UN Sanctions: Bush's Election-Eve Conversion

Huffington Post
Craig Crawford
UN Sanctions: Bush's Election-Eve Conversion

You almost have to laugh at President Bush touting United Nations sanctions against North Korea as "swift and tough," considering how he once derided similar sanctions against Iraq as ineffective (when arguing for an invasion). Now that his own team is behind a nearly identical UN move against North Korea, suddenly he is on board with this approach?

There are just as many loopholes in the North Korean sanctions as there were in those against Iraq. And it was Saddam Hussein's exploitation of those loopholes that Bush often cited as the reason why he saw no purpose in a sanctions-based policy against the bad guys. The difference now is that White House political strategists want to look tough in the final weeks of an election campaign, even though they would be ridiculing these measures as wimpy diplomacy if Democrats had proposed them. How ironic that the UN Security Council, which Bush once mocked as nothing but a "debating club," is now his cover for looking like he is doing something meaningful.