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Capabilities

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North Korean ballistic missiles armed with nuclear weapons are terrifying things, no doubt. The possibility of their existence makes me just a bit happier to be moving to Lexington, where I only need worry about Russian, British, and French ballistic missiles.

However, I can’t give our Dear Leader a pass on this one:

At a White House news conference on Thursday, President Bush said that given the uncertainties, he was worried about the progress North Korea had made on its nuclear program under its leader, Kim Jong Il. “There is concern about his capacity to deliver,” he said. “We don’t know if he can or not, but I think it’s best when dealing with a tyrant like Kim Jong Il to assume that he can.”

That sounds reasonable, and we almost don’t notice that we’ve been bait-and-switched. What the President is doing, ladies and gentlemen, is deriving capabilities from intentions. Instead of referring to any actual intelligence, he derives from the expected intentions of Kim Jong Il the capabilities that North Korea has at its disposal. Again, this sounds almost reasonable until we remember that assessing intentions is actually much, much more difficult than assessing capabilities, and that trying to derive the latter from the former is an exercise in futility.

Because the Soviet Union hates freedom and wants to destroy us, it must be spending three times as much on defense as any evidence we have suggests. Because Saddam Hussein hates freedom and wants to destroy us, he must be hiding the stockpiles of WMD that we can’t find. Because Hugo Chavez hates freedom and wants to destroy us, he must be assembling a vast army to assail us.

Works every time. Try it at home!

In other news, I must apologize for the relative paucity of posts over the last week; life intrudes. Likely no posts this weekend, either.

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