Stanley Kurtz on North Korea on National Review Online


Stanley Kurtz is certainly not making me feel all that comfortable concerning the situation in North Korea.

Today, the United States stands on the brink of war — with North Korea. War with North Korea is much more likely than either the administration or the media have indicated. And our coming invasion of Iraq may trigger developments that push us still closer to conflict on the Korean peninsula.[...]


It will be said that all of this is the madness of the cowboys running the Bush administration. How else could we have moved from so long a relative peace to the brink of multiple destructive wars? Our nightmare, sadly, is the result of the lethal combination of terror and proliferating weapons of mass destruction, not the actions of the Bush administration. For all our might and technology, the confluence of terror and WMDs has the power to destroy us — if we do not destroy it first.


We are at the beginning, not the end, of a terrible new age. Our army is too small. So is our defense budget. They will get bigger. Even that, unfortunately, will not return us to our accustomed security. We stand today on the brink of a war — with North Korea.