And incidents arose from circumstance

I don't know what to make of North Korea's alleged nuclear test:

North Korea announced Monday that it successfully carried out an underground nuclear test, weeks after threatening to restart its rogue atomic program.

The country's official Korean Central News Agency called Monday's test "part of measures to bolster its nuclear deterrent for self-defense."

President Lee Myung-bak convened an emergency security session. His spokesman, Lee Dong-kwan, confirmed that a nuclear test may have been carried out in the North.

Seismologists from the U.S., South Korea and Japan reported earthquakes in an northeastern area, where North Korea conducted a nuclear test in 2006.

Still, one thing's pretty clear: the GWBush administration had no real plan nor strategy for dealing with N. Korea beyond calling it part of the "Axis of Evil". That said, they did stop sanctions last year:

President Bush announced Thursday that he will lift U.S. economic sanctions against North Korea — a charter member of the "axis of evil" — and remove it from the U.S. terrorism blacklist now that Pyongyang has met a key requirement of its promise to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

But that lifting of sanctions seems schizophrenic when just 2 weeks earlier:

Further signs are emerging that the US is moving toward a more aggressive stance over North Korea. While there are internal differences over timing and tactics, the Bush administration has taken a series of new steps to isolate and menace Pyongyang over its nuclear programs.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reaffirmed on Monday that Washington remained committed to restarting six-party talks on North Korea, dismissing comments by an unnamed senior US defence official on Sunday that the US was about to take the issue to the UN Security Council. She did not, however, completely rule out the possibility, instead describing the remarks as “a little forward-leaning”. She declared that no timetable had been set.

So how's all that working out now, Pres. Bush and Sec'y Rice? Oh wait, you don't give a shit. Elvis has left the building.

Now, of course, it's just one more BushCo fuck-up the Obama administration has to clean up. Kind of like international diarrhea: the shit's everywhere.