From his website:

NORTH KOREA AND IRAQ: The argument that immediately surfaced in the media following the North Korean revelation about their nukes has been: See? Why shouldn't we invade North Korea now? The Bushies are sooo inconsistent. They just want to invade Iraq for oil/empire/the hell of it/the mid-term elections, or fill in the latest Dowdian allegation.



But the difference between North Korea and Iraq is so simple it's astonishing some people don't see it. So let's put this as clearly as we can: North Korea has a nuke; Iraq, so far, doesn't. Got that? When a rogue state succeeds in getting weapons of mass destruction, our options are severely limited.

The question with Iraq is simple: in trying to stop Saddam getting a nuke, do we follow the same policies as Clinton and Carter in 1994 with North Korea, or do we try something else? Amazingly, large swathes of apparently intelligent people seem to think we should try the Carter/Clinton approach to Iraq. My view is simple: if we do not disarm Saddam now, we never will. And if we don't, a full-scale nuclear, biological and chemical war is inevitable in the Middle East; and that war, with the help of terror groups like al Qaeda, will soon come to LA and New York and London and Washington. So the choice is a dangerous war now; or a much more destructive war later. I know democracies don't like to hear these as the two options; democracies rightly, understandably hate to go to war. But these choices, in my view, are the only ones we actually have. So what's it gonna be? Or do we still want to change the subject?



This is also why we deal differently with China and the U.S.S.R., too. It's the difference between negotiating with a criminal holding hostages with a pistol, or negotiating with one holed up with hostages and six hundred pounds of plastic explosive with him holding the detonator.

Bookmark this post for whenever the same stupid questions mentioned in the first paragraph come up, and Lord knows they will. In fact, bookmark Sullivan's site. Pretty much everything there is worth reading.