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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (54396)	10/24/2002 7:48:29 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

My God, we are still appeasing the bastards! WSJ.com North Korea Strikes It Rich The State Department's response to nuclear betrayal? Free oil! Thursday, October 24, 2002 12:01 a.m. North Korea can be forgiven if it is beginning to think that nuclear weapons are the best investment it's ever made. Only a day after the Bush Administration exposed Pyongyang's secret program to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs, another shipment of free fuel oil arrived on its shores, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. We had hoped the failure to stop last Thursday's oil delivery was an oversight, even though it came a full two weeks after Pyongyang's admission of nuclear perfidy. But then we learned that the two-week delay was urged by the State Department precisely so the oil could be delivered on schedule. State's Asian experts, we also hear, didn't even want to go public with the North's nuclear admission, lest the news complicate their best-laid plans to pacify Kim Jong Il. As for State being off the reservation, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer on Monday defended the oil shipment as a price worth paying for peace on the Korean peninsula. And it looks like the freebies won't stop anytime soon. South Korea confidently predicts the oil will keep flowing until at least year's end. It's also planning to give Pyongyang even more nuclear expertise, by holding training sessions for North Korean nuclear engineers next month. Saddam Hussein must be wishing he were Korean. Here we have a rogue regime caught lying to the world about its plans to build nuclear weapons and . . . nothing happens. Beyond a mild public rebuke, the U.S. and its East Asian allies scramble not to punish the North but to maintain subsidies-as-usual. And this is supposed to get the North to stop? More likely it will encourage other global renegades to work even harder to get nukes so they too can apply for U.S. foreign aid. We would have expected this from the Clinton officials who first turned bribery into policy back in 1994. And sure enough, in the Washington Post on Sunday former Defense Secretary William Perry argued that appeasement is more important than ever. The 1994 Agreed Framework may not have stopped Pyongyang from secretly enriching uranium to make bombs, Mr. Perry wrote, but now it will stop the North from using its stockpile of unprocessed plutonium to make bombs. He must not recall Dr. Johnson's line that second marriages are the triumph of hope over experience. Now, we are sympathetic that the U.S. doesn't need or want a war with North Korea and Iraq at the same time. But no one is suggesting going to war over North Korea. The issue is whether a regime that breaks multiple international promises not to proliferate nuclear weapons is going to be rewarded for its outlaw behavior. At a minimum, we'd think this would warrant an immediate U.S. withdrawal from the 1994 Agreed Framework, which even the North itself now declares "nullified." That would mean a halt to further U.S. oil shipments, and no more construction of two light-water nuclear reactors. Former Secretary of State James Baker, hardly a renowned hawk, suggests in the Washington Post that the U.S. also rally the U.N. Security Council to "obtain political and economic sanctions against the North for breach of its solemn international obligations, much as we did against Iraq in 1990." We're not sure how much the U.N. would help, but Mr. Baker is right about the U.S. role. It's unrealistic to expect either South Korea or Japan, the countries most vulnerable to Pyongyang's threats, to lead any global effort to contain the North. But they may very well follow a determined U.S. effort to cut off aid and foreign currency, as well as an attempt to strengthen defenses in the region. The world is watching Korea closely, and not just from the bunker in Baghdad. The Russians will file away the U.S. response for the next time we ask them to curtail their nuclear exports to Iran. South Korea and Japan may be urging conciliation with the North now, but how long will it be before their militaries start agitating for their own nuclear deterrent? The price of appeasing North Korea's nuclear blackmail will be a lot higher than some free oil.