This Hillary Clinton proposal will give Ron Paul fits.

US White House hopeful Hillary Clinton late Saturday said she would propose a joint US-British team to oversee the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal if she is elected president.

“So far as we know right now, the nuclear technology is considered secure, but there isn’t any guarantee, especially given the political turmoil going on inside Pakistan,” Clinton said during a Democratic debate here.

This is not an insane proposal. But it will, guaranteed, play up to the world’s imperialist image of us. And the left here in the US would say as much if the proposal hadn’t come from one of them. It’s similar, actually, to the reason that we were in Saudi Arabia in the first place: To protect that country from potential invasion by Saddam, not to “prop up dictators” as Paul is fond of saying. Here, we would be in Pakistan in the middle of a potential civil war to safeguard nuclear weapons. In both cases, we’re in other countries ultimately to protect ourselves — from letting Saddam control the bulk of the world’s oil supplies in the Saudi case, and against the transfer of nukes to terrorists, in Pakistan’s case. But Ronulans don’t see any of that and the left would denounce it as insane if Bush said or did what Hillary is proposing.

A better proposal would have been to try to prevent Pakistan from going nuclear in the first place, but when Hillary was co-president the Clinton adminstration believed Benazir Bhutto’s lies about her program’s peaceful purposes. The nuclear test took place on Sharif’s watch in 1998, but much of the work was accomplished during Bhutto’s stints as Pakistan’s PM. Last time the Democrats had power, the administration that included Bill Richardson and Hillary Clinton (if you buy her definition of experience, anyway) allowed that fractious state to obtain nuclear weapons. Yet fingers never get pointed at either of them over that.

Back to today’s story. The rest of the Democrats are doing their best to de-stabilize what’s left of Musharraf’s regime.

They said they were prepared to launch unilateral military strikes in the country if they detected an imminent threat or could pinpoint the location of Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden.

“Here’s an unstable leader, Musharraf, in a country with a serious radical — violently radical element that could, under some circumstances, take over the government,” warned Edwards.

“If they did, they would have control of a nuclear weapon. They could either use it, or they could turn it over to a terrorist organization to be used against America or some of our allies.”

Obama, who won the first Democratic White House nominating contest in Iowa on Thursday, reiterated his earlier stance that he would take action in Pakistan even if Islamabad is opposed, if there is strong intelligence on Al Qaeda there.

“Back in August, I said we should work with the Pakistani government, first of all to encourage democracy in Pakistan so you’ve got a legitimate government that we’re working with, and secondly that we have to press them to do more to take on Al Qaida in their territory,” he said.

“What I said was, if they could not or would not do so, and we had actionable intelligence, then I would strike.”

Meanwhile Richardson, the fourth-runner in the race for the Democratic nomination going into Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, called for Musharraf’s ouster.

“Here is an example of a country, a potentially failed nation-state with nuclear weapons,” said Richardson.

These people are unbelievable. The Iraq war was primarily about preventing Saddam from obtaining WMDs, and though many Democrats supported it then few of them do now, some denounce it as being based on lies, and the Democrat candidates are all united against efforts to prevent Iraq from becoming a failed state now. The tension between the US and Iran now is due in part to the latter’s efforts to obtain nuclear weapons, yet the Democrats are united in preferring useless talk to applying useful pressure. It’s easy to come to the conclusion that they just really don’t want to do anything serious about Iran at all, a replay of how they didn’t handle Pakistan. What does Richardson think is likely to happen if Musharraf actually stepped down? Has he looked at the polls lately — not of people in New Hampshire, but Karachi? There’s a provision in the Pakistani constitution, caretaker government, blah blah blah was how he answered that question last night. Why he thinks words on paper matter more than actual power in an unstable state, he has yet to explain. It’s not as though Pakistan has a couple of centuries, or even a couple of decades, of uninterrupted, peaceful and constitutional transfers of power.

Pool question: Anyone want to guess how many states go nuclear if a Democrat gets elected? I’d say four, minimum.