When it turned out that Saddam Hussein wasn’t on the phone to bin Laden working out a plan to nuke the US, a lot of people shifted their argument for invading Iraq. Namely, it’s good we went in there, because Saddam was such a bad guy.
This is interesting, because everyone agrees that he’s a bad guy, and most left-leaning people would tend to want to get bad guys out of office.
[A friend mentioned yesterday that he saw a show on The History Channel about Saddam. Apparently, it showed Saddam as being a real monster. What amused me was that my friend said, “it was The History Channel, so I don’t think it had a right-wing bias.†As if, considering Saddam a monster is a conservative viewpoint, and liberals think he’s just sort of like an angry puppy.]
The point is that if people are bad, and their administration is bad, socially conscious world citizens (and even right-wingers, apparently) should be all for pressuring them to cut it out. And if they don’t cut it out, get rid of them. This isn’t necessarily true if the administration is merely trying to get nukes.
Spiegel has an opinion piece suggesting that North Korea be looked at, not as a nuclear crisis, but as a human rights crisis (link). Pressuring them about nuclear weapons hasn’t accomplished much, and the U.N. has a specific mandate to stop human rights abuses, so the argument is shift the focus to the human rights issue.
I personally doubt it’ll work any better, but it’s a better idea than what I’ve come up with. I.e., nothing.
I don’t have any answers either, but I wish someone would figure it out since I live 6 miles from, and work 4 blocks from, the White House.
Recent years have sucked enough, between 9/11, anthrax, the sniper (anyone reading this ever had helicopters circling a shooting site that you can see both on TV *and* outside your window?), and the GOP gov’t. Okay, granted, they’re not all equally bad.
Nukes coming to DC would not be a fun addition.