An old post on North Korea:

I've put a lot of thought into this whole North Korea situation, and I've got the solution. I haven't changed my mind on removing our troops from South Korea. But for those who argue that this would be a destabilizing disengagement from the region, we replace those troops with something else.

We send 37,000 environmentalists to North Korea. This is a plan with so many wins and positive side effects that it is an absolute no brainer. UN inspections are notoriously incapable of stopping nuclear weapons development programs. Under the UN inspection regime, Pakistan and North Korea have become nuclear powers, and Iraq pretty darn close - twice. But in the United States, environmentalists have been totally effective at shutting down development of new nuclear power plants (we haven't put a new reactor on-line in over a dozen years), as well as shut down all US plutonium processing for at least a decade. They have a real track record of success.

Additionally, we could significantly reduce the number of tree sitters and trashcan-through-the-window-of-Starbucks throwers during the World Bank meetings. And these guys will get a true taste of living in a Stalinist hellhole Worker's Paradise. This could be a real Kumbayah Brigade, and be a "national service" project for the youth. And if they don't get 37,000 volunteers, Charlie Rangel could draft the graduating classes of UC Berkeley and Stanford and move on through the Ivies until the Brigade is fully rounded out. Then we'd for sure have some rich kids with some skin in the game.

What's not to like?

UPDATE: This post over at Cold Fury points out another positive side effect - the North Koreans can be reminded that all that fuel oil they want supports terrorism, so they can just drop that demand too!

No reason why this won't work for Iran, too. Get them working on a hydrogen economy!

I thought that Saddam was all cool and stuff. Iraqi intelligence guys involved in terrorism?

According to the Washington Post, there are military people blogging from Iraq!

Jim Geraghty at TKS is declaring the Able Danger story "huge." It is an interesting point - but I doubt it will be huge. (In case you've never heard of Able Danger, it is reported that US Special Forces did some data mining in 1999 or 2000 and developed information that there was an Al Qaeda cell in the US, and that Mohammed Atta - by name - was in that cell.).

I doubt it will be huge. First, it cannot be used as a club against President Bush, since it did not happen during his Presidency, but rather some other Presidency. And though it might look like a big "I told you so," on the whole "wall" of separation between intel and law enforcement, I don't see that there is any satisfaction to be gained. If 9/11 hadn't happened, and the story came out that the US military was doing domestic spying, the cries for someone to be jailed - probably military - would be deafening. Even after 9/11, datamining of public sources by the Defense Department to identify terrorists was ridiculed out of existence.

I have to say that even I am not entirely comfortable with the idea of the US military doing domestic spying. I am not going to go all EFF here, but I'll just say that there are plenty of good reasons why it shouldn't be done, even if it does identify Mohammed Atta beforehand.

At the same time, I think that terrorists are identifiable through open sources, and that law enforcement folks - not military - should do it here in the US. And even then, Able Danger isn't going to convince people that it should happen. There have been plenty of people who have used open sources to identify terror cells in the US. Steven Emerson has been tracing these folks in the US since 1992 - it isn't like NPR turned to embrace him. He had identified Sami al-Arian by name - but it took years, and Bill O'Reilly's exposure of the story, to get him off of the public payrollin Florida.

This story is not huge - it happened the way we wanted it to happen. We don't want the military spying in the US, we don't want to identify terrorists through open sources.

Remember in the mid-90's, all those "patriot groups," the Michigan Militias, the Freemen, etc.? Now, do you remember anyone going on TV then to say "dissent is the most patriotic thing you can do," then?

I am not trying to say that those guys were cool, or anything, just wondering if there were newspaper editorials praising them for standing up to the administration.