JIM CHRISTIANSEN emails this response to Nick Kristof’s column (mentioned earlier today):

Nicholas Kristof’s what’s-the-urgency? column reminds me of these lines from Tom Lehrer’s 1960s song on nuclear proliferation, “Who’s Next?”:

“Then China got the bomb, but have no fears, They can’t wipe us out for at least five years.”

For Lehrer, this was satire. For Kristof, it’s a policy argument.

As for the analogy to the Cuban missile crisis: The difference between Saddam now and Khrushchev in 1962? Khrushchev remembered the twenty-five million dead from World War II. Saddam models himself on the guy who inflicted them.

Well said.