President Ursus

Ursus: The only thing that counts in the end is POWER! Naked merciless FORCE!

Glenn Greenwald has some horrifying-at least in their implications-observations about the North Korean nuclear test.

Our credibility to act in the world -- both diplomatically and militarily -- has to be close to, if not at, an all-time low. We are already fighting two wars (in Iraq and Afghanistan) which, by all accounts, have significantly depleted our military resources. And we have been overtly threatening -- and flirting with a passing of the point of no return -- to fight a war against a third country (Iran). We plainly don't have enough troops to devote to our current wars in order to win them, let alone start new ones. And we have close to 40,000 American troops on the border between North and South Korea who are veritable hostages in any military confrontation.

Time and again, the President has demonstrated that he is capable of seeing a complex world only in the simplest Manichean terms. Someone is either Good or they are Evil. And if they are Evil, it means you cannot deal with them or negotiate with them or rely upon diplomacy. By definition, Evil understands nothing but force and threats of force. The only thing that works with Evil is to crush it, not to manage or compromise and negotiate with it.

What do I think?

I think Bush is the gorilla general, we're the human civilization that killed the baby chimp more than decades ago and North Korea is the cult that worships the bomb.

So as you can see I'm quite optimistic about how all this is going to turn out.