Will This Third World War Go Nuclear?

Our State Department has spent the past few years cobbling together a deal in which the North Koreans have allegedly agreed to shut down their nuclear weapons program. But how will they dispose off all of their nuclear materials? According to the blockbuster report below—two paragraphs buried in a New York Times article on the recent Israeli air strike in Syria—they're getting rid of their nuclear materials by selling them to Syria.

If this is true, then the administration's long delay in confronting the regimes in Iran and Syria has led—as it usually does—to the multiplication of our troubles. Now we have to act, not only to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran, but to prevent a nuclear-armed Syria.

Meanwhile, what are the Democrats up to? Democratic presidential hopeful and darling of the far left Dennis Kucinich recently traveled to Damascus in order to appear on Syrian television denouncing the war in Iraq and sucking up to dictator Bashar Assad, whom he says "should be respected and appreciated for the role that he has played" in the Middle East. MEMRI provides the video and the transcript.

"US Confirms Israeli Strikes Hit Syrian Target Last Week," Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper, New York Times, September 12 One Bush administration official said Israel had recently carried out reconnaissance flights over Syria, taking pictures of possible nuclear installations that Israeli officials believed might have been supplied with material from North Korea. The administration official said Israeli officials believed that North Korea might be unloading some of its nuclear material on Syria.

“The Israelis think North Korea is selling to Iran and Syria what little they have left,” the official said. He said it was unclear whether the Israeli strike had produced any evidence that might validate that belief….

Tensions between Israel and Syria have escalated over the past year, since the end of the Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon, and both countries remain in a heightened state of alert along their common border.

Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, has said that if Israel is not willing to resume negotiations for the return of the Golan Heights, which Israel captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the alternative would be to try to regain the territory by force.