To Pyongyang Via Baghdad
Wall St Journal
1-13-03
online.wsj.com
There are few discrete problems in foreign policy, especially in today's interconnected world. That's why the most important step President Bush could take to contain North Korea's nuclear ambitions is to end the charade of inspections and speed up the war in Iraq.
One reason Kim Jong Il has picked this moment to threaten nuclear proliferation, after all, is precisely because Mr. Bush is preoccupied with Saddam Hussein. Once the Clinton Administration agreed to let Kim keep his plutonium in 1994, the timing of when to play the extortion card again was always up to him. It's no accident he's chosen now.
The reaction in certain elite quarters of the West, we should add, couldn't be making Kim happier. Rather than rethink their own failed appeasement strategy, American liberals can't wait to accuse Mr. Bush of a double standard toward the "axis of evil."
Warren Christopher, the Clinton Secretary of State who presided over the 1994 Agreed Framework now shown to be a failure, suggests the U.S. should change its "priorities" from Baghdad to Pyongyang. What does he want, a "pre-emptive" strike? Maybe cruise missiles fired from a thousand miles away at a few North Korean tents? That sure worked well against Osama bin Laden (and there weren't 37,000 U.S. troops just across the border from Afghanistan as a potential target of retaliation).
No, the fastest way to impress one charter member of the "axis of evil" is to depose another, and sooner rather than later. Certainly the sight of another dictator with nuclear ambitions being disarmed by a determined U.S. President would give Kim something to think about. It would show U.S. leadership and resolve, notwithstanding skittish allies, as well as the military capability to succeed. It would also show Kim that searching for a nuclear arsenal isn't the safest career choice.
Above all, toppling Saddam with dispatch would allow the U.S. to turn its military attention away from the Gulf and toward the crisis in Korea. Does anyone doubt that if the U.S. weren't now building up forces near Iraq, one or more U.S. aircraft carrier groups would be heading toward Northeast Asia?
Success in Iraq would also show Kim and his comrades that the rest of the world takes its own obligations seriously. Only one of many of the Korean ironies is that North Korea has been denouncing the U.S. for trying to bring together a coalition against the North, in short for being "multilateral."
North Korea didn't merely renounce a bilateral treaty with the U.S. but also the international nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The inspectors it deported weren't Americans but officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency, an arm of the United Nations. If the U.N. isn't willing to enforce its resolutions against Iraq, despite 10 years of resistance and clear lack of cooperation even now, why should Kim Jong Il assume it would ever do anything to him?
Alas, the U.N.'s current signals on Iraq are anything but clear. Chief Iraq Inspector Hans Blix briefed the Security Council with his usual ambiguity (some would say mush) last week, chiding the Iraqis for not cooperating but adding that his team of sleuths hadn't yet found a "smoking gun."
The U.S. is now debating how much intelligence on Iraq to give Mr. Blix, despite the risk of exposing sources and methods that could put American soldiers in danger if there is a war. But unless the inspectors get lucky in the next two weeks, the likelihood is that Mr. Blix will deliver a similar porridge of caveats when he reports his final judgment to the Security Council on January 27. In other words, Mr. Bush is never going to get the smoking gun his critics demand; the decision to disarm Saddam was always going to be the U.S. President's, and the sooner the better.
Delaying action toward Iraq was always risky, but those risks are only growing with North Korea's nuclear brinksmanship. The consensus seems be that the time Pyongyang needs to turn its plutonium into usable bomb-making material is six months. After that the North would be able to sell what it has on the open market, perhaps even to the likes of Saddam Hussein. Then the "axis of evil" would be more than a metaphor in a Presidential speech.
Far from repudiating that metaphor, Kim Jong Il's nuclear blackmail has only confirmed how correct it is. The faster Mr. Bush disarms the first member of that axis in Baghdad, the easier it will be to contain and disarm the others. |
