[nuke][doug]I am not normally very critical of the US government, especially having traveled a little and seeing what life in other countries is like. However, the official reactions to the pardon of Dr. AQ Khan have me completely flabbergasted.
For the record, these faults existed long before the Bush administration—in fact, there have been few times in US history when a clear foreign policy was applied consistently. Let me make a few points to illustrate why we desperately need a consistent foreign policy:
- We know that Saddam Hussein was completely evil. If he did not succeed in building weapons of mass destruction, he certainly wanted to. He is by many estimates responsible for the death of 3 million people in the past two decades. Getting rid of him was a good thing, even if some of our intelligence was bad, and the road ahead for Iraq is not going to be an easy one. But, if we apply the “threat to us, threat to others†rules to other countries, we have to overthrow the governments of North Korea (threatens Japan and South Korea; may have the capability to hit us with Nukes), Pakistan (threatens India; created a global black market for nuclear technology), and China (threatens Taiwan; helped distribute nuclear weapons technology; directly aided Communist Korea and Viet Naam in the past).
- What about the “evil dictator†rule?If we follow this, we need to eliminate Fidel Castro in our own back yard, the Saudi royal family, several African leaders, the current rulers in Haiti after the coup, etc.
So, why are we making a deal with the devil (despite claims to the contrary) in Pakistan? I will have to get back to this later.