Andrew Sullivan's take on the ongoing crisis with North Korea is succinct and on the mark:

But the dumbest argument, parlayed throughout the media, especially abroad, is that the North Korean crisis somehow displays an inconsistency in the Bush foreign policy. Shouldn't we be threatening North Korea with war rather than Iraq, they ask? Er, no. The reason we're about to go to war with Saddam is precisely to avoid the possibility of Saddam becoming Kim Jong Il. Once Saddam gets a nuke for sure, we're completely screwed. We'd have to allow him to bask in the glory of being the only Arab leader with this capacity, using his impregnable territory to foment terrorism, more weapons of mass destruction, and the like.

Exactly.

Every time I hear an anti-war "argument" centered around our supposed inconsistency with regard to North Korea and Iraq, I wonder exactly what they're implying.

Is saying that North Korea is more of a threat:

1) An argument for not pressuring Iraq militarily?

or

2) An argument for going to war with North Korea?

Or perhaps it's not really an argument at all. Hmm...

As Sullivan has pointed out, yet again, the crucial difference in the situation is the fact that North Korea already has nukes. They also have pretty sophisticated missile technology, enabling them to easily launch a devastating nuclear attack on either South Korea or Japan, who are both our allies. This makes the situation a lot more complicated, and a lot uglier.

The point is, do we want to potentially be in the same position with Iraq, with Saddam Hussein armed with nuclear weapons, able to nuke Turkey or Saudi Arabia or Jordan. Protestors protest that he'd never do such a thing. But see, there is a strong likelihood that Hussein would threaten doing such a thing, thinking, probably rightly, that we would never risk pre-emptively nuking a region of the world that contains such a valuable commodity, that it would be better to trade oil with a madman than to render those supplies unusable, while killing millions.

Now I don't know exactly what Hussein would do with nuclear weapons, but the point is, I don't want to find out. Virtually every anti-war proponent I've talked to seems to want to impart the most innocent, feel-good motives on the part of Saddam, as if he'd never use such weapons for nuclear extortion (not nuclear blackmail, as pointed out by Matthew Yglesias), all the while admitting what a horrible person he is. Something doesn't match up here. Why in the hell would you be willing to give the benefit of the doubt to someone with a track record as a torturing, genocidal thug?

So that's the deal. We need to stop Iraq now before it becomes another North Korea.