Nuclear North Korea

North Korea is now a nuclear power. Last night they performed an underground test of a nuclear bomb. Today the world reacts with...condemnation.

Josh Marshall writes how this is a complete failure of Bush policy. Clinton had a carrot stick approach getting Korea to stop plutonium enrichment in exchange for oil and help with non-weapons reactors. North Korea worked around the Clinton agreement, pursuing uranium enrichment and Bush just made threats and did nothing and now North Korea is testing nuclear bombs. Bush had 6 years to deal with this, he can't blame Clinton for this failure (well he can and probably will but it's wrong).

Genn Greenwald writes "The message we have sent with our foreign policy is clear -- if you are a militarily weak nation, we may invade you or bomb you at will, but if you arm yourselves or, better still, acquire nuclear capability, we will not. That has become the incentive scheme produced by having the world's only superpower announce to the world that it has the right to preemptively invade other countries."

It's also a failure of China's policy and Russia's and others. There are also some reports that North Korea may be preparing a second test.

And of course now we have to deal with Bush mangling the word "nuclear" for a while.