Israel Matzav

Steyn on the North Korean nuclear test and what it means for Iran

If Mark Steyn ever goes into comedy, I'd nominate Caroline Glick to be his straight man (in addition to his citation to her below, he also refers to the North Korean test as being a way to prove to clients that it works - Glick has made the same argument). Here's part of Steyn's Monday column in the Washington Times on the implications of North Korea's nuclear test.

In the ever-more-pitiful straw-clutching of the State Department, America is said to be banking on a post-Kim era. He apparently has had a bad stroke and might be dead within a decade or three. So what? It's a safe bet that whoever emerges from a power struggle between the family, the party and the military is committed to nuclearization as the principal rationale of the state.

Likewise, in Iran's imminent election, both "extremists" and "moderates" are pro-nuke. You want an Iranian moderate? Here's Hashemi Rafsanjani, the moderate who lost to crazy Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the last time: He called Israel "the most hideous occurrence in history," which the Muslim world "will vomit out from its midst" with "a single atomic bomb." Nuking the "Zionist entity" is as bipartisan as motherhood and apple pie.

More to the point, the feeble bleatings from the State Department that there may be internal change down the road emphasize the central feature of the present scene - the absence of meaningful American power. While America laughed at North Korea, Iran used it as a stalking horse, a useful guide as to the parameters of belligerence and quiescence within which a nuclearizing rogue state could operate.

In what Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post calls "the post-American world," other nations will follow that model. We are building a world in which the wealthiest nations on the planet, from Norway to New Zealand, are all but defenseless, while bankrupt dysfunctional squats go nuclear.

Even with inevitable and generous submissions to nuclear blackmail, how long do you think that arrangement will last? In the formulation of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, we are on the brink of "man-caused disaster."

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:56 PM