Watch Closely, Everyone -- We are in the gravest of situations

Americans should be watching our government and news reports closely. In the Iraq war, the Bush administration purposely inflamed the situation, gave wrong assessments of public information and had no secret information which let them know better the situation -- as was widely assumed, based on things like Cheney's statement "We know where the WMD are.". It is clear that the Bush Administration bent intelligence and inflamed the public into the Iraq war. They remain steadfast on the subject -- insisting that they did everything right.

We are in the run-up to an election. If the Administration truly believes that they handled the Iraq situation correctly, then the claim by a South Korean news agency of an atomic test would be at least as firm a reason to go to war on the Korean peninsula. And, even so, satellite images of a mushroom cloud -- and if an atomic device was detonated, those images exist -- would definitively argue that NKorea has WMD; they are known in the past to have made illegal sales of missles to Pakistan. The case for an invasion of North Korea is at least as strong as that made for Iraq (had the 'facts' floated about Iraq actually been true; while with NKorea, we appear to have a wolf, and not merely a pretext for crying wolf).

Unfortunately, we don't have the manpower in the Army to fight two wars in two different theaters. Too bad we didn't form a coalition to fight in Iraq, and too bad we squandered our historical allies' good will, weakening our ability form such a coalition for North Korea. In other words, Bush's bad works in Iraq have actively harmed our preparedness for protecting American interests in North Korea.