BUSH HAS GOOD REASON TO BE HOSTILE - George Jonas

North Korea's Kim Jong-il is pouting. On Saturday his
second-in-command, Kim Yong Nam, told Chinese
mediator Wang Jiarui that the Hermit Kingdom no
longer wanted to talk with the United States.

What's going on in the Korean Peninsula?

Rewind 11 years to the days of "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung, "Dear Leader"
Kim Jong-il's father.
Communism, dead in Europe, was undergoing radical surgery in China. Times
weren't propitious for
Oriental despots wearing Marxist costumes, but old Kim had an idea. He
thought he might prolong the
life of his tyranny through an apocalyptic threat. In 1994, he announced he
was developing nuclear
weapons.

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton rose to the bait. He offered Kim's
dysfunctional dictatorship a
basketful of goodies, in return for which Daddy Kim promised to refrain
from reprocessing plutonium
and enriching uranium, the stuff of nuclear weapons, and content himself
with starving and repressing
his own people.

The Great Leader passed on, and his son inherited the mantle. After George
W. Bush took office, Dear
Leader Kim admitted that his Dad had continued to dabble in reprocessed
plutonium and enriched
uranium after he said he wouldn't, and young Kim followed in his footsteps.
Maybe it wasn't cricket,
but hell, it's a tough world and if tyrants don't look out for themselves,
no one will. Kim Junior also
tested rockets that could reach Hawaii -- so perhaps he and Mr. Bush should
talk. Dear Leader had an
offer a U.S. president couldn't refuse.

If the new occupant of the White House saw the movie, he didn't follow the
script. Mr. Bush responded
by calling Dear Leader and his regime part of an axis of evil, and not the
kind of folks he wanted to
pass the time of day with. Rather than pushing for direct talks with
Washington, North Korea had
better participate in a regional six-nation disarmament conference.

This wasn't the response Dear Leader expected. After mulling it over, this
month he upped the ante by
declaring that he already possessed nuclear weapons. To Kim's dismay,
however, instead of a request
by the U.S. Secretary of State for an audience, his declaration resulted in
Condoleezza Rice referring to
North Korea as an outpost of tyranny, while Mr. Bush asked the Chinese to
see if they could get their
comrades back to Earth.

Which brings us to last weekend. Comrade Wang, head of the Chinese
Communist Party's international
bureau, arrived in Pyongyang, ostensibly to persuade Kim to return to the
six-party disarmament talks
and stop insisting on bilateral talks with America, whereupon North Korea's
ruler pulled an Achilles
and retired to sulk in his tent. Dear Leader wanted no talks, bi- or
multilateral, until the U.S. agreed, as
a precondition of North Korea coming to the table, to make no attempt to
topple the communist
regime.

One can see why Kim Jong-il is concerned. His father had a bright idea 11
years ago, but with a cowboy
in the White House tyrants get no respect, whether they really have weapons
of mass destruction or
merely pretend to have them. As Saddam Hussein discovered to his detriment.

Dear Leader Kim has reason to worry -- but so do the rest of us. With nukes
or without, North Korea is
a grave threat. People of intelligence and goodwill may disagree on how to
deal with rogue states
developing, or feigning to develop, nuclear technology, but before
recommending either dialogue or
destruction, there are some things to consider.

- The likelihood of North Korea actually having nuclear weapons is remote.
The South Koreans
certainly don't believe it. While this may be wishful thinking, North Korea
never having tested a nuclear
weapon is a fact.

- All the same, the safe assumption is that a regime that claims or
simulates having weapons of mass
destruction has them. Any other assumption is irresponsible. So is waiting.
Time is on the side of rogue
regimes trying to develop WMDs.

- China may or may not be an innocent bystander in North Korea's scheme of
nuclear blackmail, and
may or may not act as an honest broker. Minimally, China expects a free
hand in Taiwan as the price of
its intercession with the Kim regime. It's even possible that Beijing has
stirred up the entire hornet's
nest, playing on Kim Jong-il's paranoia, so it could then ride to the
world's rescue -- for a reward.

- Suggesting, as Fred Kaplan did on this page last week, that "[e]ven if
Kim Jong-il were the sanest
leader on the planet" it would still be possible for him to "have good
reason to desire a cache of
nuclear weapons" because the Bush administration "has never relaxed its
open hostility to North
Korea" is a textbook way of putting the cart before the horse. If the Bush
White House is hostile to
North Korea -- or to Iran -- it's because they're trying to acquire a cache
of nuclear weapons. Countries
that make no such attempt incur no such hostility.

Liberalism's moral trap lies in trying to be even-handed between good and
evil. So does its practical
trap. That's why Kim has nukes today, if he has them.

мй National Post 2005

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BUSH HAS GOOD REASON TO BE HOSTILE by George Jonas National Post February 21, 2005

BUSH HAS GOOD REASON TO BE HOSTILE
by George Jonas
National Post
February 21, 2005