The "Greatest Threat" question:
John Kerry gave the vastly better answer, the unsecured nuclear weapons and materials of the former Soviet Union. More than 10,000 weaponized assemblies capable of difficult to detect containerized transport, armed or armed-ready, whereever freight-forward services exist, and nuclear materials in absurd quantities, not weaponized, but still a kind of weapon, whether as a radiological cladding on a non-nuclear explosive, or as a contaminant delivered by non-explosive means, or as a potential radiological weapon, operationalized in a pre-militarry political context.
It is a fucking nightmare.
George Bush gave the vastly worse answer, WMDs in the present actual possession of "terrorist networks". Which means that if the Sov Ballistic Missile Forces and Theater Nuclear Artillery and Air Force Strategic and Theater packages were sold off to Sudan or Pakistan or Taiwan or ... that really wouldn't be as great a threat to the US as OBL getting a single weapon or OBL having a stock of old Sov chem weapons. His answer was fundamentally politically damage control for the WMD snipe hunt throught the rubble of Saddam's Iraq.
The "Axis of Evil" question (revised):
This one has me puzzled. Either there is no daylight between the two parties on the fundamental policy w.r.t. Pongyang and Tehran, other than on the multi-lateral vs bi-lateral negociation process question, or KE04 is using NK/IR nuclear proliferation hypothesis to attack the BC04 thesis that the BC00 response to 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, was sane and sober.
What gives me some hope about the KE04 position of record is that they appear to be able to count, and 6 weapons-equivalents under the control of NK is wicked different from 10,000 actual weapons, any six or sixty or six hundred of which could be sold in operational-ready condition to either NK or IR, or both, so contracting to secure existing dumps trumps going to war over potential singletons.
The possibility that the PRC, SK or Japan will drop out of the process if the US agrees to formally end the Korean War and enter into bilateral talks with NK is ... unlikely. Whether it can be sold effectively as election-year rhetoric is another matter.
L'esprit de l'escalier: When did Putin become a trophy spouse? When he and Bush dance, who leads?
Posted by EBW at October 1, 2004 07:22 AM | TrackBack