Interesting OpEd in MSNBC speculating about whether Bush & Co. are playing "Nuclear Poker" with the North Koreans.

The Bush administration is becoming either outrageously dimwitted or audaciously clever in its policy toward North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. According to today’s New York Times and Wall Street Journal, the White House has decided to shift gears on the subject. No longer will it try to deter Pyongyang’s dictator, Kim Jong-il, from reprocessing plutonium or building A-bombs. Rather, it will focus on preventing him from exporting the stuff to other rogue nations or terrorists.

Instead of confronting a nuclear menace head on and reacting to his progressively crazier antics, we're now just hanging out and letting him play in his play pen?   Surely, there's duplicity in the way we dealt with a similar threat from Iraq?   The covert strategy:

The Times quotes a U.S. official who sums up Bush’s thinking as follows: The North Koreans, Bush told him, “are looking to get us excited, to make us issue declarations.” Bush’s response to this pressure, the official said, is, “You’re hungry, and you can’t eat plutonium.”

This is a *seriously* hard nosed strategy.   God only knows what the end game must look like here.