Does The Times Want To Invade North Korea?

The New York Times seems to think that George W. Bush is acting too much like John Kerry when it comes to North Korea.

The discovery that North Korea may have supplied uranium to Libya poses an immediate challenge to the White House: while President Bush is preoccupied on the other side of the world, an economically desperate nation may be engaging in exactly the kind of nuclear proliferation that the president says he went to war in Iraq to halt.

Yet to listen to many in the White House, concern about North Korea's nuclear program brings little of the urgency that surrounded the decision 14 months ago to oust Saddam Hussein. When Mr. Bush has been asked about North Korea in recent months, he has emphasized his patience. He does not refer to the intelligence estimates that North Korea has at least two nuclear weapons, or to the debate within the American intelligence community about whether North Korea has spent the past 18 months building more.

Instead, he lauds the progress he says the United States has made in organizing China, Russia, Japan and South Korea to negotiate as one with the North Koreans - though those talks have resulted in no progress so far in ending either of North Korea's two major nuclear programs.