Posted on: Monday, February 2, 2004

EDITORIAL
Intelligence review is an urgent matter

It's not enough to say, as the White House is saying, that the world is a better place with Saddam Hussein deposed, no matter whether he possessed weapons of mass destruction or not.

Not, is what the former chief weapons inspector is telling Congress. When Dr. David Kay took the job of finding Saddam's banned weapons, he predicted he'd find them quickly and in profusion.

"It turns out we were all wrong," he now says, referring to the CIA's prewar assessments that helped President Bush conclude that Saddam presented such an "imminent threat" to Americans that an unprecedented and immensely costly pre-emptive war was required. It was a conclusion also reached by many of the Democrats now running for president.

An independent review of what went wrong with our Iraq intelligence is now a must, if we are to keep from making dangerous misjudgments elsewhere.

What worries us most, from our Pacific perspective, is what such a review might suggest about the nuclear weapons crisis playing out in North Korea.

Recall, if you will, that North Korea had suspended its processing of spent plutonium fuel rods in 1994, after an agreement with the Clinton administration.

Based on intelligence that never has been spelled out in a convincing fashion, the Bush administration accused the North Koreans of cheating on the agreement by establishing a separate channel aimed at making nuclear weapons, through the enrichment of uranium.

A North Korean diplomat was said to have acknowledged the uranium bomb project to Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, in Pyong-yang in October 2002. It's now suggested that the diplomat was merely asserting his country's right to have such a weapon, but that mistranslation of a linguistic nuance caused the American side to believe its suspicion had been confirmed.

The North Koreans immediately denied any such admission. But based on its belief in a uranium program, the Bush administration suspended its obligations under the 1994 agreement. As a result, Pyong-yang kicked international arms inspectors out of Yongbyon and moved the plutonium rods out of storage. They now claim to have converted them all to weapons-grade plutonium.

By digging in its heels over a uranium project that may not exist, it appears the United States prompted the North Koreans to resume a plutonium process capable of producing a half-dozen deliverable nuclear weapons this year.

And despite North Korean willingness to trade weapons programs for a security guarantee and economic aid, the Bush administration refuses to discuss meeting them half-way.

It's long been thought we knew far more about Saddam than the inscrutable Kim Jong Il. But now Dr. Kay is telling us that it's possible Saddam really believed he had weapons of mass destruction, because his scientists duped him and pocketed the money instead of developing weapons.

That's bizarre. What if our intelligence about Kim is that far wrong? The stakes are much higher in North Korea than they ever were in Iraq. That is why we need an immediate, independent intelligence review.