Teddy Bloggie Blog Blogging

The stupidity of Bush's foreign policy in one statement: Pre-emptive strikes.

Now, North Korea is using the same principle in their saber-rattling: they're warning the U.S. that any more troop deployment to the Korean Peninsula may provoke a pre-emptive strike against U.S. soldiers stationed in South Korea. N. Korea is using U.S. rhetoric against itself.

If you look at both sides of this war of words, North Korea has a better reason for pre-emptive strikes than we do. Any U.S. buildup is aimed squarely at the North Koreans. It's the Cuban missle crisis for them and we're Cuba. Iraq after all, doesn't pose an immediate threat to us.

It seemed like a bad idea to have a policy of pre-emptive strikes when Bush first uttered those words. It seemed like a bad idea to me at the time to group N. Korea in the same "axis of evil" with Iraq and Iran.

North Korea has called the bluff and raised the ante. North Korea knows we're not interested in fighting a nuclear war with them and they're gearing up for nuclear weapons production. It'll only take a few months for them to have enough plutonium to build the bombs. With 35,000 troops in South Korea, the U.S. doesn't really want to fight an army of a million North Koreans. Sending any more soldiers may force that fight prematurely, perhaps even concurrently with a war in Iraq. That's going to be a lot of unnecessary blood stained on the hands of George W. This is what happens when you wage unilateralist war and cowboy diplomacy. This is what happens when you turn engagment policies of the Clinton administration into the confrontation policies of the Bush administration.