That North Korea Missile Launch
Although it’s still not clear whether it was a long-range missile that was launched or, as the North Koreans claim, a rocket designed to thrust a satellite into space, the larger purpose is pretty unambiguous:
South Korean officials, after studying the rocket’s trajectory, said it appeared to have been configured to thrust a satellite into orbit, as the North had claimed.
No debris was reported to have fallen on Japanese land. There has been no confirmation of whether the third and final stage of the launching took place.
But what may have mattered most to North Korea was simply demonstrating that it had the ability to launch a multistage rocket that could travel thousands of miles.
Of course, bloggers and pundits on the right are blaming Pres. Obama’s two-month-old administration for this hostile move on North Korea’s part, ignoring the past eight years, during which “the Bush administration pursued the dumbest possible U.S. policy towards North Korea, which allowed the rogue nation to develop its nuclear weapons in the first place.”
Maha has links to more background information.
Tags: North Korea
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April 5, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Do you have any examples of bloggers and pundits on the right blaming Obama for the N. Korean launch? Im not sure who in their right mind would blame Obama for this, and I’m coming from the right.
What I blame Obama for is the same thing I blamed Bush for: letting these types of antics by N. Korea take place. That rocket should have been struck by 2 U.S. cruise missiles in the middle of the night, with no public admission by the U.S. government. Instead, what we have allowed is a rogue nation to not only defy the world’s demands, but to test a technology that ultimately may be sold to Iran for use in the delivery of their nuclear arsenal.
To give our enemy the ability to test such technologies when we have the capability to eliminate their hardware with the press of a button is absurd.
We have become a paper tiger.
http://kyleklink.wordpress.com
April 5, 2009 at 3:36 pm
To give our enemy the ability to test such technologies when we have the capability to eliminate their hardware with the press of a button is absurd.
And with absolutely no repercussions or consequences, either — and no one would have been able to identify where the cruise missiles came from either.
One would think that after the U.S. proved to the world in Iraq and Afghanistan that we could eliminate a rogue nation’s hardware in the middle of the night, in a single night, with the press of a button, and with no one the wiser and no unpleasant consequences, it would be a no-brainer that we should send out the cruise missiles for all the rogue nations in the world.
I don’t know if you clicked through Steve Benen’s link in the sentence from his post that I quoted, but if you do, and you read that article, you will see that Bush’s mistake was not refraining from sending cruise missiles (how could he have, anyway, given that we were already dealing with heaping platefuls of military deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq?) — Bush’s mistake, and his dumb policy, was to refuse to talk to North Korea. Eight years of no negotiating, no diplomacy, no talks at all, just ignoring and further isolating a country that was already very angry about its treatment by the world. I’m not saying that out of sympathy with NK or Kim Jong Il — I’m saying it because as a person grounded in reality and not high-flown unrealistic ideological mantras, I can see what any person of a pragmatic, practical bent could see: NK had at least one, and probably more than one, huge vulnerability that the U.S. could have exploited to get NK to agree to things like, oh, dismantling its nuclear weapons program (wanting something makes you vulnerable to bargaining).
It’s you, and people like you, who are being incredibly naive and unrealistic in your belief that the U.S. can just send out cruise missiles in the middle of the night, take out the military hardware of probably THE most unstable, dangerous country in the world, and be no worse for the wear, with no reaction from NK or any other country. I mean, sorry, but how stupid can you get? I’m glad it’s Obama in the White House and not someone like you.