President Bush simply does not grasp the danger North Korea and Iran pose, and he proved as much today aboard Air Force One:

Asked in a wide-ranging interview if Iran and North Korea pose bigger threats now with their nuclear programs than when he took office, Bush said, "No, I don't." But then he said, "Let me rephrase that." He said the strategy he has followed "makes them less likely to take action that would make the world more dangerous."

Bush, not surprisingly, is totally off. The threat posed by North Korea and Iran has, at the least, doubled since the Iraqi invasion. The neoconservative policymakers keep touting Iraq as the great deterrent; basically that rogue nations will not aid terrorists now since they saw the US squash the Iraqi administrative establishment. In fact, the reverse is actually the truth — the situation in Iraq only emboldens North Korea and Iran especially. The US government effectively wiped out a threat to Iran by taking out Saddam and has, more than likely, set the stage for an Iran-friendly Iraqi government to emerge. Why else would Iran suddenly begin funneling funds into Iraqi reconstruction? The Islamic consevative government of Iran, the one which has labeled America the Great Satan, knows they have a burdgeoning ally in Iraq to aid in all of their future endeavours. North Korea is not deterred by anything, since they have the bomb. They know direct military action by the United States would not be ordered lightly for it could, in a real sense, mean the ruin of Austraila and/or Japan.

Bush, in the same article, also completely contradicts his (revised) reason for going to war in Iraq.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Bush also said he'd be disappointed if the Iraqi people chose an Islamic fundamentalist government in free elections, "but democracy is democracy."

"If that's what the people choose, that's what the people choose," the president said, two weeks before facing his own re-election.

The problem is, that new democracy's government can anull democracy as soon as it takes power — we're talking the creation of a regime that does not exactly speak to liberty and freedom that's supposedly on the march. The crux of the issue is that Bush really can't do or say anything to change the outcome because this is what he's left with, in fact what he wanted. He believed, almost religiously, that the people of Iraq would welcome the US' breed of freedom and be infected with viral democracy; that's simply not how it has worked out. What is left is the very real possibility of a Shi'ite Iraq tethered to an unpredictable Iran, and there is very little George W. Bush or the United States itself can do in order to cease this tremendous shift in the Middle East's balance of power.