Multilateral

It's been a while since I last posted, I know. Now that the craziness of simultaneously selling one house and buying another, as well as moving into said new house, is over I can finally devote some time to this blog. To start of with, something which you probably won't see or hear emphasized in the mainstream news is that six-way talks will start tomorrow to address North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

Many people opposed to the Iraq campaign in the War on Terror have wondered why we attacked Iraq rather than North Korea which presumably presents a greater threat due to its more advanced nuclear weapons program, and the fact that its leader appears to be every bit the dictator Saddam was. There are a multitude of reasons, which collectively form this quaint little thing called "reality," but one of the big ones was that the situation in North Korea has a much better chance of being resolved through peaceful negotions and diplomacy than the situation in Iraq.

One of the reasons I voted for George W. Bush was the difference in the way the two candidates planned to handle North Korea. Bush said he would continue to push for multilateral talks involving the other countries in the region (namely China, Japan, South Korea, and Russia) and not give in to North Korea's demands for bilateral talks between it and the US alone. Kerry, on the other hand, said he would engage in such bilateral talks. The big problem is that is what Clinton did, and North Korea essentially played the US for fools. In exchange for aid, including nuclear fuel for its reactors, North Korea promised that it would not engage in any nuclear fuel production of its own. The government of North Korea quite clearly lied about that and now we have the situation as it exists today. Kerry would have made the same mistake Clinton did and likely made the problem even worse.

By pushing for multilateral talks, Bush realizes that the best hope for resolving this situation peacefully is to get the other concerned nations in the area involved in applying pressure to North Korea. China is especially important as it is the primary source for food and fuel aid to North Korea which is, in a very real sense, keeping the country from devolving into anarchy. China, therefore, is in a position to exert an enormous amount of influence on its smaller neighbor but it will only become involved if it has to. China would probably like nothing better than to let the US deal with North Korea alone but the likely result of such action has already been demonstrated as noted above.

Its funny (not really) that the Democrats were all about how we didn't involve the international community in Iraq (even though we did) but, when faced with a situation where the Bush administration is adamant that other nations be involved, they would be willing to go it alone.