Another day, another North Korean development for the White House to ignore

Forgive me for being a tad obsessed with this, but one really has to wonder what North Korea has to do before the Bush administration will pay attention to the crisis on the peninsula.

As Carpetbagger has reported a few times, North Korea, which is already believed to already have a couple of nuclear weapons, has restarted a nuclear reactor that had been shut down since 1994. It started a new round of missile launch tests, for the first time in three years, just as Colin Powell was visiting China. It has already thrown out U.N. weapons inspectors who had been monitoring the country’s efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction. The Bush White House, meanwhile, has decided these developments do not represent a crisis and aren’t nearly as important as Iraq, which does not appear to be an immediate threat to anyone.

Today we learn that North Korean fighter jets aggressively approached a U.S. reconnaissance plane over international waters near Japan on Sunday. A Pentagon spokesman said that the jets came as “close as 50 feet” to the U.S. plane, and one North Korean jet “used its radar to identify the (U.S.) plane as a target,” but did not open fire.

The same Pentagon spokesman said this was the “first such incident since April 1969 when a North Korean plane shot down a U.S. Navy EC-121 surveillance plane, killing all 31 Americans aboard.”

I know Bush administration officials saw Clinton engage Kim Jung Il. By Bush’s logic, if Clinton had a dialog with North Korea, then the right approach is to ignore North Korea. But this became ridiculous some time ago. The longer the White House struggles to find a foreign policy, the more dangerous this crisis becomes.