there is a reason why US and the others were rushing for Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons 20 years ago :) See Lord of War too.
Interesting how recent developments continue to show the difference between how countries are treated when they have nuclear weapons vs. when they don't have, like North Korea vs. Iraq. Looking at Ukraine i wonder what Iran think :)
To be fair, there are many reasons why North Korea was left alone while Iraq was considered "safer" to invade. Seoul being with range of massive amounts of North Korean artillery is one. The concern of both China and South Korea about the potential for floods of refugees is another.
> To be fair, there are many reasons why North Korea was left alone while Iraq was considered "safer" to invade.
Many reasons why Iraq was considered more important to invaded, and all of those reasons are "barrels of oil", as elucidated in 2003 by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz: "Look, the primarily [sic] difference -- to put it a little too simply -- between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil." [1]
I don't think you're reading Wolfowitz's quote properly. He's saying that the U.S. has leverage over North Korea because their economy is in such a poor state, leverage it didn't have over Iraq because of their oil reserves.
If you're claiming the U.S. would be likely to invade North Korea if they had significant oil reserves, that's wrong. As Wolfowitz says in the context around your quote:
The concern about implosion is not primarily at all a matter of the weapons that North Korea has, but a fear particularly by South Korea and also to some extent China of what the larger implications are for them of having 20 million people on their borders in a state of potential collapse and anarchy.
...
In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances which are very different.
Hard to draw from this that the "only" reason invading Iraq was more important was oil. The lack of economic leverage made a military option relatively more practical, as did the military and social situation of Iraq vis a vis its neighbors.
The most important thing is that China supports NK for ideological reasons. Sure, China would prefer a communist regime that isn't quite as well suited to parody, but it'll take whatever communist regime it gets for propaganda and ideological reasons.
But I'm convinced if at all, only very reluctantly so - certanly not so over an ideology whose championing stands to benefit not those of Deng Xiaoping's orthodoxy but of Maoist irredentism (Hua Guofeng may only be relevant as a historical footnote dominated by currents with consderably more inertia now, but Bo Xilai certainly seemed to have justified a thorough purging. At the very least I'm confident enough to estabish that faction-on-faction maneuvering in the far past has been justified on ideological differences of a similar magnitude - and that we looked at Bo's dramatics for shades of that precedent.)
Interesting how recent developments continue to show the difference between how countries are treated when they have nuclear weapons vs. when they don't have, like North Korea vs. Iraq. Looking at Ukraine i wonder what Iran think :)