Is it hypocritical to support one military action and not the other? I'm actually not sure. I'm not old enough to remember UK going into Kosovo, but I think I would have been for military intervention in the Balkans. There are some who are always against these interventions, people like Tony Benn etc. There are also conservitives like Malcolm Rifkind who was against intervention in Kosovo and Iraq. There are others who shared the views of Robin Cook, for the first war, not the other. Another Hitchenesque school of thought is always confusing, defining missiling Sudan as a war crime, but, defending the intervention of Iraq. I was against intervention in Iraq from the start. Does it make me hypocritical? I think on the basis that Milosovic was threatning other countries and ethnic blocs. But I didn't believe Iraq was threatning other countries, the failiure to get a second UN resoloution, the faulty intelligance etc. were the reasons for my opposition. Hussein was obviously lots of things which I won't choose to say on a Sunday morning. If the 'Blairesque' school of thought is to be believed, then we would also have to intervene in Belarus, Burma, Zimbabwe, China, North Korea, Sudan, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and many other countries. And I'm sure, that many bloggers would like to see intervention in some of these countries, but not others.

My old Mum, who was passionately opposed to nuclear anything, once reckoned that nuclear testing caused earthquakes ...

It's official, at least from the North Korean standpoint. The DPRK has long claimed to have nuclear weapons, but had never before performed a known test to prove its arsenal - until just a few hours ago. The US has threatened an unspecified, but "severe," response, and though the KCNA claims that it was a successful test of the country's deterrent capabilities, it also carefully mentioned that this test brought it one step closer to its ultimate goal of establishing a Great Socialist Nation, or in other words, a Korean peninsula run by Kim Jong-il.

So where do we stand on this issue? Is doing nothing (as we have been for several years now) the best option? Is our government's nebulous stance the way forward? The DPRK's leitmotif that is Kim Jong-il has always been described as a "maniacal" and "crazy" leader, but with our armed forces facing both troop and equipment shortages, can we actually lend any credibility to our arguments against a regime that is on the brink of collapse on its own accord? Do we even need to, considering that the level of corruption within their secret police is bound to be a harbinger of bad things for the Kim regime?