Hawaii Is Panicked

I listened to George Stephanopoulos’s interview of Tulsi Gabbard, one of Hawaii’s two Congressional representatives, on ABC’s This Week this morning and several thoughts occurred to me. First, her notion that the U. S.’s pursuit of regime change explains North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons doesn’t hold water for the simple reason that it predates that policy. At most it’s a contributing factor.

I’m also skeptical of her proposed immediate, one-on-one, negotiation without preconditions with North Korea. I don’t think there’s anything we could offer the North that would assuage it and the most it would accomplish is to dignify a rogue regime that’s been abusing its own people for more than a half century, developing nuclear weapons overtly and covertly, counterfeiting our currency, dealing in drugs, and engaging in ransomware attacks around the world but, shucks, it’s worth a try, isn’t it?

Second, George Stephanopoulos did his level best to deflect criticism from two Democratic administrations (the Clinton Administration and the Obama Administration) for North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons but the obvious reality is that it’s an American problem not a partisan one. North Korea’s nuclear weapons development program began as early as the 1950s and has continued its work during Republican administrations and Democratic ones.

He also, puzzlingly, avoided mentioning the Obama Administration’s policy of regime change in Syria in his litany of that particular version of American adventurism. It seems to me that the Obama Administration wanted regime change in Syria but it didn’t want to leave American fingerprints on the deed or commit the U. S. to a lengthy military campaign in Syria is beyond question.

Finally, if Rep. Gabbard’s remarks are any gauge, Hawaiians are panicked over the prospect of being attacked by North Korea. Over the weekend the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency contributed to the dis-ease by sending out an alert that there was a ballistic missile inbound to Hawaii and then delaying 38 minutes before countering the report. If there is a better example of Robert Conquests’s third law of politics (“The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies”), I don’t know what it might be. They succeeded in increasing the level of panic and undermining their own civil defense in one fat-fingered key press. Job well done.