Did You Feel That?

U.S. intelligence has confirmed that North Korea conducted an underground test of a nuclear weapon today. By all accounts, the president of North Korea is certifiably crazy, and now he has a nuclear bomb.

Iran continues to develop a broad-based nuclear program. It doesn’t hide that fact; it boasts openly about it. The president of Iran is not crazy, but he is exceedingly dangerous, particularly now that there is a predominately Shiite government next door in Iraq.

Iran has always been the biggest threat in the Middle East. That’s why we supported Saddam Hussein in the 1980 – 1988 war between Iran and Iraq. We encouraged Saddam to invade Iran and in 1982 we began providing him weapons and economic support – because President Reagan considered Iran to be exceedingly dangerous.

We invaded Iraq in March 2003 because, we were told, it was the best thing we could do to keep the world safe from the “slam dunk” proliferation of nuclear weapons going on in that country. The president of Iraq ended up defending himself by hiding in a dark and filthy “spider hole” because there were no WMDs or anything akin to WMDs at his disposal. All he had was a disposable army that we routed in little more than a month.

On the world stage, in terms of nuclear arms and weapons of mass destruction, we are not any safer than we were in March 2003. Arguably, we learned today that we are considerably less safe.

What will tomorrow bring?