By Mary Lyon, From The Left -- World News Trust
Oct. 9, 2006 -- “Cowboy Diplomacy” strikes again -- or perhaps more accurately, strikes OUT again. This gang that won’t shoot straight has squandered thousands of lives, billions of tax dollars, and our reputation around the world for the sake of propping up a dictator. Ours, here, an arrogant wannabe dictator in the White House, and the real thing across the Northern Pacific. And now, the real thing has thrown a serious punch that we didn’t see coming. With his proclaimed nuclear test over the weekend, Kim Jong-il just pulled a “gotcha” on our government, almost as though he’s suckered us into a game of North Korean Roulette.
We certainly should have seen it coming, especially since we helped set up the playing field for it. Back when George W. Bush was just getting warmed up, he stated in the sternest tones, before the most august of company, that there was an “Axis of Evil.” That “Axis” consisted of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Certainly there were unsavory specimens calling the shots in all three places, if not elsewhere, too. They’re everywhere to one extent or other. Heck, there’ve been unsavory specimens aplenty calling the shots here in our own much-beleaguered country. Some of them are even now pushing Bush toward air strikes to take out suspected nuclear bomb sites. The republi-CONS in general are probably thanking their lucky stars for this new crisis, as it steers national attention away from their homegrown and wholly-owned scandal, Foleygate. But as much as this may distract from the Congressional Page Predator, Bush and friends have allowed themselves to fall victim to an even worse, and potentially catastrophic distraction.
Okay, so they identified three big meanies, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. They then set about picking a fight with the least troublesome of the three -- Iraq, and they lied all over the map to gin up a phony threat that didn’t really exist there. Funny how everything they spoke of, so ominously, about Saddam Hussein turns out to be undeniable fact with Kim Jong-il. While the blowhard in Baghdad wasn’t in any position of strength to be able to do something about acquiring WMDs, the Pyongyang problem child was, and did. But we didn’t notice because we were so singlemindedly focused on Iraq.
Sadly, in the process of this not-so-benign neglect, we created a tangible threat to world peace and stability where none existed beforehand. And by betting it all on Iraq, we allowed a potential hot spot in North Korea to fester like a big zit -- into a large, ugly, and rather unsettling boil. We ran around chasing imaginary boogeymen in Iraq while another real-life one was allowed to flourish in Northeast Asia. Now, he’s hardly imaginary. And he’s that much more difficult to deal with, because he just dealt himself some substantially stronger cards. Texas Hold ‘Em didn’t work out so well this time.
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