North Korea's mass-murdering tyrants have been trying for many months to plead insanity (“we're not bad, we're mad”) in the hope of getting handouts and a free pass to do their evil stuff with impunity. Their latest mad idea is to claim that they need their nuclear weapons to reduce the size of their army. Er … yeeeees. (An army, by the way, whose sole use, ever, has been to kill, rob and oppress (1) the people of North Korea, and (2) the people of South Korea.) The North Korean statement also cites two other weighty reasons why it is right for their mass-murdering dictator to have the power to slaughter millions more anywhere in the world at the touch of a button, namely (1) that US foreign policy isn't unilateralist enough:

But the Bush administration is adamantly insisting on the [sic] multilateral talks

and (2) that the US has accused them of having a nuclear weapons programme:

Such attitude [sic] from the US only more saliently reveals the sinister design of the Bush administration to dramatise the DPRK's “nuclear threat” before the world community.

OK that's impressively mad. But now Iran's tyrants – who have for decades been cultivating their reputation as mad mullahs by the effective method of being mullahs and behaving madly – have decided that they can't let North Korea out-mad them. So they have claimed that their sole reason for developing nuclear weapons (which, for good measure, they also deny doing) is that the United States is trying to prevent them from doing so:

Iran warned Monday that foreign pressure over its nuclear capabilities, branded a threat to peace by Washington, would backfire and harden Iran's position.

[…]

“Excessive pressure on Iran would untie the hands of those who do not believe in dialogue,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi. “Even those who favor constructive talks would not accept the language of force and threat.”

Uh huh. In other words, if the United States declares once and for all that it will do nothing if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, those in Iran who “favour constructive talks” will be strengthened and this will cause the ones who favour destructive action to give up their nuclear weapons programme. And the fairies at the bottom of the garden will do the weapons inspections.

He also had a friendly warning for President Bush:

“We are always alert about America's policies … but we have no doubt the Americans won't be deluded into mistaking Iran for Iraq. Such a mistake would be irreparable,” he said.

Irreparable for him, yes. Had Mr Bush lived up to the urban-myth caricatures and mistaken Iran for Iraq recently, the mass-murdering tyrants of Iran would now be history. And that would have been a bad thing why?

Anyway, nice try Mr Asefi (and Mr Kim),
but it's not going to work. In politics (as often in the courtroom too) those who try to get away with murder by pleading insanity are in fact both bad and mad. And it's obvious to everyone but them. Perhaps the maddest thing about the surviving Axis of Evil members is that they haven't yet noticed that blustering veiled threats to murder Americans is no longer good tactics.