By NORMAN SOLOMON
CounterPunch
"Running parallel to the mendacious career of the "peaceful atom," U.S. foreign policy has hit new lows during the last several years. The invasion of Iraq, on the pretext of non-existent WMDs, sent a powerful message. If the U.S. government was inclined to launch an attack before a country had the capability to generate a mushroom cloud, then the country would be protected from such attack by developing nuclear weapons as soon as possible.
Coupled with the contempt for genuine diplomacy that the Bush administration has repeatedly shown, Washington's eagerness to use military might has fueled the dangers of a nuclear-weapons standoff with North Korea. Two of the sacred axioms of the Bush regime -- secrecy and violence -- cannot solve this problem and in fact can only make it worse. Einstein was correct; with nuclear weapons, "there is no secret and there is no defense."
Rest assured that while President Bush was at a podium in the White House on Monday denouncing the North Korean nuclear test as a "provocative act," Karl Rove was hard at work to fine-tune plans for a rhetorical onslaught linking this crisis to the "war on terror." Bush was already laying the groundwork for such an effort as he spoke -- warning of "a grave threat to the United States" if North Korea gives nuclear-related technology to "any state or non-state actor.""
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