Marvin:
So this week saw the administration from Dick Cheney on down distancing itself from a proposal by former Clinton defence officials William Perry and Ashton Carter that the US threaten to destroy the North Korean Taepodong 2 missile on its launching pad before its test firing.
Actually, the real motivation would seem to be that the threat would be empty since the US anti-ballistic missile defenses *do not work* according to just about everybody on the McLaughlin Report this morning, including the rightwingers. If the Korean missile was not shot down, the USA would look even more weak. This was a risk that they could not take in light of all the other problems Marvin and the Sanger article took note of.
