Misplaced Priorities

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Throughout Asia the talk is of impending war. Yet the potential conflict that has so many Asians concerned is not the one debated daily in the U.N. or blustered about in Washington. The issue of whether Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, and where he is hiding his empty shell casings, seems in this part of the world secondary to Kim Jong Il's admission of restarting his nuclear program and Pyongyang's assertion that it might strike first if the U.S. deploys more forces in the Western Pacific. These escalations, coming from a country that, by most accounts, already possesses precisely the types of weapons of mass destruction that inspectors are searching for in Iraq, have alarmed Asians from Tokyo to Singapore. The most immediate threat to global security, from the Asian point of view, is Kim Jong Il, which makes perplexing the U.S. insistence that the North Korean issue is not a crisis. Perhaps a dictator with weapons of mass destruction is less of a threat if he is in East Asia rather than the Middle East, considering the volatility of Arab-Israeli relations and the relative stability of most of East Asia. But if the issues are weapons proliferation and state-sponsored terrorism, then the track record of North Korea's dictator may be even more frightening than Saddam Hussein's.

North Korea, to a greater extent than Iraq, defines itself almost entirely by its anti-Americanism. Hatred and suspicion of the U.S., and its perceived stooges Japan and South Korea, are not only policy, they are a national rallying point. North Korea's state philosophy of juche, usually translated as "self-reliance," relies on anti-American rhetoric for most of its brittle, thin substance. The U.S., according to North Korean history, started the Korean War, continues to pursue aggressive policies on the peninsula and aspires to the subjugation of all Koreans. Pyongyang unites its starving and impoverished people by flagrantly appealing to this hysterical world view. And these theories have been put into violent practice: North Korea launched an aggressive war in 1950, regularly kidnapped foreign nationals and is already a force in the global drug and arms trades. (Imagine if a shipment of Scud missiles was intercepted coming from Iraq, as a North Korean shipment was in the Indian Ocean last December. What are the chances the U.S. would allow that vessel to continue onward to Yemen?) Add to this North Korea's economic desperation—the country doesn't have the natural resources that Iraq can still exploit to somewhat mollify a collapsing standard of living—and it would seem that Pyongyang poses the more dangerous threat.

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Yet it is Iraq that dominates the headlines, forms the foreign-policy substance of President George W. Bush's State of the Union address and has the U.S. scurrying to build a global coalition as it mobilizes for war. This may once have made sense in Washington, where in the aftermath of 9/11, a decision was taken to seek regime change in Iraq. That Saddam is a dangerous tyrant who should be removed from the world stage is indisputable—from both Asian and American points of view. But the Bush Administration's agenda—to resolve the Kim Jong Il problem after Saddam is deposed—may be tipping into obsolescence. Asians wonder at what point Kim Jong Il's weapons projects and bellicose talk will finally cause a reordering of American priorities. Building a diplomatic coalition to resolve the North Korean problem will take almost as much arm twisting and sweet talking as convincing the Europeans to climb on board for Baghdad. South Korea continues a unilateral policy of engagement with North Korea that amounts to appeasement. China's goal is to prop up North Korea rather than risk a flood of refugees. Japan wavers between resolve and cowardice.

Possibly it would be easier to unite the region after the U.S. has emerged victorious from a campaign in Iraq. But until then the region would have to survive months of aggressive North Korean posturing that verges on nuclear blackmail. And by the time the U.S. got around to sitting down with North Korea, it might be dealing with a nuclear-armed state, one that would be in a much stronger bargaining position than now. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said the U.S. could, if necessary, fight a war in two theaters. That's an inadequate justification for current U.S. policy. (The Secretary also fails to mention the horrible potential cost of a second Asian front. During the latter half of the 20th century the U.S. lost more lives in combat in Asia than in wars in the rest of the world combined.) The current approach of treating Kim Jong Il as less dangerous than Saddam Hussein and the North Korean problem as little more than a troubling sideshow is what opens the U.S. to accusations of caring more about oil than security. Averting yet another Asian conflict should be a more central and immediate goal of U.S. policy.

For Asians, the sight of Secretary of State Colin Powell at the U.N. playing audio tapes of Iraqi officers allegedly discussing the hiding of chemical weapons seems almost comical when Kim Jong Il's scientists have fired up a nuclear reactor, the primary purpose of which is to produce weapons-grade plutonium. American inaction in the face of North Korean threats amounts to throwing oil onto the fire. Or should I say putting petroleum before a burning issue?