Undaunted

by digby

We all know that before 9/11 the neocons didn’t give a damn about terrorism (and still don’t, really.) But what were they obsessed with? Saddam, yes. Israel, yes. But they reserved a whole bunch of their firepower for the great yellow peril, the Chi-Coms, whom they are anxious to blame for the North Korean nuclear threat today. They apparently don’t feel we have enough problems, we need to start poking China in the eye too.

In their view, Beijing has always had the power to force Pyongyang to give up its nuclear arms programmes, and the fact that it has not done so demonstrates that China sees itself as a “strategic rival” of Washington, a phrase much favoured by administration hawks during Bush’s first year in office.

Indeed, in the most prominent neo-conservative reaction to the North Korean test to date, former Bush speechwriter David Frum called in a column published by the New York Times for the administration to take a series of measures designed to “punish China” for its failure to bring Pyongyang to heel.

Among them, Frum, who is also based at AEI and is sometimes credited with inventing the phrase “axis of evil”, in which North Korea, Iran, and Iraq were lumped together, for Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, urged the administration to cut off all humanitarian aid to North Korea, pressure South Korea to do the same, and thus force China to “shoulder the cost of helping to avert” North Korea’s economic collapse.

Frum, who is also based at AEI, urged that Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore to be invited to join NATO and that Taiwan, which China regards as a renegade province, to send observers to NATO meetings.

Frum, who in 2003 co-authored “An End to Evil” with former Defence Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, also suggested that Washington “encourage Japan to renounce the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and create its own nuclear deterrent.”

“A nuclear Japan is the thing China and North Korea dread most (after, perhaps, a nuclear South Korea or Taiwan),” he asserted.

Somebody has got to get the DEA to confiscate that shit these guys are smoking. What magic do these guys think we possess? Aside from the fact that China is holding all of our markers at the moment, does it seem like a good idea to be encouraging any country to renounce the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty right now? It’s an invitation to a nuclear free-for-all. Have their hare-brained schemes to destabilize the middle east failed to satisfy them enough that they have to destabilize Asia as well?

This is the nature of neocon thinking. After all we’ve seen, after everything they’ve screwed up, they still believe that they can control events on the world stage as if they were pieces in a board game. I’m not sure a simple madman would be more dangerous.

Update: And yes, the PNAC Democrats should wise up too. They are classic enablers, searching desperately for common ground with lunatics.

.