N. Korea regime change next?

You probably assumed – especially after Sept. 11 – that preventing Islamic terrorists from nuking you in your jammies had become our No. 1 national security objective.

The International Atomic Energy Agency Safeguards and Physical Security regime is the world's best hope for keeping nukes, or the makings thereof, out of the hands of terrorists.

So, you probably assumed that there was a White House working group – comprised of senior weenies from the Department of Energy, Department of State, the Pentagon, and the Central Intelligence Agency – whose mission was to cooperate with the IAEA, and to fully support its activities.

Well, as Walter Pincus of the Washington Post has just revealed, you were wrong.

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It turns out there is a secret White House working group, alright, but its mission was to convince you and your congresspersons that you would be nuked by Islamic terrorists unless the neo-crazies were allowed to immediately implement their long-planned invasion and occupation of Iraq.

You see, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz admitted shortly after Sept. 11 that the planning and budgeting for invading and occupying Iraq – code-named Operation Iraqi Freedom – had begun even before the Bush-Cheney administration came to power.

It was only after Sept. 11 that the neo-crazies discovered that you would support their invasion and occupation of Iraq if – and only if – you were convinced Saddam had nukes and intended to provide them to Islamic terrorists.

But the neo-crazies had a big problem.

According to the IAEA, Saddam had never had a viable nuke program, and what he had was completely destroyed, either during the Gulf War or its immediate aftermath, and as of January 2002, there was no evidence that Saddam had made any attempt to reconstruct it.

However, as of January 2002, the IAEA had under lock and key in North Korea enough plutonium to build a half-dozen nukes.

So, instead of supporting the IAEA in North Korea, as we should have done if we really wanted to keep nukes out of the hands of terrorists, the White House Iraq Group set about discrediting the IAEA, disputing or ignoring dozens of past IAEA reports on Iraq and casting doubt on IAEA's ability to ever find the nukes – which they insisted Saddam had hidden away – with both hands and a covert roadmap.

Of course, if the IAEA reports on Iraq had been accepted, the neo-crazies could never have justified invading Iraq.

But here is what is more important. If we had accepted the final report of the IAEA to the U.N. Security Council of March 2003 as gospel truth and had called off the invasion of Iraq, then a clean bill of health by the IAEA would have been worth having today. As it is, after what we did to Iraq in spite of the IAEA final report, no country – especially North Korea – will henceforth consider an IAEA clean bill of health to be worth the paper it's printed on.

Worse, after what we did to Iraq in violation of the U.N. charter, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 and our own Joint Congressional Resolution of Oct. 10, 2002, neither North Korea nor Iran can regard anything we promise – short of a formal non-aggression treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate – to be worth the paper it's printed on.

Worse still, both Russia and China consider the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's position – some of which is excerpted below – "absolutely logical":

It is clear that as long as the U.S. insists on its hostile policy toward the DPRK, the latter will not abandon its nuclear deterrent force.

It will be considered that the U.S. has practically given up its hostile policy toward the DPRK when [a] a non-aggression treaty with legal binding is concluded and [b] diplomatic relations are established between the DPRK and the U.S. and [c] it is made clear that the U.S. does not obstruct economic cooperation between the DPRK and other countries.

The Russian state news agency quotes Deputy Foreign Minister Losyukov as declaring on the eve of the six-party talks that "Russia and China have an identical vision of the situation" and that Russia and China may offer DPRK security guarantees "if guarantees established by the United States fail to meet North Korea's expectations to the full."

Great Zot!

Of course, the neo-crazies will tell you that China and Russia would never come to North Korea's defense if we invaded. After all, they didn't come to Iraq's defense.

But, think about it. They aren't called neo-crazies for nothing.