Sending a Message

On North Korea’s admission that it has a nuke (or three or four), Will Allen writes:

The motivations for Korea now admitting their behavior has several possible explanations, and very few of them are cause for optimism. I have read that some are positing that Korea has done so in order to win more favorable treatment by the U.S. and others. I find this naively optimistic in the extreme. Do you suppose that the Korean thugs have spent a lot of their very limited resources for the past several years to develop this capability, and suddenly woke up up one morning and said, “Boy, that sure was a mistake! Let’s make a 180 degree turn!”? I think it unlikely. It is more likely that they have decided to use these weapons, or the knowledge of thier existence for specific strategic purpose. What purpose, I do not know, but with a regime that kidnaps Japanese citizens from Japanese soil for little rational reason, it cannot be confidently predicted that we will be able to fathom their motivations. Whatever they are, I do not think it bodes well for the rest of the world. I fear something foul is afoot.

The timing is curious, so let’s indulge ourselves in a little conjecture.

The US, through one means or another, is going to topple the current Iraqi regime and install another. One of the primary motivation for doing so is Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.

The Pyongyang government is a member of the sam Axis of Evil as Iraq, according to President Bush, who is getting his way, with the American people, Congress, and probably the UN, on an Iraq war.

So North Korea must be asking itself, “Am I next?” They may also think that if Iraq already had a weapon, Bush wouldn’t be making such threats.

The truth is, without massive material assistance from China, the North Korean army can’t fight for more than three days. They’d run out of everything from beans to bullets.

I don’t think Pyongyang wants to use nukes, but they’re certainly trying to send us a message.