On the folly of “consistency” in dealing with enemies

I like a good argument, whatever its source. Here is David Frum responding to the complaint that we’re treating Iraq and North Korea “inconsistently” and by a “double standard” when we threaten war on the former but not the latter:

One reason we treat North Korea and Iraq differently is that North Korea has already acquired nuclear weapons while Iraq can still be prevented. It’s hard to imagine a better justification for differential treatment than that.

Back in 1994, of course, there was an opportunity to prevent North Korea from getting nukes. Weapons production was concentrated in one place, easily reachable by U.S. air power. President Clinton now tells us that he came this close to ordering decisive military action against the North Korean reactor—just as also came this close to taking decisive action against Saddam Hussein and this close to doing something about Osama bin Laden. Unfortunately, what with one thing or another, he just never quite managed to get around to it.

So here we are, in 2003, being challenged by some veterans of Clinton’s administration—and some Bush critics in the media—to be “consistent” in our policy. If we credulously trusted North Korea’s lies back in 1994, we must now (as a matter of simple fairness!) credulously trust Iraq’s lies in 2003. If international inspectors failed miserably in North Korea, they must now be given their full opportunity to fail miserably in Iraq as well. Instead of learning from the mistakes of the past, Bush’s critics say, we must repeat them, as if the supreme accolade for a nation’s foreign policy were to be able say, “it is consistent”—even if that means being consistently stupid.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 15, 2003 12:00 PM | Send