MSNBC Newsweek: A Wide World of Trouble

Holding the Story. Running Out of Resources

"An administration that for months has been straining to prove that Saddam Hussein is developing nukes revealed only under pressure that it had ironclad proof of North Korea’s nuclear program. The White House revealed it had learned over the summer that North Korea—like Iraq, a member of Bush’s “Axis of Evil”—had a secret uranium-enrichment program for bombmaking. Even more amazingly, the White House said Pyongyang had admitted this two weeks before, on Oct. 3, yet the Bush team came out with the news only when reporters were about to break the story...

"White House reporters were told President Bush would not discuss North Korea, with one official acknowledging 'it is not something we want to elevate.' Said another: 'This is an administration with a pretty full plate; we would like some things taken off.'

"That may be wishful thinking. A nuclear-armed North Korea is potentially at least as scary as Iraq. More so in some ways: North Korea has test-fired a missile with close to intercontinental range, after all; Iraq hasn’t even test-fired the engine for a missile that can go farther than a souped-up Scud.

"America doesn’t have the resources to take on the threats it’s hearing about, much less the ones it doesn’t yet know about. And that doesn’t include invading Iraq—which will require another level of attention, money and personnel. The CIA is already “stressed out,” says one agency officer.

"The Pentagon has also been rocked by a study by a former U.S. Army colonel, Scott Feil, that suggests as much as one third of the Army could be tied up in an Iraq occupation, costing $16 billion annually.