Posted on: Wednesday, January 8, 2003

EDITORIAL
North Korea: Bush scrambles to save face

Ever since the 2000 presidential campaign, President Bush and his defense advisers have derided as shameful appeasement the accommodation with the North Koreans reached by President Clinton in 1994.

Especially after Sept. 11, 2001, they have often hinted that they'd get around to correcting Clinton's mistake sooner or later.

So, when Pyongyang copped to cheating on its international nuclear nonproliferation agreements, the Bush administration, without hesitation, declared the 1994 "agreed framework" null and void.

By now Bush must be pining for the status quo ante. Sure, the agreement was far from perfect, but it was the best Clinton could extract from a grave situation — a situation very like the one Bush now faces with even fewer options.

The Clinton administration had prepared a plan to attack and destroy the nuclear facility at Yongbyon, but rejected it because it probably would have brought great devastation and loss of life to Seoul, which has the bad luck to be only 30 miles from the DMZ.

Instead, Clinton, Japan, South Korea and the European Union agreed to give the North two nuclear power plants of a sort that would not yield weapons materials, and supply the North with U.S. fuel oil until the power plants came on line. In exchange, the North agreed to shelve the Yongbyon operation.

Why did the North Koreans cheat? No one knows for sure. Perhaps it was only a matter of time, but it's not unreasonable to suppose that they inferred from Bush's swaggering rhetoric that they needed to do something bold while the American military was preoccupied with Iraq — because, from the sound of it, North Korea was next in line for "pre-emption."

As the situation deteriorates, one must hope that Bush now realizes that loose talk is dangerous, and that deterrence is a lot more effective against nations that have something left to lose. A nuclear North Korea is unacceptable, but the risks of a military solution, as Clinton found, are nearly as bad.

That leaves Bush with the humiliating task of asking South Korea, Japan, Russia and China to find some face-saving pretext to allow him to do what he vowed not to: talk to North Korea.

Restoring the agreed framework (obviously with effective verification measures) would be a worthy goal. But it's clear that Bush will be lucky, indeed, simply to restore the situation Clinton left him.