By Tom Plate

Two-front wars are so much easier to lose. That's why the latest terrorist atrocity in Indonesia makes it all the more imperative and urgent to settle the roiling North Korean problem as quickly as possible and get it out of the way.

Terror Attack Syndrome, TAS, as it were, is now the No. 1 violent threat to us all. Nothing else is as imminently dangerous. Iran and Syria, after the West's invasion of Iraq, are lying low; China is not going to start a nuclear war; the menacing Soviet Union is gone. No one has heard from Libya's Moammar Gadhafi in years. Cuba's Fidel Castro is a shell of his former shell.

Yet, despite all the security efforts, expenditures and puffy war-on-terror rhetoric, tenacious and evil terror teams remain alive and active.

Last week in Indonesia — the world's most populous Muslim nation — more than a dozen died and more than a hundred were injured when a car bomb exploded in a fashionable section of Jakarta. The target was a hotel identified with American clientele. The job was done by a wicked group linked to al-Qaida — Jemaah Islamiyah, notorious baddies in Southeast Asian circles but little known in the United States. This is the same lot that killed more than 200 people — mostly Australians and English — last October in Bali.

Indonesia — recovering nicely from the Asian financial crisis and working through the early, bumpy stages of its new democracy — deserves much better than this. But no country is immune, as Megawati Sukarnoputri, Indonesia's president, is now fully aware. A true, functioning, stable democracy in huge Indonesia would be a historic defeat for terrorists.

There must be a colossal worldwide coalition against TAS, accompanied by the supportive sentiments of the peaceful Muslim world, requiring the highest level of focus and patience. Distraction is the terrorists' ally. The enormity of the challenge is such that nothing must be allowed to fuzz-up the focus. President Bush can tie North Korea into some imaginary "axis of evil," but it is too feeble a nation — though heavily armed, possibly nuclear and usually unpredictable — to pose a wide-ranging, globe-throttling threat.

A singular American strike on North Korea (forget help from Great Britain, as Prime Minister Tony Blair is politically weakened) would be a strike against that very willing coalition. Besides diverting Washington's attention, it would traumatize China, whose cooperation with South Korea and the United States on the Korean issue has become dramatically helpful.

And it would upset Japan, which needs to rethink its military posture in an atmosphere of calm reflection, not with its public diving into bomb shelters out of fear of incoming North Korean missiles.

China has come forward with a helpful negotiating format involving a number of parties with which Pyongyang initially had said it would not play; but the latter changed its mind. In response, the Bush administration needs to make China look good with Pyongyang by unilaterally and formally forswearing a military intention, and letting the honorable and respected Secretary of State Colin Powell bring home a major diplomatic victory before he leaves office (bet the house against his remaining for a second Bush term). A negotiated solution on the Korean peninsula is not rocket science; but without it, real rockets, of old Soviet science, may indeed fly.

The Korean tension is directly related to the worldwide fight against terrorism because the U.S. leadership — with its exceptional technology, deep Sept. 11 psychic wounds and burning-Bush commitment — is prompted to consider a two-front war. But the fact is, it could well lose, at least in the short run, at least one of them.

Tom Plate, whose column appears regularly in The Honolulu Advertiser, is a UCLA professor and founder of the nonprofit Asia Pacific Media Network. Reach him at tplate@ucla.edu.