Is The Bush Doctrine Dead?

Between

Sept. 11, 2001, and his

State of the Union Address in 2002, George W. Bush
had America in the palm of his hand.

But in that speech, Bush blew it. Singling out Iran,
Iraq and North Korea as state sponsors of terror seeking
weapons of mass destruction, Bush yoked them together in
an "axis of evil" and issued this ultimatum:
"I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will
not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The
United States of America will not permit the world`s
most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world`s
most destructive weapons."

Neoconservatives celebrated this bellicosity as neo-Churchillian.
Yet all it accomplished was to fracture the U.S. and
foreign coalitions that had united behind Bush. As some
of us

wrote at the time, to call Iran and Iraq,

mortal enemies in the eight-year war of the `80s
that took a million lives, an "axis" was absurd.

Bush`s speech was a blunder of the first magnitude.
First, he had no authority to attack any of those
nations, as Congress had not authorized war. Second, he
had neither the plans nor forces in place to do so. Yet
he had put all three on notice this was what he had in
mind.

When the United States

invaded Iraq, North Korea and Iran got the message.
Both accelerated their nuclear programs.

By issuing public ultimatums, Bush left these regimes
no way out. Even tiny Serbia felt its national honor
required it to fight rather than submit to a U.S.
ultimatum to let NATO march through the country to
occupy

Kosovo.

Now Kim Jong-Il, though his July 4 test of the
Taepodong-2 missile seems to have Roman-candled and his
plutonium bomb may have misfired, has openly defied the
Bush Doctrine. Arguably the world`s worst regime has
acquired the

world`s worst weapon.

Bush`s response? He went to the United Nations to
plead for sanctions.

Will the sanctions work? Why should they? As
columnist Tony Blankley has argued, this is a regime
that, to ensure its isolation and ideological purity,
allowed millions of its people to starve to death. The
cruelties the Hermit Kingdom has imposed upon its own to
guarantee that America will not be tempted to attack are
astounding. This is not a crowd that will give up its
atom bomb for BMWs.

Because of the bluster-and-bluff of President Bush,
the United States is today eyeball-to-eyeball with Iran
and North Korea over their nuclear programs, and neither
of these regimes appears ready to blink.

Are we headed down the road again, as we were in the
Balkans and Iraq, toward wars that will be even bigger
and bloodier?

It need not happen, for the most basic of reasons.
Neither Iran nor North Korea could survive all-out war
with the United States, and neither has crossed any red
line to start such a war.

What do these nations want, and can America
accommodate them, without imperiling our security or
accepting an intolerable loss of strategic credibility?

What North Korea wants is what President Nixon gave
Mao Zedong in the 1970s. Recognition, security
guarantees, aid, admission into the international
community and an end to the U.S. policy of regime
change.

What does America want from North Korea? No more
atomic tests, the return of International Atomic Energy
Agency inspectors into all of North Korea`s nuclear
facilities and no export of nuclear materials to hostile
states or non-state actors that could use nuclear
devices as instruments of terror, mass murder or nuclear
blackmail.

The six-party talks have failed. North Korea has
rejected U.S. offers and resisted U.S. demands, and
South Korea and China have balked at using their
leverage to back us up. If Beijing and Seoul wish to
play a separate hand with Pyongyang, we should play one,
too.

We should engage in direct negotiations with the
North, warning them that any export of a nuclear device
to a hostile regime risks an attack by the United States
and any nuclear weapon used against Americans, anywhere,
traceable to North Korea will bring certain and massive
nuclear retaliation.

However, in return for iron-clad assurances they have
opened up all nuclear programs to inspection and given
up further development of nuclear weapons, we should
offer the North Koreans diplomatic ties, economic aid
and a security pact sealed with a U.S. withdrawal of
forces from the Korean peninsula.

Great though its crimes, Kim`s regime will never
equal in evil those of

Josef Stalin or

Mao, both of whom had nuclear arsenals greater than
Kim can ever achieve—and America never went to war with
either.

Meanwhile, put the bellicose bluster on the shelf. It
has done less than nothing to advance America`s
security.

COPYRIGHT

CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Patrick J. Buchanan needs


no introduction to VDARE.COM
readers; his book

State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and
Conquest of America,

can be ordered from
Amazon.com.