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COMMENTARY
October 4, 2003
The long wait
It has never been easy to deal with madmen and by any standard it appears the leadership of North Korea are actually insane. They do not behave in a coherent way to assure their own survival. The announcement by the North Korean foreign ministry this week -- that the regime has redirected plutonium from 8 000 spent fuel rods into the production of nuclear bombs -- offers an especially poignant illustration. This is equivalent to declaring Stop me before I kill more. While U.S. intelligence seems to have been reasonably aware that the regime has been doing what it now claims to have done I do not think it has a purchase on the extent or even the locations of this nuclear programme. There are certainly no indications that the CIA or any other intelligence organization has access to the human agents who alone could penetrate the fog of North Korea's public mind. I doubt they even know who has real power within the politburo so that one mystery conceals another. As the "outing" of Valerie Plame in Washington has demonstrated the CIA cannot even be counted upon to take the side of the U.S. government in pursuing secret missions. Its operatives and associates think nothing of sabotaging Bush administration policies through leaks to the media. In the case of North Korea neither the CIA nor State Department are game for anything resembling a policy of confrontation. There is increasing alarm among the other four parties dealing directly with the North Korean threat -- China Russia South Korea Japan. But it is alarm only; no solutions are proposed. With delicious Japanese understatement Yasuo Fukuda the cabinet secretary in Tokyo responded to the latest psychopathic pronouncement from Pyongyang by saying That is not a good action. Of those parties the Japanese have been much the most stalwart rhetorically. Under the new government of Roh Moo-hyun the South Koreans are merely spooked. President Roh yesterday could only babble something about linking his troop contributions to Iraq to progress in the next round of the six-way talks that foundered in Beijing in August. South Korea presents a curious case of a country that has gone not only from rags to capitalist riches but from gritty survival instincts to an effete and hapless liberalism in less than two generations. All parties look for leadership to the Bush administration which in my opinion has no ideas beyond Pentagon contingency plans. Certainly no one from State or elsewhere has been able to enunciate a coherent position. Like Iraq this is a problem with no diplomatic solution which leaves the one alternative of a military solution which will be more expensive in lives and property the longer it waits. Given North Korea's demonstrated willingness not only to acquire lethal weapons but to sell and deliver them through the international black market nothing short of a complete blockade of their ports and borders would be an adequate response. But the necessary Chinese cooperation is not forthcoming on this and the danger the North Koreans might respond by say obliterating the city of Seoul makes a blockade impracticable too. We may pray that the regime in Pyongyang will suddenly fall apart as other communist regimes have done; though with no assurance that it will do so as peacefully. For the mindset of the regime is that of the suicide bomber: all or nothing at every turn. Here in other words is a problem to which there is no solution. The Western mind rebels against such a thing; we think there must be a way to fix anything. And there is but in this case it almost certainly involves a huge catastrophe. Our policy in the meantime is waiting for this to happen. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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