Posted on: Friday, January 3, 2003

Re-examine priorities on Iraq, North Korea

The Bush administration's confused explanation for ignoring the clear and present danger presented by North Korea's nuclear threat is frustrating and a bit frightening.

It's amazing that Bush's defenders continue to accuse the Clinton administration of causing this problem through cowardly appeasement in 1994. Amazing, because in 1994 Clinton gave the North Koreans to understand that its pursuit of nuclear weapons at its Yongbyon facility was unacceptable, and if they didn't halt it, the facility would be attacked and destroyed. (Sure, fuel oil shipments and new power plants became an important carrot, but we mustn't forget the stick that was part of the deal that defused the 1994 crisis.)

The current administration says such a military strike is impossible, that it would scatter radioactive materials all over the area, and that it would provoke a North Korean attack on Seoul. Both of these very real considerations have changed not a whit since 1994. How was Clinton, in standing ready to take these terrible — but perhaps justifiable — risks, the appeaser and not Bush?

Bush proposes to get the North Koreans to put their nuclear toys away with muted diplomacy (literally, while refusing to talk to them) and economic sanctions (against a nation with virtually no foreign trade). Doesn't Bush realize that his threat to cut off food aid to North Korea is more offensive to Western humanitarian sensibilities than to a Stalinist regime that repeatedly demonstrates that its people are expendable?

A nuclear-armed North Korea is at least as dangerous to American interests as a nuclear-armed Iraq, and only the North Korean threat is imminent. Is Bush's blind spot on North Korea caused by a virtual obsession with Iraq — which dates, by the way, from well before 9/11?

A senior Bush diplomat acknowledged yesterday that the administration faces "considerable skepticism on the question of how we can justify confrontation with Saddam when he is letting inspectors into the country, and a diplomatic solution with Kim when he's just thrown them out."

"And we're working on the answer," he added. The answer, in light of a clear appraisal of risk facing the United States, is likely to agree with the suggestion the other day by Warren Christopher, former secretary of state: Put Iraq on the back burner until North Korea has been compelled — verifiably this time — to abandon its weapons of mass destruction programs.