Before going further, I should declare that I am a patriot, but a qualified one. My loyalty is to the kinds of ideas Jefferson put in the Declaration: the sanctity of property, suspicion of power, and extra suspicion of the state. I am saying so now because some of what follows might sound deeply unpatriotic to the modern ear, but I think it would have sounded just fine to Jefferson's classical one.

The shock of September 11th did some damage to my political resolve. The murder of two thousand innocents was an act so outrageous that it demanded a quick and violent response. So, like many Americans, I wanted to see someone punished, and the federal government appeared ideally placed to do the punishing. I silently agreed with the plan to go after the bombers and their friends.

The way I saw it, the army could pummel some bad guys (not necessarily the 9-11 culprits) and that would be one way to get our revenge. Self-declared allies of the killers would find themselves being treated as such.

It was a classical liberal's rationale: a stand for the subjective individual and his property; finally, the government doing its job. Of course the logic was twisted by emotion, and I knew the whole enterprise might end badly, but I felt like punching anyway, at least until my arm was completely exhausted and the anger was gone.

But the Jeffersonian in me had other ideas about Iraq, and they do not make happy reading - not for neocons who like the war or apologists who don't. If we woke Jefferson's gang up today, what would they make of it all? Well, the first thing they would see is the US government punching away on our behalf, and that they would probably endorse. Knowing about the carnage in New York and Washington, the attempted assassinations of two Presidents, the invasion of Kuwait, and the chemical attacks on Saddam's subjects (and, of course, the fact that he had subjects) would be reason enough.

But then, as their excitement subsided, I think they might notice a few disturbing things: the sheer size of the US force, for one, and how far it is reaching across the ocean, for another. And they could only be dismayed to discover that their libertarian brainchild had grown up to be an empire, feeding off its citizens' labor, with legions stationed around the world, fighting in foreign civil wars, enforcing a Pax Americana, and tasting the bitter fruit of its adventures.

Once over that disappointment, though, Jefferson and his friends might spot a ray of hope in Iraq. Their radical eyes would pick up on something about the guerilla war that we - after two hundred years of relative comfort and ease - have missed.

The US government's arm is tired. Even with one hundred and fifty thousand troops, a fortune in fuel and supplies, and the best weapons ever invented, all that power is having a rough ride. Humvees loaded with high-tech regulars are sitting targets for bits of plumbing packed with C-4, left at the side of the road. There are plenty of surprises from the front, but such news would only elicit a sad smile from Jefferson, and the same from his fellow insurgent, Madison, who wrote this:

The highest number to which a standing army can be carried in any country does not exceed one hundredth part of the souls, or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This portion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men.

To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops.

Even though Madison was talking about a war between the feds and the people, the parallel with Iraq makes it a devastating tactical appraisal. The biggest military machine - even the GPS-guided, kevlar-toting, night-fighting, uranium-shooting US Army of 2006 - can't subjugate a rabble of ornery civilians if a good number of them have guns. Yes, it can obliterate them, but that's not the same as governing them. Madison knew, and Iraq proves, that a rifle over every mantlepiece can safegaurd freedom.

American insurgents from 1776 would see Iraq through the filter of their own occupation: the struggle against the Crown and its Hamiltonian successors. They would see the setbacks of the 75th Rangers in Baghdad and the 8th Cavalry in Fallujah, and would mourn the casualties among the professional soldiers, as we do, but another part of them would be saying I told you so - and might even be glad. They couldn't feel anything else, because they were rebels to the core:

The governments of Europe are afraid to trust the people with arms. If they did, the people would surely shake off the yoke of tyranny, as America did.

The man who wrote that would not have rooted for Iraq's fanatics and murderers, out to become tyrants themselves, but neither would he have cheered the federal juggernaut fighting them now. The Iraqi insurgents are the bad guys, for sure, but they are sovereign men, too, armed with nothing but light assault weapons, trip wires, and explosives. Just as Madison predicted, they are holding their own against the attack helicopters of the King. Our government is against them today, but that doesn't change their tactical likeness to the snipers of 1776.

The comparison is a disturbing one to make in the middle of our war, but we need to make it. And maybe it would put Madison and Jefferson at ease about the monster they fathered - the global superpower. A successful insurgency, independent of its underlying purpose, is a reason for every man who loves liberty to cheer.

For both of our modern wings of politics, Iraq is a lesson in government, and not the one either of them wants to learn. It proves the assertion that the best way to keep the state down is to get everyone a weapon.

Some part of the gun rights lobby should want the army to lose in Iraq, and some part of the gun control lobby should want it to win.

Let neocon Republicans, who support the war and guns in the home, and leftist Democrats, who despise both, put that contradiction in their pipes and smoke it. Do they like state power or not? I am afraid the answer is: they like it when it suits them. That is why we - who can be true patriots only by being rebels ourselves - must not forget how our patriotism was born.

Here is one last quotation, this from the insurgent commander himself:

... the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable. The very atmosphere of firearms everywhere restrains evil interference, they deserve a place of honor with all that's good.

That's not Moqtada al-Sadr talking, but George Washington. You get the idea. Staring into Iraq's quagmire, we should see a second chance for freedom everywhere, including the United States.

Ammar al-Hakim, the son of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim (the leader of the United Iraqi Alliance, the largest bloc in parliament), also complained the some Iraqi media and question the patriotism of certain parties in the dispute. The reference appears to have been to al-Zaman and al-Iraqiyah.

I see this resolution as an extension of a virtual doctrine of the tyranny of the Shiite majority, and aimed at silencing a major Sunni Arab newspaper.

al-Sharqiya Television employs 400 reporters, administrators and technicians. Al-Zaman newspaper employs 150 reporters, 160 technicians and administrators in all of its Iraq-based operations. The parliament warned these two media organs against repeating their "unacceptable coverage."

Please write your legislators and urge them to pressure the Iraqi government to abide by the freedom of the press provisions of the Iraqi constitution.

I already see less controversial news in al-Zaman than I used to. I think the window of relative press freedom may be closing. Al-Zaman has a London edition and can be kept alive abroad, but would lose something important if its editorial offices ceased being in Iraq.

Al-Zaman also reports that some MPs did insist that parliament does not have the authority to close newspapers and television stations, warning that such a move would represent a return of the dictatorial methods of the former regime.

You hope they are in the majority.

"So far, a total of 20 people were killed and another 17 injured in the attacks," the source said.

Earlier Monday, three Iraqis were killed and seven others, including policemen, wounded in two bomb attacks targeted an Iraqi bank and police forces in Baghdad, according to Iraqi police.

Separately, a third roadside bomb targeted a police patrol on the highway of Muhammad al-Qassim, near the Technology University, went off, wounding three policemen.

In Suwaiyra, a town some 60 km south of Baghdad, a car bomb killed ten people and wounded 15 others also on Monday.

There will be a concerted attempt to persuade people that the statistical issues involved in this study are difficult. They aren't. The correct way to think about this is as follows:

First, don't concentrate on the number 600,000 (or 655,000, depending on where you read). This is a point estimate of the number of excess Iraqi deaths - it's basically equal to the change in the death rate since the invasion, multiplied by the population of Iraq, multiplied by three-and-a-quarter years. Point estimates are almost never the important results of statistical studies and I wish the statistics profession would stop printing them as headlines.

The question that this study was set up to answer was: as a result of the invasion, have things got better or worse in Iraq? And if they have got worse, have they got a little bit worse or a lot worse. Point estimates are only interesting in so far as they demonstrate or dramatise the answer to this question.

The results speak for themselves. There was a sample of 12,801 individuals in 1,849 households, in 47 geographical locations. That is a big sample, not a small one. The opinion polls from Mori and such which measure political support use a sample size of about 2,000 individuals, and they have a margin of error of +/- 3%. If Margaret Beckett looks at the Labour party's rating in the polls, she presumably considers this to be reasonably reliable, so she should not contribute to public ignorance by allowing her department to disparage "small samples extrapolated to the whole country". The Iraq Body Count website and the Iraqi government statistics are not better measures than the survey results, because one of the things we know about war zones is that casualties are under-reported, usually by a factor of more than five.

And the results were shocking. In the 18 months before the invasion, the sample reported 82 deaths, two of them from violence. In the 39 months since the invasion, the sample households had seen 547 deaths, 300 of them from violence. The death rate expressed as deaths per 1,000 per year had gone up from 5.5 to 13.3.

Talk of confidence intervals becomes frankly irrelevant at this point. If you want to pick a figure for the precise number of excess deaths, then (1.33% - 0.55%) x 26,000,000 x 3.25 = 659,000 is as good as any, multiplying out the difference between the death rates by the population of Iraq and the time since the invasion. But we're interested in the qualitative conclusion here.

That qualitative conclusion is this: things have got worse, and they have got a lot worse, not a little bit worse. Whatever detailed criticisms one might make of the methodology of the study (and I have searched assiduously for the last two years, with the assistance of a lot of partisans of the Iraq war who have tried to pick holes in the study, and not found any), the numbers are too big. If you go out and ask 12,000 people whether a family member has died and get reports of 300 deaths from violence, then that is not consistent with there being only 60,000 deaths from violence in a country of 26 million. It is not even nearly consistent.

This is the question to always keep at the front of your mind when arguments are being slung around (and it is the general question one should always be thinking of when people talk statistics). How Would One Get This Sample, If The Facts Were Not This Way? There is really only one answer - that the study was fraudulent.[1] It really could not have happened by chance. If a Mori poll puts the Labour party on 40% support, then we know that there is some inaccuracy in the poll, but we also know that there is basically zero chance that the true level of support is 2% or 96%, and for the Lancet survey to have delivered the results it did if the true body count is 60,000 would be about as improbable as this. Anyone who wants to dispute the important conclusion of the study has to be prepared to accuse the authors of fraud, and presumably to accept the legal consequences of doing so.

So what? This is always the other line from the people who want to ignore this study. Even if we accept that the invasion has been a disaster (in the strictest sense, the doubling of the civilian death-rate is usually taken to constitute a humanitarian crisis) for the Iraqi people, what should we do differently? The majority of the deaths by violence are a result of action by the insurgents, so we can't just pull the troops home. Isn't this kind of study just "picking over the rubble", to quote the Euston Manifesto and a distraction from the real debate about humanitarian intervention?

Well, there is something that we can do. We can ensure that the people responsible for this outrage suffer the consequences of their actions. A particularly disgusting theme of some right-wing American critics of the study as been to impugn it by talking about it being "conveniently" released before the November congressional elections. As if a war that doubled the death rate in Iraq was not the sort of thing that ought to be a political issue. Nobody is doing anything about this disaster, and nobody will do until people start suffering some kind of consequences for their actions (for example, no British politician, soldier or spy has lost his job over the handling of the Iraq war and no senior member of the Bush administration either).

There has to be some accountability here. It is not good enough for the pro-intervention community to shrug their shoulders and say that the fatalities caused by the insurgents are not our fault and not part of the moral calculus. I would surely like to see the insurgents in the ICC on war crimes charges, but the Nuremberg convention was also correct to say that aggression was "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole". The people who started this war of aggression need to face up to the fact, and that is a political issue.

[1] In the context of the 2004 study, I was prepared to countenance another explanation: that the Iraqis were lying and systematically exaggerating the number of deaths. But in the 2006 study, death certificates were checked and found in 92% of cases.

The commander and militants had previously conducted ambush attacks on Afghan and NATO soldiers, it added.

NATO troops "are actively and aggressively extending the security reach of the Afghan government," a spokesman for the forces said.

Uruzgan has been a hotbed of Taliban insurgents, who clash with Afghan and NATO troops frequently.

Due to rising Taliban-linked violence this year, Afghanistan has plunged into the worst spate of bloodshed since the Taliban regime was toppled down nearly five years ago.

Over 2,400 people, mostly Taliban militants, have been killed in this volatile country this year.

The North's Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency that the country wants "peace but is not afraid of war."

The North "vehemently denounces the resolution, a product of the US hostile policy toward (the North) and totally refutes it," the statement said.

"The resolution cannot be construed otherwise than a declaration of a war" against the North, it said.

The country warned that if
anyone used the UN resolution to infringe on the country's sovereignty, "It will deal merciless blows at him through strong actions."

The U.N. Sanctions, passed Saturday, bans the sale of major arms to the North and orders the inspection of cargo to and from the country. It also calls for the freezing of assets of business supplying the North's nuclear and ballistic weapons programs.

The North "will closely follow the future US Attitude and take corresponding measures," the statement said, without specifying what those measures would be.

Second nuclear test?

On Monday, US television networks reported that US spy satellites have detected suspicious vehicle and people activity near the site of North Korea's nuclear test that may signal preparations for another test.

US officials said they could not be certain of what the North Koreans were doing in the area, but the activity there could be preparations for a second nuclear blast, NBC and ABC said.

In Seoul, a South Korean government official told Reuters on Tuesday: "The government is aware of signs related to North Korea's possible second nuclear test. We cannot exclude the possibility of a second test."

But he added there was no firm information on a possible new test.

This is the first official reaction from Pyongyang since the UNSC adopted its 1718 resolution on the DPRK's nuclear test last Saturday.

"The UNSC resolution ... can not be construed otherwise than a declaration of a war against the DPRK," said the statement.

The DPRK reaffirmed that it didn't abandon the effort of denuclearization and peace, but it "is not afraid of war."

"If anyone attempts to infringe upon the DPRK's sovereignty and right to existence even a bit under the signboard of the UNSC resolution, it will deal merciless blows at him through strong action," it said.

The statement didn't say what action the DPRK will take on "attempt of infringement," just adding that it "will closely follow the future U.S. attitude and take corresponding measures."

The DPRK also said that its nuclear test last Monday was just a way of self-defense due to the "U.S. nuclear threat and blackmail and foiling its attempt to ignite a new war."

The KCNA announced last Monday that the DPRK had conducted a successful underground nuclear test.

The U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution, condemning the nuclear test proclaimed by the DPRK, demanding that the DPRK eliminate its nuclear weapons and nuclear programs, and imposing sanctions on the DPRK in spheres related to its nuclear, ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

As the US secretary of state prepared to leave for talks in Japan, China, South Korea and Russia, US intelligence said air samples it had collected confirmed North Korea's claim to have carried out an underground nuclear test last Monday.

Describing resolution 1718 passed unanimously as "a very powerful tool", Ms Rice said it made possible the "interdiction of dangerous and suspicious cargo".

"We expect every member of the international community to fully implement all aspects of this resolution and we expect the Security Council to aggressively monitor the process," she said.

However, Wang Guangya, China's ambassador to the UN, disagreed, telling reporters: "Inspections yes, but inspections are different from interception and interdiction."

He said the resolution did not make it mandatory for all nations to inspect cargo going to and from North Korea. States could carry out such an operation as necessary "in accordance with their national legal authorities", he said.

Kim Holmes, a former senior US official who dealt with North Korea and the UN and is now vice-president of the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, appeared to concur with the Chinese interpretation, saying the resolution did not approve the use of force needed for interdiction. The resolution speaks of inspection, not interdiction.

China had succeeded in watering down the resolution in a week of debate, by insisting that inspections also required the "co-operation" of North Korea, Mr Holmes said.

Ms Rice said she would discuss how to design "a practical architecture for detecting and screening" dangerous materials.

Dismissing the notion of differences with China, she said: "I am not concerned that the Chinese are going to turn their backs on their obligations. I don't think they would have voted for a resolution that they did not intend to carry through on."

China had already started checking North Korean trucks crossing its border, Nicholas Burns, under-secretary of state, commented.

Ms Rice repeated that the US was ready to hold talks with North Korea if it returned to the six-party forum mediated by China.

"My goal on this trip is, certainly, to reiterate that we're prepared to return to the talks. But North Korea also needs to understand?.?.?.? that they will pay a price here," she said.

North Korea becomes the ninth state believed to possess a nuclear weapon, although it is not widely thought to have perfected the process needed to deliver one by missile.

Iran as a potential customer of nuclear materials is the Bush administration's greatest concern. Senior US officials are visiting Gulf allies this week to prepare for naval exercises testing their joint ability to intercept North Korean ships bound for Iran.

"The Iranian government is watching and it can now see that the international community will respond to threats from nuclear proliferation," Ms Rice told reporters.

Later this week the US is expected to table a draft Security Council resolution that seeks to impose sanctions on Iran for rejecting a UN demand that it suspend its nuclear fuel cycle programme. US officials said they expect tough negotiations with China and Russia.

Yasuhisa Shiozaki, chief cabinet secretary, said Monday Japan had no plans to change its ban on nuclear weapons. Thomas Schieffer, US ambassador to Japan, said that, as long as Japan believed the US remained prepared to "trade New York for Tokyo", an independent nuclear deterrent would not make it any safer. "This is not a new situation for Japan. We have been here for 50 years."

Australia - one of the few western countries to have diplomatic relations with Pyongyang as well as being Washington's most important defence ally in the Asia-Pacific region - said it would go beyond the UN resolution by banning North Korean ships from entering its ports.

Additional reporting by David Pilling in Tokyo and Virginia Marsh in Sydney

The nuclear test, once conducted, will have far-reaching implications for the Koreas and the rest of the world. It carries five messages.

The first message is that Kim Jong-il is the greatest of the peerless national heroes Korea has ever produced. Kim is unique in that he is the first to equip Korea with sufficient military capability to take the war all the way to the continental US. Under his leadership the DPRK has become a nuclear-weapons state with intercontinental means of delivery. Kim is certainly in the process of achieving the long-elusive goal of neutralizing the American intervention in Korean affairs and bringing together North and South Korea under the umbrella of a confederated state.

Unlike all the previous wars Korea fought, a next war will be better called the American War or the DPRK-US War because the main theater will be the continental US, with major cities transformed into towering infernos. The DPRK is now the fourth-most powerful nuclear weapons state just after the US, Russia, and China.

The DPRK has all types of nuclear bombs and warheads, atomic, hydrogen and neutron, and the means of delivery, short-range, medium-range and long-range, putting the whole of the continental US within effective range. The Korean People's Army also is capable of knocking hostile satellites out of action.

All the past Korean heroes let the Land of Morning Calm be reduced to smoking ruins as the wars were fought on its soil, even though they repelled the invaders. One of the two major aspirations of the Korean people has been the buildup of military capability enough to turn enemy land into the war theater. Kim has splendidly achieved this aspiration.

The other has been the neutralization and phasing out of the American presence in Korea before the two Koreas come together as a reunified state. When President George W Bush agreed on the 2009 transfer of wartime operational control over South Korean forces to the South Korean president, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signaled the withdrawal of US troops with combat troops relocated from the front line to bases behind Seoul.

The title "the greatest iron-willed, brilliant commander" is reserved for Kim Jong-il, who has led tiny North Korea to acquire the most coveted membership of the elite nuclear club, braving all the nuclear war threats, sanctions and isolation efforts on the part of the US. It is little short of a miracle that the leader has outmaneuvered and outpowered the Bush administration against heavy odds.

Kim is adding to the glory of Koguryo and Dankun Korea, vindicating the military-first policy inspired by tamul (the Koguryo term for standing up to a major power, valuing the pride of being descendants of Dankun Korea, developing newer weapons, restoring lost land and settling old scores with foreign invaders).

Revealing are headlines of New York Times articles. One op-ed on February 9, 2005, by Nicholas Kristof is headlined "Bush Bites His Tongue". The article says: "There are two words the Bush administration doesn't want you to think about: North Korea. That's because the most dangerous failure of US policy these days is in North Korea. President Bush has been startlingly passive as North Korea has begun churning out nuclear weapons like hot cakes."

One article dated February 13, 2005, by B R Myers is "Stranger Than Fiction". He writes: "To North Korea, diplomacy is another form of war. Under the leadership of Kim Jong-il, the Foreign Ministry has bullied the United Nations into submission and outwitted the United States into providing food aid - all the while developing a formidable nuclear arsenal. This is, of course, the hardline view of North Korea that prevails in some quarters in Washington. Yet it is also the official North Korean view of North Korea."

The February 20, 2005. article by David Sanger is headlined "America Loses Bite," with a senior Bush administration official quoted as saying, "It's counterproductive to draw a red line for North Korea because they will only view it as a challenge." The article notes: "In North Korea's case, red lines may be what Kim Jong-il sees in his rear-view mirror."

In his September 9, 2006, address to the 4th Global Strategic Review of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, Mitchell Reiss offered a remarkable observation:

"Perhaps the least-noted and most astonishing aspect of the entire diplomatic process involving North Korea during the past few years has been the almost complete inability of four of the world's strongest military and economic powers, including three nuclear weapons states and three members of the UN Security Council - the United States, China and Russia and Japan - to shape the strategic environment in Northeast Asia.

"They have proven thoroughly incapable of preventing an impoverished, dysfunctional country of only 23 million people from consistently endangering the peace and stability of the world's most economically dynamic region. This has been nothing less than a collective failure."

The December 29, 2002, Washington Post article by Michael Dobbs says: "US officials note that North Korea's action has been condemned by most of its neighbors and potential big-power patrons, such as China and Russia, Japan and South Korea. Such logic is unconvincing to many experts on North Korea. They contend that Kim is trying to set up a situation in which he wins, whatever happens."

The second point is that a nuclear test will be a legitimate exercise of North Korea's sovereign right in supreme national-security interests of the country. The sole reason for the development of nuclear weapons is more than 50 years of direct exposure to naked nuclear threats and sanctions from the US. The Kim administration seeks to commit nuclear weapons to actual use against the US in case of war, never to use them as a tool of negotiations.

It is sheer illusion to think that sanctions and isolation will stop North Korea from the planned nuclear test. US hostility, threats and sanctions are the very engines that have propelled the development of nuclear weapons. Absent US hostility, nuclear blackmailing, sanctions, threats of isolation and regime change, the Kim administration would never have thought at all of acquiring nuclear deterrence.

What makes North Korea unique among those states Bush lumped together as the "axis of evil" is that only it has been subjected to US nuclear threats and sanctions and singled out as a prime target of nuclear preemption. The US refuses to end the state of war with North Korea while keeping combat-ready nuclear-attack forces ready in bases in Japan and South Korea. North Korea is not host to any foreign military bases. The US is engaged in ceaseless nuclear-attack exercises in and around Japan and South Korea.

The US, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, India, Pakistan and Israel conducted numerous nuclear detonation experiments in legitimate exercise of their sovereignty. There is no international convention or treaty that prohibits North Korea from conducting underground nuclear tests. No country is allowed to infringe on the sovereignty of North Korea in material breach of Chapter 2 of the UN charter, unless they are prepared to risk triggering nuclear war with North Korea.

The third message is that the nuclear-armed North Korea will be a major boon to China and Russia. Nuclear-armed, the two countries are friendless in case of war with the US. The US has nuclear-armed allies, such as the UK and France. The Americans have a network of military bases around the two countries, while they have none. The presence of a mighty nuclear weapons state in Korea should be most welcome to Russia and China.

The People's Republic of China has every reason to welcome a nuclear-armed North Korea, whatever it may say in public. The nuclear deterrence of North Korea is a major factor in reducing US military pressure on China on the question of the independence of Taiwan.

The fourth point is that the North Korea government of Kim does not care at all whether Japan goes nuclear, or that South Korea and Australia follow suit. In the first place, those countries are practically nuclear-armed because they are under the nuclear umbrella of the US and house American nuclear bases and because Tokyo's military spending is 10 times that of Pyongyang's and Seoul's defense budget is five times that of Pyongyang's. It is too obvious that they are capable of acquiring nuclear weapons at short notice.

The factor that has prevented them from developing their own nuclear weapons is political pressure from the US, not because North Korea was only conventionally armed. The US has insisted that they should be under the nuclear umbrella and buy expensive high-tech weapons from them.

Their becoming nuclear powers will signal that the US is no longer a reliable cop. At long last de-Americanization of the US allies and neutralization of the US in the rest of the world will be set into motion. This is one of the reasons why the Kim administration has every reason to secretly welcome the nuclear arming of junior US allies.

The main enemy to North Korea is the US, the sole surviving superpower in the world. Acquisition of hundreds of nuclear weapons by Japan and South Korea will not have any serious impact on the total balance of nuclear power. Japan and South Korea have too much to lose in a nuclear war with North Korea, while North Korea has little.

It is important to note that the nuclear weapons and long-range means of delivery are not aimed at South Korea and will be common property shared with South Korea under a confederated government.

The fifth and last point is a long, overdue farewell to the nuclear non-proliferation regime, with the Bush administration standing in the dock as prime defendant accused of sabotaging nuclear non-proliferation. Had the Americans been steadfast in upholding the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty by reducing their nuclear weapons and respecting the sovereignty and independence of the non-nuclear states, North Korea would not have felt any need to defend itself with nuclear weapons.

A nuclear test by North Korea will go a long way toward emboldening anti-American states around the world to acquire nuclear weapons. There is a long line of candidate states.

It is important to note that the North Korean Foreign Ministry pledges to faithfully implement its international commitment in the field of nuclear non-proliferation as a responsible nuclear-weapons state and to prohibit nuclear transfer.

Kim Myong-chol is author of a number of books and papers in Korean, Japanese and English on North Korea. He is executive director of the Center for Korean-American Peace. He has a PhD from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's Academy of Social Sciences and is often called an "unofficial" spokesman of Kim Jong-il and North Korea.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd.

ElBaradei said countries that have started uranium enrichment programs or have the technology to do so quickly had created "virtual new weapons states."

The IAEA chief did not single out any country as being among the "almost virtual new weapons states."

"The knowledge is out of the tube ... both for peaceful purpose and unfortunately also for not peaceful purposes," ElBaradei said.

"It's becoming fashionable for countries to try to look into possibilities of shielding themselves ... through the possibility of nuclear weapons," he said.

ElBaradei said more money and international commitment were needed for his agency's verification efforts to keep pace with the new era of suspicions prompting some countries to contemplate developing weapons programs..."

"It's important that the system continues to be ahead of the game," he said.

"We cannot continue to do business as usual," he added.

Mr Chavez, who faces reelection in December, is likely to come under domestic criticism for squandering money on the Council bid.

Venezuela would have held the seat for two years and Mr Chavez had vowed to use it to frustrate the US in the chamber.

Elected without contest to represent other regions yesterday were Italy, Belgium, South Africa and Indonesia.

In fact, after the first three rounds of election, the assembly has to carry out unrestricted election in accordance with the UN Charter, which means the election is open to all members in the region.

Unrestricted balloting will continue until a state from the region achieves the required majority. The winner will replace Argentina, whose term expires on Dec. 31.

In the first round of election held on Monday morning, Belgium, Italy, South Africa and Indonesia were elected to serve two-year terms starting Jan. 1, 2007.

The United States is lobbying against the bid of Venezuela for the council's membership. Francisco Javier Arias Cardenas, Venezuela's ambassador to the UN, accused the United States of trying to turn the vote into a contest between his government and Washington, and stressed votes cast for Venezuela would be "votes of conscience" in favor of the developing world.

"We are not competing with a brother country. We are competing with the biggest power on the planet," he told reporters, adding that Venezuela would not withdraw from the race.

The members were elected according to an agreed geographic allocation, which awards two seats to African and Asian countries, two to Western European and Other States, and one to Latin America and the Caribbean during this year's round of elections.

Council elections are held by secret ballot, and a winning candidate requires a two-thirds majority of ballots from present members and voting. Formal balloting takes place even in those regions where there is only one candidate per available seat.

Belgium and Italy were the only contenders in the Western European and Other States category, and they received 180 and 186 votes respectively. South Africa, the only candidate in the African group, was elected after picking up 186 votes. In Asia, where there were two contenders, Indonesia received 158 votes and Nepal received 28.

The council's five other nonpermanent members, whose terms on Dec. 31, 2007, are Congo, Ghana, Peru, Qatar and Slovakia. The five permanent members are China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States.

The longest election in the UN history for the membership of the Security Council occurred in 1979. A tense race between Cuba and Colombia began on Oct. 26, 1979 and ended on Jan. 7, 1980. After two months and 155 rounds of election, Mexico, a third candidate, was elected when both Colombia and Cuba decided to withdraw.

Command Sergeant Major David Lady of the Joint Functional Combat Command for Integrated Missile Defense, said at the Strategic Space & Defense conference in Omaha on 12 October that the attacks were detected after US satellite operators - most likely users of the National Reconnaissance Office's secret imaging satellites - observed that the satellites occasionally failed to perform over China.

"There had been times when we wondered at the sudden decline in effectiveness as the satellites passed over China," CSM Lady said. Sensors at the Reagan Test Site on Kwajalein atoll in the South Pacific were tasked with tracking the satellites and observing any unusual phenomena. "We sensed the projection of beams against the spacecraft and could identify the streams of photons," CSM Lady said.

The Kwajalein data confirmed that the Chinese appeared to have "some level of confidence" in their laser countermeasures system, according to CSM Lady.