Bomb Kim Now

We should surely invade North Korea without delay. It possesses the power to detonate a nuclear device but hasn’t yet developed a delivery system. The world surely cannot allow a ruthless dictator, with expansionist ambitions and little concern for the welfare of his people, to hold the world to nuclear ransom. Like a madman with an automatic weapon, he needs to be taken out.

No, I haven’t turned into a Republican warmonger, and I don’t advocate a nuclear strike on Pyongyang. However, I ask you to consider for a moment why you have not heard anyone in the Pentagon advocate such a course of action in the last forty eight hours. The silence speaks volumes.

For if ever there were a case for a pre-emptive strike it should surely be now. After all, we invaded Iraq to deprive a deadly dictator the means to launch nuclear warfare against regional states. Okay, he didn’t actually have any weapons of mass destruction - but there’s no such intelligence difficulty here. You don’t need Hans Blix to confirm that North Korea has WMD in an advanced state of readiness.

The whole point of the Bush/Blair doctrine was supposedly to deprive rogues states of the ability to develop a nuclear capability. This is how the National Security Strategy of the United States put it in 2002: “Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction. The United States will not allow these efforts to success” continued this classic statement of the Bush doctrine, “And as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed”

‘Before they are fully formed’. Well, if that is still what Bush thinks then surely the marines should be preparing to kick some serious Korean butt, because Kim Jong Il has already developed a missile - the Taepodong 1 - capable of hitting targets two thousand kilometres away - he just lacks the means to squeeze a nuke into the warhead.

There is a window of opportunity. Kim heads feeble and paranoid administration with no regional support - even the Chinese have disowned him. East Asia desperately wants him gone. So come on guys - stop fiddling around with sanctions and UN resolutions like some wussy Frenchmen before Baghdad, and put your money where your mouth is. God Bless America!

But of course, this is one butt they can’t kick. For all the big talk after 2001, America and the west has been forced to sit by and watch while the most repellent and unstable dictator on the planet, a murderous megalomaniac who lets his people eat grass while he spends the national product on weapons of mass destruction. , becomes a member of the nuclear club, Tony Blair insists that there is no military option under consideration. The very idea. We only threaten non-nuclear rogue states.