Neo-cons come out guns blazing

By Jim Lobe
Asia Times

"The North Korean test "has stripped any plausibility to arguments that engaging dictators works", according to Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist at AEI, who added that the Bush administration now faced a "watershed" in its relations with other states that have defied Washington in recent years.

"This crisis is not just about North Korea, but about Iran, Syria, Venezuela and Cuba as well," said Rubin. "Bush now has two choices: to respond forcefully and show that defiance has consequence, or affirm that defiance pays and that international will is illusionary."

Bush "must now choose whether his legacy will be one of inaction or leadership, Chamberlain or Churchill", Rubin said in a reference to the pre-World War II debate between the "appeasement" of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and the war policy of his successor, Winston Churchill.

The neo-conservatives' main area of concern has historically been the Middle East - indeed, their central focus in recent months has been publicizing the threats to the United States and Israel allegedly posed by Iran and Hezbollah and opposing any realist appeals to engage Tehran and Damascus in direct talks. But they have also been warning for some time against "the appeasement" of North Korea and its chief source of material aid and support, China.

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 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."A nuclear Japan is the thing China and North Korea dread most, after, perhaps, a nuclear South Korea or Taiwan," he asserted. "Not only would the nuclearization of Japan be a punishment of China and North Korea, but it would also go far to meet our goal of dissuading Iran [from trying to obtain a nuclear weapon] ... The analogue for Iran, of course, would be the threat of American aid to improve Israel's capacity to hit targets with nuclear weapons."

Other commentators called for strong efforts to achieve regime change. James Robbins, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, called for covert action, including "sabotage, espionage, information operations, subversion, deception - the works. A highly paranoid totalitarian regime like Kim [Jong-il's] will be highly susceptible to these methods," he predicted."