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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Wednesday, March 5, 2003

EDITORIAL
Korea crisis won't get better by itself

Sounding alarm bells on foreign policy developments is often a mistake, even when those developments are genuinely alarming. Most of the time, we expect that when we hear mild, reassuring language from the White House in a rapidly escalating crisis, it means matters are firmly in hand.

We wish we had a feeling of some confidence about the Bush administration's response to the reckless North Korean provocations, but it's difficult to escape the assessment that preoccupation with its Iraq campaign has led it to wishful thinking about North Korea.

This crisis was mishandled right from the very beginning. For starters, the crisis doesn't date from October, when the assistant U.S. secretary of state for Asia, James Kelly, confronted the North Koreans about their illicit uranium enrichment program, but from at least a year earlier, when the administration first learned of the program but did nothing.

The administration's reaction to North Korea's admission that it was extracting uranium was to halt its delivery of fuel oil, an obligation incurred as part of the so-called Agreed Framework of 1994. North Korea in turn responded by abrogating its part of the same agreement.

The result was a quick ratcheting-up to resumption of a plutonium process that promises to supply the regime with a half-dozen or more nuclear weapons by this summer.

The Bush administration is correct to characterize the North Korean escalation since then as reckless, but its response has been truly dismaying. In fits and starts, it has sought to deny there was a crisis, then to internationalize it; it has taken military options off the table and put them back; it has refused to negotiate bilaterally and then offered to negotiate while quibbling over the setting and timing.

Make no mistake. The stakes are very high and the signs that the White House is getting a handle on this crisis are still very few.