Colin Powell may not have sipped champagne with Kim Jong Il, but the White House has spent the last year in endless deliberation about what to do with the nuke-tipped pariah state of North Korea. Oh, there have been talks but they are just that: talks. Though President Bush would never have called North Korea out as a member of the Axis of Evil if the DPRK weren't embroiled in the same markets and politics of terror as Iraq and Iran, Saddam Hussein lost power first in part because the DPRK had one thing Ba'athists lacked - fully researched nuclear weapons.
The deterrent is an unimaginably powerful one - hence Bush's warnings against allowing the threat of atomics in Baghdad to mature - and it strips the American playbook against Pyongyang to only a few pages. With political capital, brave lives and domestic resources invested in Iraq, a North Korean solution seems to benefit from the biding of America's time - without being treaty-suckered - for at least a year or two. Steven Den Beste settled on a frighteningly skeptical assessment of the free world's options, but offers this relatively comforting thought:
What the Chinese have been trying to do until now was to finesse the situation so that we (the US) would solve it by giving in to NK's demands. If only the US would cave, placate NK, and more or less resume the terms of the 1994 agreement as implemented. Which is to say, we would ship grain and oil to NK and not insist that NK live up to any part of the bargain. Then tension would subside and everyone could heave a sigh of relief and stop worrying about it, for a few years anyway.That wouldn't actually solve anything, in the long run, but it would defer the problem, and that's good enough. But after the utter failure of the 1994 agreement, and in light of the current international political situation, the Bush administration is not going to do any such thing. Bush is looking for a real resolution to the problem rather than a way of deferring it again.
I think we've been trying to convince the Chinese that the problem has to be solved soon and solved for real, but the Chinese have been hoping that we weren't serious, and have been hoping they could put us into a position where we felt forced to buy off NK. The Bush administration seems to understand that it had to be patient, and let the Chinese try subtleness and finesse in order to prove to itself that it won't work, either on us or on NK.
Personally, I had hoped to see a noose gradually tightened around Kim Jong Il's neck. A United Nations disarmament order would bind Kim to the cocktail party that is international law - as in Iraq, a confusing mess for both the accuser and the accused, but one in which a determined American leader could navigate through diplomacy and ambivalence to judgment.
At the outset, setting Kim Jong Il's oppression and aggression under the spotlight would draw new statements of condemnation from responsible democratic countries and at least partially disrupt illicit trade and deals with Pyongyang from unscrupulous ones. With South Korea and Japan as staging grounds similar to Kuwait and Qatar, a force like the one occupying Iraq could be assembled for the inevitable demolition of North Korea's brutal regime.
Would weapons of mass destruction be used? Saddam didn't use his, and it becomes more apparent by the day that he destroyed evidence of standby research programs and stashed whatever was functional. Though the White House is therefore knee-deep in opportunists who'd rather believe Saddam to be the honest broker, a political problem is far preferable to one made of ricin, VX or anthrax. Yet no one knows for certain what Pyongyang would do, and that's why Kim Jong Il's nationwide concentration camp still runs.
Even if tossing the hot-potato around with China and agreeing with Pyongyang on a framework du jour averts the appearance of disaster, Steven and others rightly acknowledge that North Korea's active weapons black market could very easily cause the same holocaust we fear in the Pacific to occur on our shores via terrorists. There's a touch of Munich Agreement in every treaty signed with dictators.
Now, we dither. And wait. Just as important as the safety of the world from the DPRK, however, is the plight of those who suffer under the Stalinist regime. What good is a fragile peace when it is at the expense of others?
