Posted on: Thursday, July 17, 2003

EDITORIAL
Bush's baffling, scary North Korea policy

A combination of fierce internal disagreement within the White House and President Bush's own visceral dislike for North Korea's leader has pushed the United States ever closer to war with that isolated nation.

As former Defense Secretary William Perry put it in a recent Washington Post interview: Bush "has come to the conclusion that Kim Jong Il is evil and loathsome, and it is immoral to negotiate with him."

True, the administration can point to some success in building a multilateral consensus that North Korea's nuclear program is unacceptable, leaving Pyongyang increasingly isolated. The problem is that increasing isolation can as easily make the unpredictable regime lash out as throw in the towel.

The alternatives to negotiation appear to be:

1) War. But if that's Bush's preference, he should have attacked when North Korea's nuclear assets (by now dispersed, deep underground) were at a single, known site — and certainly before he tied down 200,000 U.S. troops in and around Iraq.

2) A policy of wishful thinking — hoping, that is, that North Korea will implode soon, not with a bang but a harmless whimper. The White House reportedly is considering admitting thousands of North Korean refugees in an effort to encourage instability there. Such a policy would be offensive to China and South Korea, which have much more realistic expectations of the chaos that collapse might bring.

Numerous factors call into question the coherence of Bush's approach to the North Korea crisis, such as the announced pullback of U.S. troops from the Korean DMZ and serious inconsistencies and fluctuations in the administration's presentation of North Korean intelligence assessments. The latest issue of the Naval War College Review argues that U.S. officials have "opted to exploit the intelligence for political purposes."

As President Clinton's defense secretary, Perry oversaw preparation for air strikes on North Korean nuclear facilities in 1994, an attack that was obviated by the so-called Agreed Framework, which successfully froze — under international inspection — activities at the Yongbyon nuclear complex.

Bush took office convinced that Clinton had been far too easy in dealing with Kim Jong Il. Now, in just a few months, Bush and Kim have walked away from close to a decade of painfully crafted diplomatic arrangements that had almost completely frozen nuclear weapons development on the peninsula, leaving nothing in their place except the strong possibility that North Korea will quickly develop deliverable nuclear weapons.