Carter and Perry: Preemptively Strike the North Korean Missile
You know it’s time to strike North Korea when even former Clinton officials are saying do it. In a piece written in the Washington Post, Ashton Carter and William Perry advocate:
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. This could be accomplished, for example, by a cruise missile launched from a submarine carrying a high-explosive warhead.
The six party talks are a joke. Sorry President Bush, but it’s time to admit a policy failure. Yes the surrounding nations have a stake in what the North Koreans are doing, but when the North Korean Hitler decides he’s going to build nukes and now an intercontinental ballistic missile to carry them, unilateral action must be taken.
In fact, President Bush must act immediately to defend and protect the United States.
The concluding paragraph to the article sums this up nicely:
This is a hard measure for President Bush to take. It undoubtedly carries risk. But the risk of continuing inaction in the face of North Korea’s race to threaten this country would be greater. 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. 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.
Bush called it right when he gave the “Axis of Evil” speech. It’s time Bush stopped being a Liberal on North Korea.
