Never again? How the war in Iraq spurred a new nuclear arms race

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article303776.ece

As the world prepares to mark the anniversary of Hiroshima, Iran is poised to go nuclear amid a new global arms race

For the Bush administration, openly hostile to a UN solution, the answer has been talk or bomb: negotiate with states that already have a weapon (such as North Korea), or to take preemptive strikes against those that do not (such as Iraq). US officials say acting outside the treaty has produced results: it brought Libya back into the fold in 2003, when Colonel Muammar Gaddafi decided to scrap his weapons of mass destruction.

Yet this approach contains the risk of opening the path to nuclear blackmail, which is how North Korea has coaxed the West into compensating the hermit state in return for concessions on its nuclear programme.

As with Iran, negotiations have stalled on the North Korean insistence that it has the right to a civilian programme, if it renounces nuclear weapons.

Iran, an NPT member which insists on its treaty right to pursue nuclear power, has been infuriated by US co-operation with India, a non-member of the NPT, which blasted its way into the nuclear "club" in tit-for-tat tests with Pakistan in 1998.

[Inland]

1. The lesson of Iraq is, nothing but actually having WMD deters invasion.

The US said, "prove you don't have WMD and we won't invade". Iraq did, and we still invaded.

North Korea not only boasts having nukes but threatens us with them, and our intel services agree. They aren't invaded. Instead, the US comes to the negotiating table through the agency of the OTHER nuke power in the area.

So the lesson of the story is, no amount of conciliation, no amount of backing down, no amount of actual weakness will prevent an American president from invading your country. Heck, even the likelihood of a tweny year occupation won't stop it.

Proving you don't have WMD proves that you are weak and available.

Proving you have WMD gets food and oil.

Of course there will be a new arms race.

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2. Pakistan got free F-16's from Bush after becoming a rogue nuclear state

Can't argue with that strategy.

Don