Is the world safer?

[Stonehead]

Interesting thoughts on real threats by nuclear proliferation:

 

Excerpts--

 

The questions that now cry out to be answered are, Why did the United States, standing in the midst of the Pakistani nuclear Wal-Mart, its shelves groaning with, among other things, centrifuge parts, uranium hexafluoride (supplied, we now know, to Libya) and helpful bomb-assembly manuals in a variety of languages, rush out of the premises to vainly ransack the empty warehouse of Iraq? What sort of nonproliferation policy could lead to actions like these? How did the Bush Administration, in the name of protecting the country from nuclear danger, wind up leaving it wide open to nuclear danger?

 

In answering these questions, it would be reassuring, in a way, to report that the basic facts were discovered only after the war, but the truth is otherwise. In the case of Iraq, it's now abundantly clear that some combination of deception, self-deception and outright fraud (the exact proportions of each are still under investigation) led to the manufacture of a gross and avoidable falsehood. In the months before the war, most of the governments of the world strenuously urged the United States not to go to war on the basis of the flimsy and unconvincing evidence it was offering. In the case of Pakistan, the question of how much the Administration knew before the war has scarcely been asked, yet we know that the most serious breach--the proliferation to North Korea--was reported and publicized before the war.

 

It's important to recall the chronology of the Korean aspect of Pakistan's proliferation. In January 2003 Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that Pakistan had given North Korea extensive help with its nuclear program, including its launch of a uranium enrichment process. In return, North Korea was sending guided missiles to Pakistan. In June 2002, Hersh revealed, the CIA had sent the White House a report on these developments. On October 4, 2002, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs James Kelly confronted the North Koreans with the CIA information, and, according to Kelly, North Korea's First Vice Foreign Minister, Kang Suk Ju, startled him by responding, "Of course we have a nuclear program." (Since then, the North Koreans have unconvincingly denied the existence of the uranium enrichment program.)

 

Bush of course had already named the Pyongyang government as a member of the "axis of evil." It had long been the policy of the United States that nuclearization of North Korea was intolerable. However, the Administration said nothing of the North Korean events to the Congress or the public. North Korea, which now had openly embarked on nuclear armament, and was even threatening to use nuclear weapons, was more dangerous than Saddam's Iraq. Why tackle the lesser problem in Iraq, the members of Congress would have had to ask themselves, while ignoring the greater in North Korea? On October 10, a week after the Kelly visit, the House of Representatives passed the Iraq resolution, and the next day the Senate followed suit. Only five days later, on October 16, did Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, reveal what was happening in North Korea.

 

In short, from June 2002, when the CIA delivered its report to the White House, until October 16--the period in which the nation's decision to go to war in Iraq was made--the Administration knowingly withheld the news about North Korea and its Pakistan connection from the public. Even after the vote, Secretary of State Colin Powell strangely insisted that the North Korean situation was "not a crisis" but only "a difficulty." Nevertheless, he extracted a pledge from Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, that the nuclear technology shipments to North Korea would stop. (They did not.) In March, information was circulating that both Pakistan and North Korea were helping Iran to develop atomic weapons. (The North Korean and Iranian crises are of course still brewing.)

 

In sum, the glaring contradiction between the policy of "regime change" for already disarmed Iraq and regime-support for proliferating Pakistan was not a postwar discovery; it was fully visible before the war. The Nation enjoys no access to intelligence files, yet in an article arguing the case against the war, this author was able to comment that an "objective ranking of nuclear proliferators in order of menace" would put "Pakistan first," North Korea second, Iran third and Iraq only fourth--and to note the curiosity that "the Bush Administration ranks them, of course, in exactly the reverse order, placing Iraq, which it plans to attack, first, and Pakistan, which it befriends and coddles, nowhere on the list." Was nonproliferation, then, as irrelevant to the Administration's aims in Iraq as catching terrorists? Or was protecting the nation and the world against weapons of mass destruction merely deployed as a smokescreen to conceal other purposes? And if so, what were they?

 

Read the entire article at the source

 

About the Nation :

The Nation will not be the organ of any party, sect, or body. It will, on the contrary, make an earnest effort to bring to the discussion of political and social questions a really critical spirit, and to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration, and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred.

-- from The Nation's founding prospectus, 1865

 

 

So, hypothetically, North Korea has or will have the capability to lob nuclear missiles at the west coast. Heard this was the reason for Bush to pursue a space-based missile defense system ($$$) which will probably not work for defense against potential enemies such as China or Russia but may against rogue states such as N. Korea. BTW, we had to drop out of a weapons treaty to pursue this one, again $$$.

Edited March 19, 2004 by Stonehead

[Stonehead]

Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atom bomb operated a clandestine nuclear arms network that was feeding Libya's drive to build an atom bomb.

 

Khan first met the Libyans in Istanbul in the late 1990s. He cut a lucrative USD100 million deal to supply equipment needed to build a bomb to on-site training. "He became a one-stop shopping centre," said Jim Wilkinson, deputy White House national security adviser while Mohamed EIBaradei, Director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency described his network as a "supermarket" for countries wanting the bomb.

 

Khan cleverly used precision engineering laboratories and companies around the world that were contracted to make different parts of the equipment he needed to supply to the Libyans and many of these parts were dual purpose equipment that is also used in the oil and gas industry or other industries. That modus operandi never created a suspicion in the minds of the manufacturers until Khan's network was exposed by investigators.

 

Khan has admitted to selling nuclear secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea but was promptly pardoned by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Bush has "allowed this farce to go unquestioned". In fact Bush is quite mum about Khan's network and this episode but very rhetorical about WMDs and non-proliferation of WMDs.

 

It will remain an enigma why Bush illegally invaded Iraq to topple Saddam by military force on the premise that Iraq possessed WMDs (and that Saddam was an imminent threat) but takes a keep-thy-mouth-shut view on Khan and Pakistan, just as it will remain an enigma why Osama, who was trained and funded by the CIA and was an ally of the US, turned on the US and attacked it on September 11. It is probably the same shroud that covers the secret post-9/11 airlift of Saudi nationals and members of Laden's family.

 

Bush has weak knees on Khan and Pakistan, the nation that created and trained the Taliban using teachings of the 18th century Wahabbi sect that originated in Saudi Arabia and has an admitted rogue conduct in clandestine proliferation of nuclear weapons, paradoxically accuses John F Kerry of being weak on the issue of terrorism.

 

Bush has an enigmatic embellishment to adorn his policies and actions, and on the way he carries on his so-called War on Terrorism. The US has rewarded Pakistan with a elite military status for its "support in the war on terrorism" and has designated Pakistan as a "major non-Nato ally"! That means Pakistan will be given preferential treatment in foreign aid and defense co-operation.

 

That also lends support and credibility to the theory that there are in fact two wars - one is war on terrorism that Congress supported and the other is a war on WMDs which is a private war of a coalition led by Bush culminating in the illegal invasion of Iraq. The dichotomy is clear and real. So, Pakistan is rewarded for its WMD network which is real but Iraq was invaded for the WMDs that it did no have. If you have never seen the wedlock of enigma with a paradox, you now have one to see in how Bush treated Pakistan vis-a-vis Iraq.

 

The abyss in the enigma comes from information compiled by Craig Unger in his new book, HOUSE OF BUSH, HOUSE OF SAUD:THE SECRET RELATIONSHIPS, that details "murky banking deals and illegal arms deals" going back to three decades between the Bush family and the Saudi Royal family and later the "complex war negotiations". More than that Bush is a "friend of the Saudi Royal family" who maintained close business relationship with Osama. It leaves one wondering if the world's most feared terrorist has a cowboy buddy in the White House which makes Bush the most dangerous man in the world and throws up more questions on why the focus on the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda was hijacked and mothballed into another war to topple a secular regime in Iraq.

 

The result - Saddam is in jail while the warlords in Afghanistan are gaining ground! The lies of Bush are therefore no ordinary lies. His lies, as we now see them are dangerous on a large scale. They encompass hundreds of billions of dollars and territories across the globe. Never was America so cleverly hijacked by the lies of one man. Never before a man successfully used the media and public relations in a multi-billion dollar campaign to make lies look like gospel truth. It makes Goebbels look minuscule and if Goebbels was alive today, he would have died of shame.

 

The record now shows that Bush is indulgent toward regimes that are strongly or actually implicated in nurturing militant terrorism and does not have a systematic approach or a real plan to eradicate terrorism but has successfully and ruthlessly exploited 9/11 for his own agenda which includes a private war to topple Saddam at the expense of the US taxpayer.

 

-- source

[MrDoolittle]

Please summarize with a single sentence of mono-syllabic words.

[willstrickland]

Bomb Pak E Stan.