Time was, Condoleezza Rice was admonishing the North Koreans--who were offering to dismantle their nuclear program in exchange for food aid--that the United States would not be victimized by Korean bribery.

Condi and friends are now whistling a different tune:

Seeking to persuade North Korea to abandon its threat to produce nuclear weapons, the Bush administration yesterday for the first time handed the North a detailed proposal promising an aid package and a guarantee not to attack in exchange for a commitment to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

Now, any reason the Bush Administration couldn't have offered to lift Iraq's sanctions had Saddam "in exchange" offered a "commitment to abandon its nuclear ambitions"?

Well, maybe because the Bush Administration (like the Clinton Administration before it) was well aware that Saddam had long since abandoned his nuclear (and other banned weapons) ambitions, not to mention the weapons themselves--if only because he knew that it was a fool's game to try to out-gun the Israelis and the Americans.

Given the Bush Administration's latest about-face, can there be any doubt whatsoever that the Administration had absolutely zero expectations of finding any sign of an extant banned weapons program in Iraq?

Good ol' Scottie McClellan is keeping a stiff upper-lip, anyway: "One way to look at this is to look at the Libya model. Good-faith action on North Korea's part will be met with good-faith response by the other parties."

No doubt the US will soon be making a similar "good-faith" offer to Iran--which, it was reported a few months ago, "could be unstoppably on its way to producing nuclear material for its own bombs" as soon as this summer. So if the Bush Administration can offer "good-faith" negotiations with two of the three charter members of the Axis Of Evil club, why not with the third? (Of course, it's probably now wishing it had done.)

Simple: it saw Iraq as entirely defenseless. In other words, having disarmed at least eight years prior to Bush's merry war, it had nothing of value to offer in return--save perhaps an oil concession, which the Bush Administration preferred to take outright.

Given that it was a country with a military 400 times smaller than the United States', with no weapons of mass destruction to its name, and reeling from a decade of the most punitive sanctions regime in history; stealing Iraq's oil should have been as easy as the proverbial taking of candy from an infant.

Instead, the battered, bruised, and beleaguered Iraqis have stalemated and crippled the US military. (Retired General Barry McCaffrey goes even: "The Army is accelerating downhill at the moment, and if the course isn't changed, we could damage it significantly or even break it in the next five years.")

The "good-faith" offer to Iran is thus probably a foregone conclusion. Begging the question, how soon 'til the United States makes a "good-faith" offer to bin Laden, marking the official collapse of the "War On Terror."

And, natch, how deftly will Limbaugh and McClellan be able to spin the ignominious groveling at the feet of the gooks and the towel-heads?

--Eddie Tews, Fancy-pants citations revealed at http://feedthefish.org/blog/archives/000345.html.