By Claudia Rosett,
Friday, November 3, 2006
The good news, we are told, is that North Korea - after taking a break to test a nuclear bomb and a missile designed to hit Los angeles - has now agreed to return to the diplomatic "six-way talks" from which it decamped last year. The bad news is that "talking," which we have been doing with Pyongyang in one way or another for years, has worked to North Korea's advantage, with increasingly dangerous results.
The real problem is that the government of Kim Jong Il cannot be chivied into good-faith deals, or even forced into trust-but-verify arrangements. This approach has failed repeatedly. The way out of this spiral is not another round of false dtente that dignifies Kim on the world stage and buys him time to build more nuclear bombs. The answer is in declaring that we are done talking, and - however it might be accomplished - desire in the interest of both security and humanity the end of his regime.
For too long, that path has been treated as unthinkable. and, yes, the risks are large. Kim fields one of the world's biggest armies, directly threatening Seoul and peddling weapons to folks who threaten the rest of us. Perhaps riskiest of all, the Free World, with its chronic catering to Kim's blackmail, has invited him to conclude that we will forgive almost anything short of a military invasion of South Korea.
and so we get one argument after another that North Korea cannot be confronted; it must somehow be contained. We are told, especially in light of the continuing violence in Iraq, that the United States has no military option on the Korean peninsula, that diplomacy and sanctions are the only way. There is endless debate over carrots and sticks, over asking the feckless United Nations to act, over hoping that China - which in its duplicity helped Kim to create this mess - might now help solve it.
This complicated dance has its own risks, and they are getting bigger daily. For modest starters, offering anything to North Korea's regime amounts to a corrosive betrayal of our own values.
North Korea is a prison-state whose rulers live lavishly, siphoning national resources and foreign aid for themselves and their military, while resting their feet on the graves of millions. Numerous reports have documented that Kim's repressive policies led in the 1990s to the famine-related deaths of at least one million North Koreans, and many of the country's 23 million people still go hungry today.
To deter escape, North Koreans caught trying to flee have in some cases been executed in public. Others have been sent to join the hundreds of thousands in Kim's gulag, the prison camps where thousands die every year of overwork, cold and starvation. an integral part of this system is a vast state-security and propaganda machine, designed to wall out the world, exalt the Kim dynasty and demonize the United States - regardless of our aid, talks and tolerance over the years.
What does this have to do with us? Everything, because the North Korean system that inflicts this nightmare on its own people applies the same pattern of deceit, brutality and ruthless excess wherever possible in dealing with the democratic world. This is basically the same regime - bequeathed in 1994 by totalitarian father to son - that in the 1980s bombed the South Korean cabinet, blew a South Korean airliner out of the sky, and made a practice of kidnapping Japanese citizens. Under the current Kim, this regime in 1994 signed onto the nuclear-freeze deal offered by the United States and some of our allies, took the free food, fuel and start-up construction of two modern turnkey nuclear reactors - then cheated by pursuing nuclear weapons anyway.
OK, but if the Free World has survived North Korea's depredations to date, why should this be any more urgent now? The danger is more sinister than simply the prospect of Kim selling nuclear bombs to terrorists or to other rogue regimes - though that's quite bad and urgent enough. In the post-Cold War order, much talked about in the 1990s, but only now truly heaving into view, the rules of this interconnected world are still being hashed out. Kim is demonstrating to an attentive gallery of despots - notably Iran - that if you are willing to threaten, bully and manipulate the risk-averse politicians of the Free World, you can break every rule of civilized conduct, and get away with it.
Right now, Pyongyang is broadcasting to the dictators of the world that if you want stature at home and bargaining chips abroad, you should get yourself a nuclear bomb program, pronto. american's aim should be to employ our considerable resources and ingenuity not in talking to Kim, but in finding the courage and means to shut him up, and shut him down.