Sunday, April 08, 2007
The United States allowed the arms delivery to go through in January in part because Ethiopia was in the midst of a military offensive against Islamic militias inside Somalia, a campaign that aided the American policy of combating religious extremists in the Horn of Africa.
This deal violated the trade sanctions against North Korea, but here is the thing. North Korea now has the ability to play with weapons of mass destruction. The lesson everybody should learn from the last several years is twofold. It is in rogue nation's best interests to acquire nuclear weapons because we won't attack you at that point. We knew Iraq didn't have that capability or we wouldn't have attacked.
Once Pakistan developed nukes, we became much more friendly to them. They can screw up quite a bit by allowing people responsible for 9/11 inside their borders, by allowing the Taliban to operate with little cause for concern. They have nukes.North Korea was part of the axis of evil until they started testing explosions. All of a sudden, we cut deals with them. Now, they go break sanctions, start arming Ethiopia, and we say go ahead. It's no big deal. It doesn't hurt that we supported Ethiopia in their stand off, but the fact that North Korea has tested weapons of mass destruction is a big part of why our attitude is lax.
This is why I think Cheney knew Iraq was a paper tiger. If we really thought that Iraq was a nuclear power, Sadam Hussein would still be in power today. That is why he was so desperate to lie about the evidence. He might have thought that soon Hussein would get nukes, but the case made that he already had them is proven a lie by how we treat people who acquire these weapons; like North Korea.
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