Digby sez:
Who says regime change is the official policy even now? Bush has been talking about "disarmament" and a peaceful solution for the last few days, so one can only wonder what happened to our tough talk about pre-emptive, unilateral blah, blah blah. From the way he's been talking lately, the last thing we ever wanted was a big, bad war --- we just wanted everybody to all get along.
Of course, now we find out that coincidentally, it was 12 days ago that N. Korea dropped it's little bombshell, so maybe they don't think it's a good idea to push that axis-of-evil line at the moment. It's probably another one of those fiendishly clever "enigmas wrapped in a riddle" foreign policy strategies that we just KNOW are brilliant in some way but are so byzantine that we shouldn't worry our little heads about it. All of this shucking and jiving between the foreign policy mavens and the military and the old guard Republicans is political theatre. It only looks as though they are making it up as they go along.
And, can you please explain why, at long last, if the overthrow of Saddam has been the policy since before 9/11 (which, I agree was the fondest hope of the Wolfowitz cabal if not the official policy) we have been forced to to swallow this utter bullshit from them about "imminent danger" and al Qaeda linkage and the urgent need to authorize Bush to have a free hand right this minute? I don't doubt that they've wanted to invade Iraq since 1991, much less since 9/11. Which means that their amateurish, unconvincing attempts to persuade the American people that bin Laden and Saddam are connected and, even more suspiciously, that we had to get a war authorized by the congress before the midterm elections is just plain insulting.
And, this news that North Korea told them 12 days ago and they were so stunned they just couldn't inform the congress before they voted is one of the most despicable examples of crude, dishonest power politics we've ever seen in this country. How anyone can continue to defend this sorry excuse for an administration is beyond me. After all, we're only talking about nuclear war, global terrorism and the rule of law. It's not as if we need to worry that our foreign policy is completely incomprehensible.
