“Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof-the smoking gun-that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” It is with these words that President George W. Bush began the drive to war in earnest. At the Cincinnati Union Terminal on October 7, 2002, President Bush articulated the case for invasion and less intentionally so, highlighted the administration’s myopic worldview. Now, with the arrival of a newly assertive Iran and a belligerent North Korea, one is forced to acknowledge the inconsistencies in Bush-era foreign policy; and to recognize that to our president, Iraq was special.
On that same night in Cincinnati, President Bush intoned, “some ask why Iraq is different from other countries or regimes that also have terrible weapons. While there are many dangers in the world, the threat from Iraq stands alone-because it gathers the most serious dangers of our age in one place.” He went on to argue, “Iraq is unique…. Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction.”
It is here that one must pause to separate fact from rhetoric: Saddam Hussein was undeniably a ruthless dictator, one who murdered thousands as Iraq withered under his rule. The left-leaning journal Mother Jones wrote rightly, “Few mourn the defeat of Saddam, a tyrant who will surely join Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler in some especially unpleasant corner of hell.” That said, the argument that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a “unique threat” due to its “technical capabilities” is a more dubious claim. This fact is underscored when Iraq’s weapons program is compared to that of North Korea.
On April 25, 2003 North Korea admitted having fully operational nuclear weapons. North Korea didn’t just disclose having a “weapons program” or indicate that they had successfully fabricated one of the scores of complex inner workings of an atomic bomb. Rather, according to The New York Times a North Korean representative, Li Gun, “pulled aside U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly…and told him ‘blatantly and boldly’ that the country has a least one nuclear weapon.” Li Gun followed this by asking the stunned Assistant Secretary of State, “Now what are you going to do about it?” North Korea has repeatedly threatened to “test” its nuclear weapons, becoming the first nation-state since the fall of the Soviet Union to so aggressively use nuclear weapons as a bargaining chip. This is additionally troubling when one considers that just 11 days ago, it was widely reported that a “two mile-high mushroom cloud” was seen in the vicinity of a well known North Korean testing facility.
With regard to the claim that Iraq was “unique” due to the “merciless nature of its regime” one need only turn to North Korea to find a far graver danger. Andrew Natsios of the U.S. Agency for International Development testified in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 5, 2003 that, “No totalitarian regime of the last century has exercised a greater degree of absolute control over its society than the North Korean government….Life in North Korea today is less free and less humane than life in any other country now or in modern time. Every aspect of life is controlled and every bit of individualism destroyed.” Further, in 1995, “economic crisis” turned into full-scale, national famine as the North Korean government stood by. According to the U.S. Agency for International Development, more than 2.5 million North Koreans died of starvation. As the famine neared a second year, cannibalism became common. In October of 2003, a North Korean defector, using the pseudonym Lee told the Washington Post, “I can’t condemn cannibalism. Not that I wanted to eat human meat, but we were so hungry. It was common that people went to a fresh grave and dug up a body to eat meat.”
The above is merely a snapshot of North Korean threat. Regardless, it should be clear that by the criteria put forward by President Bush himself, it is North Korea and not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that was and remains to be a menace. Conservative pundits have been quick to praise the administration for a “steady, multilateral and diplomatic” approach to North Korea. If diplomacy remains the preferred policy with Kim Jong Il-a historically irrational, patently belligerent, nuclear-weapon-possessing-tyrant-then why not with Saddam Hussein?