re-election races?

Bushspeak: North Korea.

From the transcript of the Presidential news conference.

Do you feel, as you're confronting these problems, the number of troops you've left tied up in Iraq is limiting your options to go beyond the diplomatic solutions that you've described for North Korea, Iran?
BUSH: I appreciate that question.
The person I asked that to -- the person I asked that to, at least, is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, my top military adviser.
I said, Do you feel that we've limited our capacity to deal with other problems because of our troop levels in Iraq? And the answer is no, he doesn't feel we're limited. He feels like we've got plenty of capacity. You mentioned the Korean Peninsula. We've got good capacity in Korea.
We've traded troops for new equipment, as you know. We've brought some troops -- our troop levels down in South Korea, but replaced those troops with more capacity.

What exactly does that mean, that the US has replaced troops in South Korea with more capacity? And is the US military over-stretched as many outwith the administration have been saying since at least 2003? Is the ability of US armed might to deter a possible enemy seriously eroded by heavy committments of manpower and resources in Iraq and Afghanistan?

The US currently has around 37,000 troops in South Korea and was supposed to reduce that number by 12,500 or roughly one third by the end of this year. However, in 2003 the two countries agreed instead to a phased withdrawal that means only 8,000 of those troops will have left by the end of 2005, with the remaining 5,500 not completely gone until 2008. South Korea has increasingly wanted to manage it's own defence and has a stated objective of being totally able to do so by 2010. At that time it is increasingly likely that US troops will be withdrawn from the Peninsula entirely.

The "more capacity" that Bush mentioned refers to an increase of heavy B-1 and B-52 bombers based in the Pacific theatre, as well as units of artillery missiles in Korea itself. However, there is a serious shortfall in air and sealift capacity, with up to 90% of both committed to the Iraqi occupation and it's resupply. If general hostilities were to break out in Korea, then the most the US could do would be to assist the existing forces it has there with airstrikes - until the Iraq occupation is concluded it cannot effectively resupply or heavily reinforce it's Korean forces in event of war.

One 2003 study on the Bush administration's possible responses to North Korea's nuclear program noted:

[The] Pentagon estimates that the casualties of a three month war on the Korean Peninsula would be 50,000 US military casualties, 100,000 South Korean military casualties, untold North Korean casualties, and perhaps more than a million civilian casualties. We do no know how China, Japan, or Russia (or even South Korea, for that matter) will react to such a possibility. China still has a mutual defense treaty with North Korea, after all. Moreover, we cannot eliminate the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons on both sides, or of missile attack on Japan. For these reasons, threatening war on the Korean peninsula, in my opinion, shows reckless disregard for the lives of US troops and those of important US allies.

The possibility of a North Korean nuclear strike on Tokyo or even the US itself has become more real than previously thought, with the admission on Thursday by the Director of Defense Intelligence (DIA) Agency Admiral Lowell Jacoby that "they have the capability" to arm a long range missile with a nuclear device. This revalation has been something the US has been telling it's allies in secret briefings since 2003, but never admitting to the US media and public until now. Now the DIA is trying to pass it's Director's admission of as a slip of the tongue, but what he told Senators was quite clear.

Bush and his administration are walking a tightrope. On the one hand they must downplay the very real danger enough that the American people do not demand direct action that has no chance of happening successfully - certainly not by the almost bloodless standards of the two invasions of Iraq. On the other they must keep the sense of threat alive enough that America will continue to back their diplomatic measures and provide money for programs such as the ballistic missile shield which Bush placed such huge reliance on in his press conference.

I have instructed Secretary Rumsfeld, and I have worked with Congress, Secretary Rumsfeld has worked with Congress to set up a missile defense system. And we're in the process of getting that missile defense system up and running.
One of the reasons why I thought it was important to have a missile defense system is for precisely the reason that you brought up: Perhaps Kim Jong Il has got the capacity to launch a weapon; wouldn't it be nice to be able to shoot it down?
And so, we've got a comprehensive strategy in dealing with him

The trouble is, the nuclear threat is real now - the missile defence system is still some years away from being reality. Not only have most of the tests of key parts of the system been such utter failures that that "the command that is responsible for drawing up the ground-based system’s operating plans and procedures doesn’t yet know exactly what the missile shield can do," the military officials responsible for operating the system are far from clear about who will do what, when and how.

In other words, Bush's "comprehensive strategy" is empty of real options other than to keep US citizen's as much in the dark as possible while hoping diplomacy works.

It's hardly surprising then that promises of "all options" being all the table rang hollow during his press conference. Contrast:
QUESTION: I want to make sure I understand your answer to Mike about North Korea. He asked you how long you were prepared to let the multiparty talks proceed in the face of what might be a gathering threat of North Korea. And you said, How long -- I'm paraphrasing -- How long we let it go on is dependent on our consensus among ourselves.
BUSH: Yes.
QUESTION: Did you mean to say that you will neither refer North Korea to the U.N. nor take military action unless you have the agreement of all the other partners in the process?
BUSH: No, I didn't speak about military -- I was speaking about diplomatically.

with this, a few sentences later:

Are you going to -- you know, when are you going to -- when will there be consequences? And what we want to do is to work with our allies on this issue and develop a consensus, a common approach, to the consequences of Kim Jong Il.
I mean, it seems counterproductive to have five of us working together and then all of a sudden one of us say, Well, we're not going to work together.


Since it is obvious that military action could only follow after the US said "Well, we're not going to work together", it also seems obvious that US threats of military action are as empty as the "comprehensive strategy" Bush calims to have.

Yet the only people he is trying to hoodwink are common Americans. You can be sure that other nation's militaries, including North Korea's, are as aware of the realities as the Pentagon is.