TPM Reader MA checks in:

If only Democrats could plan a bit more than a half-step ahead, they’d pay close attention to what Baker is cooking up, as it were.

The emerging plan for the next couple of years seems to be to attempt to pile on Democrats with the accusation of “cut and run” prior to the midterm elections and then to shift gears, declare limited victory in Iraq and propose a timetable for withdrawal AFTER the midterm elections and before the next general election.

The Iraqi people want a timetable for us to get out of there as do the American people. The only other option is to ramp up the forces there to the half-million or more necessary to secure the country — a plan that, with the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and other potential threats — would almost surely entail reinstating the draft, something that the GOP will NEVER do in the leadup to a presidential election.

Democrats need to see what’s coming — and advocate for what they believe. I suspect that they will almost always be losers in the war debate since they were dumb enough to back Bush in the first place and they’ll always be the ones who didn’t have the guts to say what they knew was the right thing to say WHEN it needed to be said. If there charge against Bush is that he got it all wrong — that just makes them look like the idiots they were for jumping on his bandwagon.

Still, they need to tell the public what’s going on, that even as the GOP numbly repeat their “cut and run” charge, they are plotting to announce a plan for troop withdrawals after the elections, and they need to take the initiative to come up with a least-worst withdrawal plan and make that an issue NOW before Republicans steal it from them.

I think MA is correct on the GOP plans for Iraq, and I touched on this a while back. But the larger issue he is getting at applies well beyond Iraq.

The Democrats have to make sure that they frame the election in the next few weeks in such a way that they can convert the political momentum of victory into a strong post-election political position on a range of issues.

For example, prior to the Foley scandal, I think it would have been difficult for the Democrats to persuasively argue that their victory was a mandate for fundamental political reform. But now the issue of scandal and corruption has been clearly framed, and Democratic victory would carry with it a strong mandate to clean up public corruption.

Winning the election must of course be the first priority, but it’s time to be thinking ahead.

This is big:

A Republican congressman knew of disgraced former representative Mark Foley’s inappropriate Internet exchanges as far back as 2000 and personally confronted Foley about his communications.

A spokeswoman for Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) confirmed yesterday that a former page showed the congressman Internet messages that had made the youth feel uncomfortable with the direction Foley (R-Fla.) was taking their e-mail relationship. . . .

The revelation pushes back by at least five years the date when a member of Congress has acknowledged learning of Foley’s behavior with former pages.

That’s not the other shoe dropping, that’s Imelda Marcos’ whole closet.

Well, Foley may get pushed off the front page.

North Korea claims it has successfully completed its first nuclear test.

And some South Korean officials say there are signs it’s true.

Developing . . .

Update: From the AP:

North Korea said Monday it has performed its first-ever nuclear weapons test. The country’s official Korean Central News Agency said the test was performed successfully and there was no radioactive leakage from the site.

“The nuclear test is a historic event that brought happiness to the our military and people,” KCNA said.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency is reporting that government officials said North Korea performed its first-ever nuclear weapons test Monday.

South Korean officials could not immediately confirm the report.

South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun convened an urgent meeting of security advisers over the issue, Yonhap reported.

Late update: AP reporting that the test occurred 9:36 p.m. EDT Sunday. You can’t very well hide a nuclear test, so American officials already know whether it occurred. Any unusual activity at State or Pentagon tonight?

All indications at this point are that the North Koreans have conducted a nuclear weapons test. According to CNN:

Late Sunday in Washington, the U.S. military told CNN it believed the report to be true, but was working to fully confirm it.

Senior U.S. officials said they also believed the test took place.

This is a strategic disaster of the first order.

With the traffic to TPM and our other sites growing rapidly in advance of the elections, we’re installing some new hardware this evening to ensure we can handle the load. TPM Readers shouldn’t notice anything. But in case there are a few hiccups, that’s why.

See the US Geological Survey’s alert about a 4.2 seismic ‘event’ in North Korea.

We’ll need to wait a few more hours for confirmation. But initial signs suggest that the US picked up the seismic signature of the underground nuclear test the North Koreans are claiming to have carried out. We’ve been pretty sure for some time that the North Koreans had developed a nuclear capacity. This would not only confirm that assumption, but the decision to conduct the test will be interpreted as a sign of belligerence that will send ripples throughout the region, probably first through Japanese rearmament.

For the US this is a strategic failure of the first order.

The origins of the failure are ones anyone familiar with the last six years in this country will readily recognize: chest-thumping followed by failure followed by cover-up and denial. The same story as Iraq. Even the same story as Foley.

North Korea’s nuclear program has been a problem for US presidents going back to Reagan, and the conflict between North and South has been a key issue for US presidents going back to Truman. As recently as 1994, the US came far closer to war with North Korea than most Americans realize.

President Clinton eventually concluded a complicated and multipart agreement in which the North Koreans would suspend their production of plutonium in exchange for fuel oil, help building light water nuclear reactors (the kind that don’t help making bombs) and a vague promise of diplomatic normalization.

President Bush came to office believing that Clinton’s policy amounted to appeasement. Force and strength were the way to deal with North Korea, not a mix of force, diplomacy and aide. And with that premise, President Bush went about scuttling the 1994 agreement, using evidence that the North Koreans were pursuing uranium enrichment (another path to the bomb) as the final straw.

Remember the guiding policy of the early Bush years: Clinton did it=Bad, Bush=Not whatever Clinton did.

All diplomatic niceties aside, President Bush’s idea was that the North Koreans would respond better to threats than Clinton’s mix of carrots and sticks.

Then in the winter of 2002-3, as the US was preparing to invade Iraq, the North called Bush’s bluff. And the president folded. Abjectly, utterly, even hilariously if the consequences weren’t so grave and vast.

Threats are a potent force if you’re willing to follow through on them. But he wasn’t. The plutonium production plant, which had been shuttered since 1994, got unshuttered. And the bomb that exploded tonight was, if I understand this correctly, almost certainly the product of that plutonium uncorked almost four years ago.

So the President talked a good game, the North Koreans called his bluff and he folded. And since then, for all intents and purposes, and all the atmospherics to the contrary, he and his administration have done essentially nothing.

Indeed, from the moment of the initial cave, the White House began acting as though North Korea was already a nuclear power (something that was then not at all clear) to obscure the fact that the White House had chosen to twiddle its thumbs and look the other way as North Korea became a nuclear power. Like in Bush in Iraq and Hastert and Foley, the problem was left to smolder in cover-up and denial. Until now.

Hawks and Bush sycophants will claim that North Korea is an outlaw regime. And no one should romanticize or ignore the fact that it is one of the most repressive regimes in the world with a history of belligerence, terrorist bombing, missile proliferation and a lot else. They’ll also claim that the North Koreans were breaking the spirit if not the letter of the 1994 agreement by pursuing a covert uranium enrichment program. And that’s probably true too.

But facts are stubborn things.

The bomb-grade plutonium that was on ice from 1994 to 2002 is now actual bombs. Try as you might it is difficult to imagine a policy — any policy — which would have yielded a worse result than the one we will face Monday morning.

Talking tough is great if you can make it stick and back it up; it is always and necessarily cleaner and less compromising than sitting down and dealing with bad actors. Talking tough and then folding your cards doesn’t just show weakness it invites contempt. And that is what we have here.

The Bush-Cheney policy on North Korea was always what Fareed Zakaria once aptly called “a policy of cheap rhetoric and cheap shots.” It failed. And after it failed President Bush couldn’t come to grips with that failure and change course. He bounced irresolutely between the Powell and Cheney lines and basically ignored the whole problem hoping either that the problem would go away, that China would solve it for us and most of all that no one would notice.

Do you notice now?

The House ethics committee has already begun conducting interviews in their Foley investigation. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

More from Fred Kaplan in the Washington Monthly in 2004 on how President Bush got us into this jam in North Korea.

From the annals of catastrophic success. This graf from Glenn Kessler’s piece in the Post tells the tale …

Yet a number of senior U.S. officials have said privately that they would welcome a North Korean test, regarding it as a clarifying event that would forever end the debate within the Bush administration about whether to solve the problem through diplomacy or through tough actions designed to destabilize North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s grip on power.

Translation: The Cheneyites have always wanted a policy of force and confrontation with the NK’s. They deep-sixed the Agreed Framework (which kept the plutonium out of commission from 1994-2002). Now they feel confrontation is a fait accompli.

Remind you of anything?