The other two legs of the Axis of Evil eagerly await the results of the impending nuclear-capable, intercontinental ballistic missile test.

Watch it unfold, and ask yourself. Will the same sniggering critiques that thought President Bush some wild eyed, Strangelovian cowboy, acknowledge how precisely President Bush identified the threats we face, back in 2003?

It might have been Saddam, too, eagerly watching that test, waiting to get into serious negotiations to get him some. But we took care of that threat, didn’t we?

And now the world seems only too eager  to have the US take on the other two psychopathic regimes who consider terrorism a legitimate form of international behavior as official foreign policy. And would likely consider nuclear terrorism (or at least extortion) all the more desirable and effective?

I posted yesterday about the remarkable subtext of the European Union (EU) meeting in Vienna tangentially (and only temporarily) reported by the AP.

Today we have David Warren from the Ottawa Citizen (posted at Real Clear Politics) saying North Korea is threatening “An Act of War, Not a Test,” for that is what the North Koreans provoke:

By any standard of international law, the launch will be an act of war. The Americans, or anyone else with anti-missile capabilities, would thus be entirely within their rights to shoot it down. Nor would it be provocative to do so. The provocation consists in sending up the missile in the first place. (Though alas, a mind addled by "liberalism" will refuse such a logical distinction.)

The question whether it would be prudent to shoot it down -- or even obliterate the launch facility before the launch can happen -- is another matter. It is a question without a reasonable answer, because the Western intelligence agencies upon which we depend for accurate information about North Korean capabilities are utterly incompetent, and morally confused about whose interests they serve. (Look at what the CIA has been revealing about itself, recently, for confirmation of this dire view.)

Let that sink in: a question without a reasonable answer. Warren hits the nail on the head. Precisely because Western Intelligence agencies and analysts have been cowed into questioning all manner of pre-Iraqi-war assessments, because our CIA has elevated political, bureaucratic aims over intelligence (but in a way contrary to what war opponents think), they stand motionless now. We have so often underestimated the aims and capabilities of our enemies, and misjudged those who posture as friends but want those enemies to achieve great things against us.

Our Intelligence services display this inability and perhaps unwillingness to “connect the dots” for no target more than North Korea, where decades of misbegotten diplomacy have lead us straightaway to these dire straights. Call it another peace dividend resulting from the collapse of the old Soviet Union and our strenuous efforts to make friends with the Russians. With eyes wide open we decided not to see the evidence of all those proxy wars fought against us, in few places more heatedly than through willing Pyongyang.

Two Clinton era appointees, Assistant Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter and Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, wrote an editorial today in the Washington Post. Carter and Perry argue that we should act with force:

Therefore, if North Korea persists in its launch preparations, the United States should immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy the North Korean Taepodong missile before it can be launched.

While arguing for force, Carter and Perry nevertheless couch their argument in willfully self-exonerating and Bush-bashing arguments:

Creative diplomacy might have avoided the need to choose between these two unattractive alternatives. Indeed, in earlier years the two of us were directly involved in negotiations with North Korea, coupled with military planning, to prevent just such an outcome. We believe diplomacy might have precluded the current situation.

As I recall recent history, the US continuously tried to meet the North Koreans more than halfway, and the North Koreans repeatedly have been proven to be deceitful, taking every opportunity to advance their nuclear ambitions under cloak of thoroughly negotiations that are thoroughly cuckolded by North Korean violations of every aspect of those agreements. All while diverting food aid to military purposes and keeping their people in starvation, to boot.

Still, however much they misrepresent what brought us to this critical moment, Carter and Perry correctly identify what the US needs to do, as demanded by the situation. And the consequences if we don’t:

But diplomacy has failed, and we cannot sit by and let this deadly threat mature. A successful Taepodong launch, unopposed by the United States, its intended victim, would only embolden North Korea even further. The result would be more nuclear warheads atop more and more missiles.