Shooter's Having A Good Day Today
by Steve
Some days. It’s good to be Dick Cheney. Your failures abroad bear fruit and friends die at home before they can talk.
After several threats by the United States, North Korea went ahead and test-fired up to seven missiles yesterday and today, some of them making it into the Sea of Japan. According to reports, the one long-range missile that Pyongyang fired failed less than a minute after launch. These missiles tests were a failure for the North because they proved that despite the bluster, Pyongyang isn't capable of threatening the United States and can't as far as anyone knows enable their short-range missiles to deliver a nuclear payload. But that doesn’t mean the White House isn’t privately giddy this morning anyway.
From the moment that Dick Cheney convinced Bush to embarrass the South Koreans and pull out of any further dialogue with Pyongyang over five years ago, this was the end result that Cheney wanted: a missile-capable North that went nuclear right under Cheney's nose, aided by our best friend in the war on terror Pakistan. After all, you cannot justify a dramatic increase in defense spending, especially for anti-missile systems and Star Wars unless you let a presidential speechwriter like David Frum incite two states seeking face time and respect with the catchphrase “Axis of Evil”. The predictable behavior by Iran and North Korea since that 2002 SOTU utterance and our invasion of the one non-nuclear member of that troika would have been better understood if this administration hadn’t blown up Brewster-Jennings through the Valerie Plame scandal, and had the administration not been perpetually bitch-slapped away from interviewing A. Q. Khan by Bush’s best buddy Pervez Musharraf.
Make no mistake, this was the inevitable outcome of Dick Cheney’s foreign policy, and he and George W. Bush along with Condi Rice are to blame. Sure, the leaders in Pyongyang are of questionable stability, and an ultra-nationalist is now in charge along with the mullahs in Iran. So what? That doesn’t mean you don’t have to deal with nutcases in foreign policy. Adults know that. Instead, Dick Cheney thinks it is better to ignore people he doesn’t like and hope that things turn out his way, or a huge profit opportunity opens up once again for a GOP campaign contributor. Either way, Cheney is happy, plus he has his lunatic buddy John Bolton now at the UN to make sure Pyongyang is sanctioned back into the Stone Age when we could have had folks on the ground these last five years monitoring everything they were doing.
So things have lined up just fine for Cheney once again. We have wasted five years on a foreign policy that has eliminated any influence we may have in Tehran or Pyongyang, the oil barons are about to take over in Baghdad, more GOP campaign contributors are about to get even richer, the climate of fear can be stoked even more here at home, and now Ken Lay won’t be around to talk about what was really discussed at Cheney’s Energy Task Force meetings as part of a sentence-reduction deal.