Time Magazine Slips Further Into Appeasement Mode

(Only hours after this was written, the North Korean dictatorship announced it had conducted an underground nuclear test, and the U.S. said it had detected a seismic event in North Korea. This, I believe, represents a terrible failure of will by the Bush Administration. North Korean nuclear facilities should have been attacked last week, and should be attacked now, without delay. Certainly, going to the United Nations will be a waste of time).

Time magazine has, in recent months, slipped further into views reminiscent of the British appeasement advocates of the 1930s. It reaches a new low this week when it suggests, initially on its Web site, but perhaps in the forthcoming week in the magazine itself, that the U.S. enter into bilateral talks with the North Koreans.

Such a policy would make America susceptible to North Korean extortion. There would be no end to what this tyranny would ask us to do to get it to promise to end its quest for nuclear arms and its sales of such technologies to others. And then, as in the past, when the Clinton Administration made concessions, it would violate any pledges it had made and go right ahead with its nuclear development. In other words, talking with the North Koreans would be self-defeating.

What Time and its dilettante editors seem to want more and more is that we give in to the exponents of violence all around the Earth, in hopes they can be dissuaded from their designs on America, Japan and Western European countries. They are wrong, I believe. Psychopaths only gain determination to continue their mayhem when people give in to them.

Time is preaching folly of the worst sort. Unless we resist the Kim Il Jongs and the Mahmound Ahmedinejads of the present world, they are more and more going to dominate the Earth. They will not be dissuaded by appeasement from pursuing their evil agendas, and we, by entering into talks with them, can only lose, possibly everything.

Time casts it this week as recognizing reality, and sees a choice between that and, in the North Korean case at least, regime change.

Rather than give in on our values I favor regime change, but not necessarily by injecting the U.S. military into another long, stalemated war, as in Iraq. Means such as selective bombing, or timely assassinations of tyrants, might prove more effective. We might be able to enable the North Korean people, on their own, to rid themselves of the dictator.

If North Korea entices the U.S. into direct talks, through threatening a nuclear test or actually staging one, it will only be the first sip of a bitter cup it shall offer us time and again in the years ahead. We cannot afford to let that happen. This regime must be given a shove, and warned very clearly that any North Korean attack on South Korea, Japan or us will be met with a full nuclear response, and the resulting end of North Korea.

It's a difficult time for the Bush Administration, and the Mid-Term elections may make only it more difficult. Still, the consequences of giving in to North Korea, or Iran for that matter, are too awful to contemplate.

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Michael Kinsley, stung bitterly by his ouster as the incredibly ditsy editor of the Los Angeles Times editorial pages, seems to have gone off the deep end in his resentment at the paper and of Jeffrey Johnson, the publisher who wisely dispensed with his services.

Kinsley, who is now writing for the Left wing Guardian paper in England, Time magazine and elsewhere, this morning, in space he was foolishly given in the L.A. Times Current section, envisions folding the L.A. Times into a "National Tribune" paper that would somehow join the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times into a new national publication. This almost certainly will never be.

But I do agree with Kinsley, in his latest article, when he says the L.A. Times Web site is the worst of any major newspaper these days. One reason, of course, is that the Tribune Co. refuses to allow it to make any investments into a better product.