A nuke sale would be a one-shot, and if it is used and traced, the cost would be very high. A huge amount would have to be involved to make it worth it.
Absolutely concur. Kim Jong Il is a "businessman" who treats the entire country as his personal corporation. And the last thing he desires is to lose control of that business. So I don't see him throwing all of that away by pushing a nuclear program.
What I fear about unilateral negoations is that Kim might even attempt to up the anty even higher by claiming the US has bungled the "deal-making" and left Kim in a position where he could justify launching a "last-ditch" invasion.
I mean, if he believes his regime is at a state where it has no choice but to go to war in a suicide attack, then it would behoove him to make it appear the US left him no other choice.
Thus, I applaud the Bush approach, offering the promise of talks and further economic assistance, but only in the context of multi-lateral talks that absolutely leave Kim unable to remain intransgent based upon some stupid claim that Bush has threatened to invade N. Korea.
And it REALLY puzzles me that Democrats would be so reckless as to pledge the US to enter into negotiations that no other nation in the region would be obliged to acknowledge. After all, the conflict has been between the North and South, not with the US. Our role has merely been to prevent N. Korea from invading the South.
Repressing them would be counterproductive, and reform is highly unlikely.
Depends on how one defines "repressing". I merely assert that the Saudis must define what is, and what isn't acceptable behavior for a religious cleric, and then enforce those standards. They can't have Wahhabist clerics advocating violence and militant Jihad throughout the Islamic world.
Democracy in Saudi Arabia would only get you an Wahabbi theocracy.
Absolutely... I've never advocated creating democracies that permit non-democratic ideologies/theologies to participate for the purpose of destroying that democratic system. And encouraging something of that order in SA would be insane.
But none of the recent actions in SA would likely have occurred had not Bush (IMO), by his invasion of Iraq, placed SA in a position of diminishing power. Strategic power is destined to shift to Iraq, by virtue of the degree of political and military capital being expended to make it work.
Iraq rivals SA in oil reserves. Their cost of production is apparently lower than SA. And their society, chaotic as it currently is, is primarily secular in nature, which should permit the growth of entrepreneurialship to take root there.
Don't bet on any significant reduction in Saudi importance any time soon.
Gotta start somewhere, and sometime. Because the issue of Islamic militantcy is not a short-term problem. It will remain with us for at least the next 10-20 years, given the demographic and economic statistics that exist in the region.
But I will have to read Pollack's analysis.
Hawk |
