Kerry�s North Korea Blunder

Last week�s Bush-Kerry debate hinged on which candidate would be more conspicuously horrible. As it turned out, Bush was so rambling, incoherent, twangy, and cranky that anyone with a complete set of teeth, some command of the English language, and reasonably clear annunciation could have walked away with it–and did, but not without a fatal blunder on one of the key national security issues we face.

Kerry actually believes that in 2001, North Korea was safely in the box and that it was Bush who ruined everything. This would be a good opportunity to thank Jimmy Carter again for 1994, when he stepped out of his retirement to remind us what a dangerously abject failure he was as President. Of course, the catalyst for the latest crisis wasn�t the plutonium reactor where the UN inspectors once were, at least before the NorKs threw them out. The problem was that they secretly had a uranium program and continue to deny it to this day, even though China has finally acknowledged it. Kerry, then, was either misinformed or �misleading� us. Bush caught the error but then failed to explain it or drive the point home. Obviously, Kerry (1) doesn�t grasp the essential facts; and (2) stubbornly assumes that Kim Jong-Il is dealing in good faith, notwithstanding years of evidence to the contrary.

Predictably, Kerry�s error went almost completely unnoticed in the media.

Yes, I perked up when Kerry mentioned �human rights,� but I wasn�t fooled. Nice words, all two of them. Bush had some nice words about the concentration camps when he talked to Bob Woodward in 2001, but those words have resulted in nothing of consequence. Congress has taken the lead on giving the issue any significant attention. Unlike Kerry, Bush gets points for accepting the patent facts of Kim�s mendacity and South Korea�s moral corruption. In other contexts, he has shown the spine to put steel on a target, although flying steel won’t solve the greater North Korean problem . . . which is that it is ruled by Kim Jong-Il. Bush’s troop pullback in South Korea shows an understanding that our viable North Korean options don’t include launching a ground war, or even becoming embroiled in one.

Thank you, Mr. Kerrey, for noticing that there�s a human rights problem in North Korea. Do you comprehend that you won’t remedy it by helping the killers pay for more barbed wire, concrete, and precursor chemicals? Thank you, President Bush, for not wanting to �give Kim Jong-Il exactly what he wants,� but stiff-arming the Dear Leader is no substitute for an affirmative plan to effect tangible change.

My question for the candidates is this: What you are prepared to do after talks inevitably prove futile? Would you launch a direct military attack–one that confronts North Korea at the point of its last real strength–and risk the loss of millions of lives? Are you prepared to risk a naval confrontation in with China in the Yellow Sea to blockade North Korea? Have either of you the vision to directly empower the North Korean people with food, radios, newspapers, sanctuary for a few, and if all else fails, the training and arms to fight for their own freedom . . . even if it takes years of fighting the Chinese Army to a stalemate for them to get it?

We�ve tried talking. Clinton’s two-party talks were a fiasco. Bush’s six-party talks have gotten us nowhere. Doing both, as Kerry suggests, merely means a return to the Clinton policy of bilateral talks while maintaining six-party talks as a superfluous sham. We�ve had every kind of talks with North Korea. We�ve tried every conceiveable shape of table. The Dear Leader is still cranking out bombs and corpses with abandon. For the American people and for the North Korean people, the urgency is greater than our diplomacy suggests.

Without the determination to confront Kim Jong-Il and demonstrate the courage and determination to cause him some pain–some real concern for his personal welfare–simply talking about human rights won�t deliver any tangible improvement in the lives of North Koreans. Experience has taught us that talks with North Korea are a waste of oxygen unless you are willing to back your words with force, and unless you have an airtight way to verify North Korea’s compliance.

Thus we reach the confluence of the WMD and human rights issues. How can you verify the compliance of a regime that keeps a quarter of a million of its people in secret concentration camps, some of them involved in the production and testing of WMD programs? Would North Korea’s neighbors have the courage to raise human rights issues if the United States backed down from North Korea and allowed it to become a major nuclear power? Thus, the issues of North Korea’s WMD and its oppression of its people are mutually inextricable.