Common Dreams Headlines Well Worth Reading

Monday 10.09.06

Headlines...

Earth's Ecological Debt Crisis: Mankind's 'Borrowing' from Nature Hits New Record
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1009-03.htm

US Casualty Rate in Iraq Worst Since Fallujah
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1009-05.htm

Gitmo Lawyer Who Took on Bush Forced to Retire from Navy
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1009-01.htm

Analysis: North Korea Test a Sign of Weakness
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1009-04.htm

Baquba, Iraq: An Unknown City Erupts
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1009-02.htm

Rising Seas Could Leave Millions Homeless in Asia
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1009-06.htm

and more...

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Views...

Chris Hedges | Bush’s Nuclear Apocalypse
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1009-20.htm

Katrina vanden Heuvel | Death of a Courageous Journalist
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1009-21.htm

Norman Solomon | Welcome to the Nuclear Club
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1009-36.htm

Tom Barry | The Politics of Fear
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1009-22.htm

Andrew Simms | The Human Race is Living Beyond Its Means
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1009-23.htm

Neal Peirce | Time to Become a "Locavore"
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1009-24.htm

and more...

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Newswire...

Friends Committee on National Legislation: North Korean Nuclear Test is Predictable Result of Failed U.S. Diplomatic Strategy
http://www.commondreams.org/news2006/1009-08.htm

Public Citizen: With Special Interest Index, Voters Can Gauge How Indebted Lawmakers Are to Big Business
http://www.commondreams.org/news2006/1009-11.htm

Human Rights Watch: UN: New Report Says Violence Against Women is a Human Rights Violation
http://www.commondreams.org/news2006/1009-06.htm

and more...

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Common Dreams * Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community *

www.commondreams.org

A massive failure of U.S. diplomacy

Understatement of the century...

News Analysis: A massive failure of U.S. diplomacy

By David E. Sanger The New York Times Published: October 9, 2006

WASHINGTON For a tiny, starving, friendless nation of 23 million people, the small nuclear device that exploded Monday, apparently successfully, in the mountains above the town of Kilju in North Korea represented a last bid for survival and respect. For Washington and its allies, it represented a massive failure of atomic diplomacy. It was more than just another nation joining the nuclear club, more than just an effort by North Korea to follow the path of Pakistan, another country that overcame huge hurdles and damaging sanctions. Pyongyang's development of a nuclear weapon portends the dawning of a very different era, as President George W. Bush seemed to acknowledge Monday in brief, somewhat cryptic comments. What worries Bush about North Korea is not where its warheads are aimed, but in whose hands they may end up. That is why he declared that the United States would regard as a "grave threat" any transfer of atomic knowledge from the North to other nations or terror groups. To the president's critics, the North Korean test was the inevitable outcome of a Bush administration approach that never gave as much priority to nonproliferation as it did to overthrowing Saddam Hussein. It was in the months before the American invasion of Iraq in early 2003 that North Korea made its nuclear breakout - when it kicked out inspectors and very publicly began its drive to turn its stockpiles of spent fuel rods into weapons. Bush and his administration chose then to do nothing. The North Korean test raises the question of whether it is too late for the president to make good on his promise that "the world's worst dictators don't get the world's most dangerous weapons." Former Senator Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat who has spent his post-congressional career trying to halt a new age of proliferation, said in an interview Monday: "What it tells you is that we started at the wrong end of the Axis of Evil. We started with the least dangerous of the countries, Iraq, and we knew it at the time. And now we have to deal with that." Bush and his aides dispute that view, arguing that Iraq was the more urgent threat in 2003, given its role at the center of a volatile Middle East. But foreign policy, as Nunn said, is "all about priorities," and until now the closest Bush came to drawing what in the Cold War was called a "red line" for the North came in May 2003, when he declared that the United States and South Korea would "not tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea." The Central Intelligence Agency's estimates in the years since have been that the United States has been tolerating exactly that - a small arsenal of nuclear fuel sufficient to produce six or more weapons. Monday morning, hours after the North's test, Bush did not repeat that threat. Instead, he drew a new "red line" - one that appeared to tacitly acknowledge the North's possession of weapons. North Korea, he said, "remains one of the world's leading proliferators of missile technology, including transfers to Iran and Syria." He went on to warn that "the transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or nonstate 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." To critics of Bush's policy, this was a moving of the goalposts, a recognition that U.S. policy - reaching back over at least four presidents - has failed to control the makings of the bomb. "Think about the consequences of having declared something 'intolerable,' and last week 'unacceptable,' and then having North Korea defy the world's sole superpower and the Chinese and the Japanese," said Graham Allison, a Harvard professor who has studied nuclear showdowns from the Cuban missile crisis on. "What does that communicate to Iran and then the rest of the world? Is it possible to communicate to Kim credibly that if he sells a bomb to Osama bin Laden, that's it?" Allison was touching on the central dilemma facing Washington as it tries to extract itself from the morass of Iraq. Whether accurately or not, other countries around the world perceive Washington as tied down, unable or unwilling to challenge them while 140,000 troops are tied up in a bloody war. Kim may have calculated, many experts said, that at this point there was little more that the Bush administration could do to him. The United States has imposed sanctions on his country since the end of the Korean War. The new crackdown on the banks through which the North conducts many of its illicit activities - counterfeiting, missile sales, trade in small arms - are being choked off, a step the North Korean leaders presumably see as part of a strategy of bringing down the regime. "He's probably betting that there is nothing we can do to bring the Chinese and the Russians together on cutting off his oil, and he may be right," a senior American official said after the North threatened the nuclear test. "And he may think that his negotiating leverage will be a lot greater if he has proven that he's got the bomb." If so, Kim may have calculated that this is his moment, when Bush, in the last two years of his presidency, cannot afford another military confrontation. It may be years, or decades, before historians will know whether Iraq played into Kim Jong Il's calculations about when to conduct a nuclear test. But clearly, managing simultaneous crises around the world is straining the system in Washington, and posing the United States with more direct challenges than it can handle at one moment. The question for Bush now is the one he faced when he came to office: Can he best contain one of the world's most unpredictable regimes by trying to further isolate it, or by trying to draw it out of its paranoid shell?