A seismic thump presented by North Korea to the world as man-made fission — and the likelihood of a fortified Stalinist artifact becoming even more impregnable as it becomes more militarily promiscuous — was too much for National Review's John Derbyshire to take sitting down this morning. Construing the end of the Bush Doctrine "in the alleys and groves of Iraq," he delivered a brief epitaph for it, advised us all to accept a nuclear club as big as the global soccer league; and, when pushed by other news, Derbyshire threatened to vote, well, not Republican.
Offered a mail comment of mine on his proclivity for assuming the worst, Derbyshire answered "And you really think W will do anything about NK or Iran? Wake up." Well, he started at a possible North Korean atomic detonation and wound up amid metastatic nuclear armament, about three years away from post-apocalyptic Mad Max.
North Korea's present danger to mankind (outside of North Korea) remains its materiel black market and artillery batteries pointed at South Korea. Even if the purported test was an authentic and successful one, nuclear weapons need delivery systems and Pyongyang apparently hasn't got one. Kim Jong Il may be uncontested but he rules a country whose pinnacle resembles 1950s Utica, if erected by director Tim Burton and populated by forcibly malnourished zombies. The travestying Democratic People's Republic of Korea is not Iran, and certainly not Stalinist Russia. American ennui tends to be a thing of the intermediate, rather than the terminus, so a nascent atomic threat may be enough to render domestic skepticism and suspicion of assertive military action — or an effort to materially throttle the regime, in spite of the consequent civilian deaths — inconsequential.
In fact what most debilitates American efforts against belligerent countries is the nature of the opposition thereto. Committed leftists dismiss reports about North Korea or Iran as propaganda, if they don't outright blame democratic nations for untoward events. I have tried many times and failed to have any constructive conversations with those that I come across, observations corroborated by what can be daily read on paper or a screen. This kind of virulent nihilism has spread to where common sense is now defined as believing a mutually affirmed front line — Iraq — is a losing proposition if it can't be secured in a handful of years. It is on this point where two of Derbyshire's statements are contradictory.
First, the iniquity of AQ Khan — the scientist who helped weapons advancements of Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and Libya — confirms that an absence of the rule of law is all that is needed for proliferation where least entitled, so removing a threat from Pyongyang would require eliminating all of House Kim's totalitarian scaffolding. To that end, American forces would encounter similar frustrations and dangers as those Derbyshire believes, in Iraq, deflated the Bush Doctrine.
Second, if President Bush and the Republican Party have disappointed for having failed to "put an end to the nuclear ambitions of despots, criminals, religious fanatics, and lunatics," why would anyone vote for a minority party whose distaste, for the very policies demanded, is declarative and long-standing — except to hasten some kind of indulgent, literary tragedy?