Posted on: Saturday, January 18, 2003

EDITORIAL
Bush blinks on Korea: Is there a way out?

The one constant that George Bush inherited from Bill Clinton, the one thing Bush could certainly count on, was the deadly menace of North Korea. In his two years in office, Bush has done a lot that we didn't anticipate: slash taxes, take us to the brink of war with Iraq and bring back deficit spending in a big way.

But the one thing we had a right not to expect was Bush getting caught flatfooted by North Korea. Kim Jong Il may be a pudgy dilettante, but at the moment he is playing Bush like a rookie.

It will take some months to unravel exactly how Bush allowed this crisis to deepen. When he threatened North Korea and insulted Kim personally, was he strutting for a domestic audience without thought of how it might play in Pyongyang? Did he halt talks with North Korea and pull the rug out from under Nobel Prize-winning South Korean President Kim Dae Jung just because it was the opposite of what Clinton would have done? Did preoccupation with Iraq distract him?

Make no mistake, the bad guy here is Kim Jong Il, not Bush. We already knew that. That Kim cheated on his agreement with Clinton should surprise no one. But Bush has allowed Kim to turn his perfidy to strategic advantage.

Clinton had two famous "almosts" with North Korea. He almost bombed the North's nuclear facility at Yongbyon, in 1994. And near the end of his second term, seemingly on the brink of rapprochement with the North, he almost decided to visit Pyongyang, an echo of Nixon's visit to Beijing. What enormous, needless deterioration has occurred since then.

Can Bush save our bacon? His options are limited by two nearly contradictory conditions:

• The United States must not allow North Korea to become a nuclear power. Clinton understood this and almost took us to war over it.

• The cost of war with North Korea will be dreadful, likely bringing millions of casualties and the destruction of Seoul.

In retrospect, it appears former President Jimmy Carter was able to prevent a war in 1994 not only because he offered "carrots" worth billions of dollars, but because Pyongyang understood that war was surely the alternative.

It's hard to imagine how Bush, who has already renounced both war and carrots, can find a middle way. But find it he must.

Bush has one important asset that he must learn to rely upon more readily — the tremendous expertise and readiness that comes in military uniforms and centers on Camp Smith, right here on O'ahu.

In numerous ways in his first two years in office, Bush and civilians in his Defense Department have overlooked and even belittled some very solid advice they were hearing from the Joint Chiefs and the regional commanders, including, most specifically, those in Hawai'i with their eyes on the Pacific.

Another happy accident in Bush's favor is the request by weapons inspectors in Iraq to take a few more months to finish their work. Of course, he wanted to start the next gulf war next month, but the inspectors give him a pretext not to.

And that gives him time to resolve a much more important bit of business, the North Korea crisis.