"swimming" in oil

[Terrance]

pynchonoid wrote:

more spam and propaganda. 

Q:  What I meant is that essentially North Korea is being taken more
seriously because it has become a nuclear power by its own admission,
whether or not that’s true, and that the lesson that people will have is
that in the case of Iraq it became imperative to confront Iraq
militarily because it had banned weapons systems and posed a danger to
the region.  In the case of North Korea, which has nuclear weapons as
well as other banned weapons of mass destruction, apparently it is
imperative not to confront, to persuade and to essentially maintain a
regime that is just as appalling as the Iraqi regime in place, for the
sake of the stability of the region.  To other countries of the world
this is a very mixed message to be sending out.

           
               Wolfowitz:  The concern about implosion is not primarily
at all a matter of the weapons that North Korea has, but a fear
particularly by South Korea and also to some extent China of what the
larger implications are for them of having 20 million people on their
borders in a state of potential collapse and anarchy.  It’s is also a
question of whether, if one wants to persuade the regime to change,
whether you have to find -- and I think you do -- some kind of outcome
that is acceptable to them.  But that outcome has to be acceptable to
us, and it has to include meeting our non-proliferation goals.
           
      Look, the primarily difference -- to put it a little too simply --
between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic
options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil.  In the
case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic
collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the
military picture with North Korea is very different from that with
Iraq.  The problems in both cases have some similarities but the
solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances which are very
different.