"More pressure [from the US] against Iran will accelerate the nuclear project of the country," says Saeed Laylaz, a political and security analyst in Tehran who says that American actions will determine Iran's strategic choices.

"Because the regime is convinced that the US wants to [change the regime], they believe they have a temporary opportunity to protect themselves [using] a nuclear program as a shield," says Mr. Laylaz. "If the US can convince [Iran] they are not going to collapse the regime ... then they will be ready to cooperate much better and more constructively than now."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday the United States would not attack North Korea, rejecting a suggestion that Pyongyang may feel it needs nuclear weapons to stave off an Iraq-style US invasion. President George W. Bush, Rice said, has told the "the North Koreans that there is no intention to invade or attack them. So they have that guarantee. ... I don't know what more they want."

Rice told CNN television that Bush "never takes any of his options off the table. But is the United States, somehow, in a provocative way, trying to invade North Korea? It's just not the case."

Asked whether North Korean leader Kim Jong Il may have felt that he needed to stage an apparent nuclear test this week to prevent an invasion similar to the US-led attack on Saddam Hussein, Rice said Iraq "was a very special situation."

"Iraq was a desire to finally deal with a threat that had been there for too long," she said.

The U.S. is already reducing its troop levels on the Korean peninsula; it should accelerate the process and move rapidly toward ending its military presence. Moreover, it should negotiate a peace treaty with North Korea. This will remove Pyongyang's motive to attack U.S. interests, ensure that China could never again attack U.S. forces in a ground war and allow the U.S. to concentrate instead on maintaining its overwhelming lead over China in naval and air power.

We must be very clear, however, that this withdrawal would also mean ceding to China the dominant role in containing North Korea's nuclear ambitions - along with Japan, South Korea and Russia - and in managing the eventual collapse of the North Korean state and the appallingly difficult and expensive process of the reunification of the two Koreas. ...

North Korea must be treated as a regional problem to be managed by a regional concert of powers, with China in the lead. The U.S. role in all this should be sympathetic - and distant.

While Bush may have intended the Iraq War to be an object lesson about the futility of defying his will, some American adversaries learned something else – that disarmament and cooperation with the U.N. are for suckers.

After all, Hussein had complied with U.N. demands for eliminating his stockpiles of unconventional weapons and had forsaken active development of nuclear weapons. He even agreed to unfettered U.N. inspections.

Hussein’s reward was to see his two sons killed, his country ravaged, and the almost certain end of his own life coming as he dangles from the end of a rope, rather than his request that he die before a firing squad.

The 1994 crisis came about because the North Koreans were producing weapons-grade plutonium. Under the Agreed Framework, they agreed to shutter the plutonium production facility and put the already produced plutonium under international oversight.

In return, the US promised aide, help building lightwater reactors (which don't help with bombs) and diplomatic normalization.

That agreement kept the plutonium operation on ice until the end of 2002.

President Bush came to office wanting to pull out of the agreement and did so when evidence surfaced suggesting that the North Koreans were secretly trying to enrich uranium (a separate path to the bomb).

The bomb that went off yesterday was made with plutonium, the same stuff that was off-limits from 1994-2002. In all likelihood some of the same stuff that was on ice from 1994-2002.

To the best of my knowledge, no one thinks the North Koreans are close to having enough uranium to make a nuclear weapon that way. And it's not even completely clear they were ever trying to enrich uranium.

So Clinton strikes a deal to keep plutonium out of the North Koreans' hands. The deal keeps the plutonium out of reach for the last six years of Clinton's term and the first two of Bush's. Bush pulls out of the deal. Four years later a plutonium bomb explodes. (my emphasis)

In 1994, the government - our government - entered into a bilateral arrangement with the North Koreans that worked to make sure that they don't have the capacity to develop a bomb, and North Korea agreed that there would be no program whatsoever toward the development of a weapon. And yet, we came into office and discovered that they were developing a program, unbeknownst to the folks with whom they signed the agreement, the United States government. And we confronted them with that evidence and they admitted it was true, and then left the agreement that they had signed with the U.S. government.