Making Kim Pay

I will tell you exactly what will happen to North Korea in consequence of exploding an atomic bomb:

Goose egg. Nothing. Nada. Rien. Zippo. Absolutely sweet dick-all.

"And this could have been stopped, if the West had had the courage to stand up to both North Korea and China. It did not. And Seoul, or Tokyo, or even Los Angeles, will pay the price one day," moans one blogger, meaning to give a damning indictment of the West's moral and political failures, but unintentionally pointing the finger at the real source of decay.

Ever since claiming the moral leadership of the free world and naming North Korea as one of the most evilest nations in the Axis of Evil, George W. has essentially sat on his hands on the nuke issue. It dropped on his to-do list --- the evil apparently having lessened with time --- to somewhere between water appropriations in North Dakota and global warming. At the same time it appears about 97.3% of his attention has been drawn to the sectarian strife terrorism civil war disaster in Iraq and related sideshows in the war on terror. Remember Bush cutting the legs from under John Kerry two years ago for Kerry's sucky position on North Korean nukes? He had a plan, right? He was going knock Chinese and Korean heads together to fix this thing, the so-called six party talks. In retrospect, the sucky position would probably have been better than this triumph of American diplomacy.

Bottom line: short of outright miltary intervention --- any volunteers for that particular bucket of slop? --- nothing will be done. The Chinese will bluster --- Beijing as a target is a lot closer to Pyongyang than Washington --- and the Americans will wave their hands and the Europeans will make pooh-poohing noises, while Stephen Harper offers sanctions --- against a country with which Canada has no foreign trade, and whose development aid from Ottawa would scarcely carpet Kim's vacation house in broadloom. Denunciations and sanctions against the most isolated country on the planet are laughable and amount to a sorry mass bum-covering exercise on the part of world leaders. They really don't have anything else to offer. In the event, a sanctioned North Korea with nuclear weapons is probably better than the blood-and-gore alternative.

So get used to North Korea having the bomb. But don't worry: building a delivery system for such weapons is at least two or three years off ---- plenty of time for George to fix it.