REAL MEN WANT BEIJING & CASTRO (via Ransom Danegeld)

The US is starting a nuclear fight that will be hard to stop: The hawks are gunning for a showdown with North Korea and Iran (Simon Tisdall, August 9, 2003, The Guardian)

John Bolton might be termed an old hand. The US under-secretary of state for arms control and international security, a Yale-educated lawyer, has held a string of senior posts in the state and justice departments. By any yardstick, he is an experienced if conservative-minded diplomat of some gravitas who, it must be assumed, knows what he is doing. But according to an official North Korean statement this week, Bolton is "human scum".

Even by Pyongyang's astringent rhetorical standards, this is strong stuff. It constituted a reply in kind to a stunningly splenetic tirade delivered by Bolton in Seoul three days earlier that amounted to a fierce, personal attack on Kim Jong-il.

North Korea's leader was a tyrannical despot and extortionist who "lives like royalty", Bolton said, while hundreds of thousands of his people were locked up and millions more endured a life of "hellish nightmare... scrounging the ground for food in abject poverty". For good measure, Bolton also attacked the UN for not facing up to its responsibilities - a familiar theme for students of the Iraq crisis.

Begging Mr. Tisdall's pardon, but what part of Mr. Bolton's statement is anti-factual? If speaking the truth is a vicious personal attack then there's something seriously wrong with the reality, isn't there? And one needn't worry about a nuclear fight, if one should come, being hard to stop--it's unlikely to last more than a matter of minutes. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 9, 2003 2:25 PM