Imposing economic and political sanctions against Iran and North Korea will help democratic forces in those countries as Washington pursues its “ultimate objective” of regime change, John Bolton, the US ambassador to the United Nations, said on Tuesday.

Regime change didn’t come about in Iraq even after years and years of sanctions. It required some Shock and Awe and the deaths of a few thousand US soldiers as well as untold numbers of Iraqis to get rid of Saddam. I don’t see why sanctions would suddenly work in Iran and North Korea. I wonder which one we will invade first? My guess would be whichever one we determine doesn’t yet have a nuclear weapon.

Asked by Fox News why the UN did not try to encourage political change in Iran and North Korea, Mr Bolton said talk of changing authoritarian regimes into democracies would “make a lot of countries unhappy”.

He went on: “But I think that’s something the United States and its friends should be pursuing on their own, because that is our ultimate objective. If you had countries that were responsive to the public will – unlike, say, North Korea or Iran – I think the odds are considerably reduced that they’d want to spend their scarce resources on nuclear weapons.”

No doubt it would make some countries unhappy, and some of those countries we call friends and allies … and when he starts saying that a country that’s responsive to the public will not wanting to spend their scare resources on nuclear weapons, does he mean a country like the USA that spends some $6.5+ billion a year maintaining, modernizing, developing, and producing its nuclear arsenal? Did you know that after adjusting for inflation, we spend as much on our nukes now as we did during the height of the cold war? I’m sure we couldn’t find something better to spend that money on, you know, if we had a government that was responsive to public will and didn’t want to waste scarce resources.

Of course, that amount is but a mere drop in the bucket compared to how much we have spent and continue to spend in Iraq … some $330 billion the last time I looked into it.