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

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (100240)	6/4/2003 7:54:22 PM
From: Alastair McIntosh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

You may not consider a transcript from defenselink a "reputable publication", but here it is: defenselink.mil Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz Q&A following IISS Asia Security Conference (Q&A session following remarks at the IISS Asia Security Conference in Singapore. Also participating were Sen. Jack Reed and Sen. Charles Hagel.) Scroll about halfway down. Wolfowitz: The concern about implosion is not primarily at all a matter of the weapons that North Korea has, but a fear particularly by South Korea and also to some extent China of what the larger implications are for them of having 20 million people on their borders in a state of potential collapse and anarchy. It’s is also a question of whether, if one wants to persuade the regime to change, whether you have to find -- and I think you do -- some kind of outcome that is acceptable to them. But that outcome has to be acceptable to us, and it has to include meeting our non-proliferation goals. Look, the primarily difference -- to put it a little too simply -- between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances which are very different.