Before the original Iraq War, Democrats backed the drive to prevent the awful Saddam regime from continuing on and possibly getting weapons of mass destruction.
When the going got tough, Democrats retroactively opposed the war and said that preemptive action is only justified when the threat is "imminent" because the state in question is on the cusp of having weapons like nukes and we can prove it.
North Korea has made an interesting threat:
North Korea’s deputy U.N. ambassador warned Monday that the situation on the Korean peninsula “has reached the touch-and-go point and a nuclear war may break out any moment.”
So North Korea is claiming to have nuclear weapons. Which would mean that we missed that whole period of time when all Americans could join together in harmony to stop a threat.
Actually, I suspect that the North Koreans are still bluffing and don't yet have long-range nuclear missiles, or even any missiles so armed. Perhaps they have bombs that their ancient air force could drop if not shot down.
But North Korea won't have to bluff for much longer.
Just as Saddam bluffed having chemical weapons, hoping that would deter an attack on him until he could escape Western scrutiny by weakening sanctions to be free to pursue such weapons.
Which is what Iran may have achieved by escaping scrutiny with inspections limited in scope and duration under the farcical 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
And as Syria escaped serious consequences for using chemical weapons with that farcical 2013 chemical weapons deal that banned an arsenal they had previously denied having but which didn't actually prevent Assad from launching more chemical weapon strikes.
Or did we miss that bi-partisan window because as I long argued, we can never have intelligence information with enough precision to convince the Left that an enemy is about to become very dangerous?
Is the lesson from [the intelligence failure on Iraq's WMD] that we shouldn't do anything when we think an odious regime is pursuing nuclear or other unconventional weapons? Are we still on that silly "imminent" standard where we have to have a clear picture of somebody turning a wrench on an obvious bomb and then we bomb the offending threat as they fuel up the missiles? Is our solution going to be strengthening our ability to make a prosecutor's case against the offending regime?
Look, it is easy for a sovereign nation to hide its activities and keep the evidence ambiguous enough to prevent a clear picture from emerging until it is too late to do anything about the offending nation going nuclear. Even with inspectors crawling over Iraq and intelligence agencies from around the world looking at Iraq, we never knew that there were no chemical weapons in firing condition as the Coalition went into Iraq.
Our only option is to forget about trying to establish clear proof of nuclear guilt and focus on the regimes. Your country is a collection of nutballs that make aggressive statements and you appear to be pursuing nuclear technology, missiles, and other weapons? Then your regime should be history and we will work for that result. We won't take the chance that you will get something that makes your threats real.
So what is it, America's Left? Are we in that sweet spot of glorious consensus when even your side says a preemptive strike is justified?
Or, darn the luck, did we miss it and you are just relieved that the duty to cope with North Korea falls on Trump rather than Obama?
