October 9, 2006 - North Korea has successfully conducted a test of a nuclear devise joining the exclusive nuclear club. This triumph of the Bush Administration foreign policy follows on the heels of the spectacular cleansing of Iraq of its massive storehouse of weapons of mass destruction. That one achievement has accomplished that which Denis Hastert and the Republican Congressional leadership has been unable to do – knock Mark Foley off the page.

Nearly 150,000 allied troops led by the American commander and an almost equal number of newly trained Iraqi army troops have been making steady progress in creating a stable, peaceful, and democratic Iraq with an implicit admonition to the American people to “stay the course”. At least that is the view espoused last week by Condolezza Rice during her surprise visit to Baghdad. Senator John Warner (R-VA), chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee does not share that view. On his return from a fact finding expedition to Iraq in the company of Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) has seen things differently. If things do not improve within a short two months Senator Warner calls upon the Bush Administration to review the situation and revise its police toward Iraq. Former Secretary of State James Baker III, who headed the Bush legal team in the Florida re-count controversy, is calling for a revision of the Administration’s policy and calls for a tri-partite partition of Iraq into Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite States.

In Afghanistan the newly installed NATO commander is warning of increasing Afghani support for a resurgent Taliban insurgency against the faltering government installed by the Americans in Kabul. Even as the pace of insurgent attacks is stepped up in Iraq and the death toll in that conflict soars Taliban forces are adopting the suicide bomber techniques that have been employed so effectively in the Iraqi war. In these two conflicts the issue is in doubt even as the US military is stretched so thing as to render the United States a toothless tiger as it faces down a nuclear North Korea and emerging Nuclear Iran.

In his reaction this morning to the Korean nuclear test President Bush told us that he was going to emphasis diplomacy in this crisis. Bush league diplomacy has been at best ineffective to prevent North Korea’s joining the nuclear club – at worst it has been wholly absent from the field. For almost six years Bush has refused to talk to Pyongyang after scuttling the tenuous agreement that had been hammered out with the North Koreans. When the nuclear devise detonated deep in the North Korean earth we say the fruits of the Bush foreign policy that exalted bullying and the pursuit of imaginary threats to a high art form. That has been the nuclear yield of the Bush policies.