Whatever tensions existed between North Korea and the U.S. were exacerbated to a fever pitch when Bush framed the North Koreans into his axis of evil declaration, and thereby shutting down any possibility of a progressive and constructive dialog. He created the enemy we have in North Korea. That’s the reason why Swami thinks Bush is a jerk.

Based mostly in what I read in “Fiasco” and the similar failures with N. Korea, I have to wonder if the facts being reported describe results that arise from the corruption of the process. For the last 6 years the White House has made policy decisions about who our enemies are based in large part on the whisperings of paranoid neocons and the White House has then requested from the IC the ‘facts’ to support the decisions.

Under this theory, the IC became a ‘whore’ to the White House, supplying twisted and blatently false risk estimates which fit the warped policy because to fail to do so would cost senior officials in the IC their jobs.

This is a bit OT, but not unrelated to Donna’s comment about how BushCo is intent on rewriting history. Tonight NPR did a piece on how, on his Asian trip, Cheney would talk to reporters only if they referred to him in their stories as “a senior White House official.” But then he proceeded to unreel long responses to reporters’ questions that described his own actions in the first person. OK, I’m not conveying the absurity as well as NPR did; they got Leon Panetta on the phone to comment, and for the first three seconds, Panetta just laughed uproariously.

Point and laugh, it’s where BushCo is now.

1) an absolutely trustworthy fuel-selling partner, or
2) the ability to enrich uranium to fuel-grade.

Now, far be it from me to suggest that the US would ever use leverage over nuclear fuel to try to cause NK problems.

I would never suggest such a thing; I’ll state it for the record. Fuck yeah, the US would use a nuclear fuel supply to cause NK problems if the US felt it was in the US’s “national interests”. So, of course NK wants an alternate supply of fuel.

One thing I’m curious about is this: how much would it *cost* NK (in energy capacity) to build a uranium bomb? I mean, if they had a nuclear reactor, I suspect – I freely admit I could be wrong abou tthis – that they’d be more desperate to use their enriched uranium for fuel than for bombmaking.