EDITORIAL
Pre-war spin on Iraq hurts Korea credibility

"American intelligence officials now believe," the New York Times reported this week, "that North Korea is developing the technology to make nuclear warheads small enough to fit atop the country's growing arsenal of missiles."

Those missiles can reach Japan, where the United States bases 37,000 troops. The CIA now thinks, according to the Times, that North Korea may have deliverable nuclear weapons within a year.

Given that no one really understands North Korean intentions, it's impossible to say whether we'd be facing such a serious threat if this crisis had been handled in a different way.

But it's clear that the situation was in a far more manageable state before the Bush team went to work on it.

Situation worsens

There's no doubt that North Korea had begun to cheat on its 1994 agreement with the Clinton administration to suspend its nuclear weapons development in exchange for the construction of two much safer nuclear power plants.

But Pyongyang's cheating was in favor of a new program, to build weapons by enriching uranium — a program, apparently enabled by Pakistan, which was several years away from results.

Had the dispute been confined to that slower program, we might not now have a crisis. But when the Bush administration "blew the whistle" on it last October, North Korea resumed the program it had suspended in 1994: by reprocessing spent fuel rods, it could begin turning out nuclear weapons within months. And now the CIA thinks it's on the verge of miniaturizing them.

The situation thus got much worse quickly.

North Korea, somewhat plausibly, says it became alarmed when Bush included it in his "axis of evil," thinking that put it on the regime change short list. So, it says, it decided to build a nuclear deterrent.

This, Bush has declared, will not be allowed.

Allies skeptical

But what will he do about it, short of catastrophic war? The eventual winner of such a war is not in doubt, but the cost in South Korean casualties, the Pentagon estimates, might be 1 million. And that was before North Korean nukes entered the picture.

Bush so far has refused to pay blackmail to buy off North Korea, and has resisted negotiating one-on-one with Pyongyang, insisting on a regional forum. But emerging doubts about White House claims about Iraq's nuclear threat in the run-up to the war has hurt his credibility on North Korea with the countries he wants to participate.

"After the claims made about prohibited weapons in Iraq, which have not been found so far," says the Times, "skepticism about the quality of American intelligence is widespread." Indeed, South Korean experts say the CIA is using an old satellite photo to pump up support for military options.

How we'll get out of this fix remains to be seen, but Bush has played a significant role in getting us deeper into it.