I started not to comment on Dave Ryan’s DA column on North Korea’s nuclear test, because, well, the last time I mentioned him, in a post that was intended as a fun bit of quirkiness, I was accused of attacking him. I was worried that he might take actual criticism a little more harshly.

I was originally going to write a post about the last paragraph by itself:

These questions are, in the end, going to be the basis for the larger handling of the situation. Sanctions have been tried and failed, talks held and fallen apart. It’s just a matter of time before this latest response fails and the next plan is announced. Sadly, in a world where rogue countries are beginning to go nuclear and real threats to national security are confirmed, that’s something the United States—and the world—doesn’t have much of.

It took me about five readings of that to figure out which noun the word “that” was supposed to replace, and even then, I didn’t figure it out. I handed it over to a friend of mine who also had to reread it a few times, and she finally decided it meant “time.” I’m still certain that it’s still a pretty ambiguous pronoun, but it works well enough.

Dave also raises a question about why we invaded Iraq with “guaranteed, ‘slam dunk’ intelligence about the country…”, but “when faced with actual intelligence that some degree of nuclear activity has happened in the mountains of the socialist country, the administration is all about diplomacy, conveniently near election time.” He completely glosses over two huge differences between Iraq and North Korea:

1. North Korea may not be an entirely healthy nation, thanks to years of sanctions, but they do have weapons (even if thy’re not all nuclear), and many of those weapons are pointed at a couple of nations we have pretty good relations with (South Korea and Japan).
2. More importantly, North Korea is bordered by a huge nation that we know has nuclear weapons and the ability to hit us with those weapons if they wished. We may have fairly normalized relations with China right now, but there is no way in the world we’d risk antagonizing them by invading North Korea without their permission.

Even if our military wasn’t occupied elsewhere, and domestic politics wouldn’t make it nigh-impossible for the President to get support for invading North Korea, China and the threat against our allies in the region would be enough to cause us to seek diplomacy as long as it’s a feasible option.

Patterico commenting on an article by Jonah Goldberg, discusses the War in Iraq and whether it was a mistake. The original article and Patterico’s post are both worth reading.

I don’t necessarily agree with the “it was a mistake” idea (I’d explain why, but Dafydd of Big Lizards does a better job than I could), but even if I were, I’d be reluctant to admit it, because like Jonah Goldberg, I’m reluctant to be lumped in with the “antiwar” crowd. The eighth comment on Patterico’s post (link) seems to indicate that there is something wrong with that reluctance:

i thought the column was stupid.
guy finally admits invading iraq was a mistake, but he spends 90% of the column inches dumping on the people who realized this all along, i.e., who were smarter than him.
then he calls for a vote to determine if we stay there. an iraqi vote!
[Remainder of the comment is deleted because it's both irrelevant and unnecessarily insulting toward Iraqis. Click the link if you'd like to read it. - Robin]

Comment by assistant devil’s advocate — 10/19/2006 @ 8:45 am

I don’t know anything about assistant devil’s advocate, but I’m guessing he didn’t take too many higher level math courses in high school or college. You can tell by the fact that he thinks having the right answer is all that’s important. In my assorted math (and engineering) courses, I learned that getting the right answer is absolutely meaningless if you get that right answer because of invalid reasoning.

Jonah Goldberg writes that he’s come to the conclusion that, knowing what we know now, the War in Iraq was a mistake. Because he wanted neither those who supported the war nor those who opposed it to think that he’d converted to agreeing with the latter group, he takes the time to explain that his reasoning is absolutely not the reasoning of many of those who opposed the war from the beginning. He’s not denigrating those who’re smarter than him.

He’s simply asserting that, though they may have come to the correct conclusion, they arrived at that conclusion by a path that only read to the right conclusion by sheer luck, because, based on the evidence we had at the time, their conclusion was insupportable.