The Emperor Has No Dong

It is still not certain that the North Koreans actually have usable nuclear weapons. But it's now clear that, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said they did a few weeks ago, he was not just blowing smoke.

North Korea's revelation last week that it has a bomb program was greeted by opponents of an Iraq invasion with a kind of glee. Even supposedly neutral parties saw it as a setback for America's Middle East hawks. Speaking on CNN, Kelly Wallace said: "I just talked to a senior official who says this will have no impact on coalition building for Iraq. But really, White House officials have to know it is going to be somewhat of a complicating factor, because you have this administration taking two approaches. It is saying that for Iraq, it is considering the possible use of military action to deal with Saddam Hussein and to prevent him from one day acquiring nuclear weapons"?while we have not thus far threatened to bomb North Korea.

Wallace's report is a journalistic curiosity. As I've often written in this column, in a 500-channel world, editorializing?and even "bias"?on the news is to be encouraged. One wonders, though, why Wallace called the White House in the first place, if she planned merely to follow up its statements with a dismissive, "But here's what I think..."

What Wallace thought was decidedly confused. For one thing, she was under the impression that North Korea had just decided out of the blue to fess up to its misdeeds. A lot of talking heads and editorial writers were under the same impression, and they set themselves to wondering why. The conclusion they reached, almost unanimously, was that the world's last Stalinist regime was developing thermonuclear weapons because... well, because it just wanted to be loved. On CNN, Paula Zahn suggested to Kelly Wallace that "perhaps this admission is a sign that the North Koreans really do want to have a dialogue on this." And that struck Kelly as reasonable. She said: "It's...possibly a way for some leverage, to say, 'We need economic aid,' 'We want better relations,' 'We want to come clean here and move forward with the United States and the rest of the Western world.'"

That makes no sense. North Korea didn't admit to its nuclear program?we discovered it through surveillance, and then confronted them with our knowledge. And the reason they wouldn't consider it anything to brag about is that, under a cowardly agreement negotiated by the Clinton administration in 1994, we have propped up Kim Jong Il's regime by giving it tons of hard currency?the "economic aid" Wallace speaks of?not to build nukes. We've basically been paying the North Koreans handsomely to honor the nuclear nonproliferation treaties they've signed, and which South Korea has both signed and obeyed. We've even built two nuclear reactors for Kim. Yet he and his regime began to breach this agreement almost immediately after signing it. They have obstructed both the scheduled and the "challenge" inspections of their nuclear facilities, to the point where cataloguing their atomic assets would be as formidable a task as cataloguing Kim's pornography collection (which is rumored among intelligence sources to be a veritable Bodleian of international hardcore). In 1998, Kim's regime even tested one of its new, long-range No Dong missiles (don't look at me?I didn't name them) by firing it over Japan. According to the CIA's national intelligence council, North Korea may be ready to flight-test a brand new rocket?the multiple stage Taepo Dong-2, capable of hitting the United States.

The Clintonites were so sanctimonious about this deal when they cut it. They bragged about what a big improvement "engagement" was over the "outmoded politics of the Cold War," etc. etc. It was part of a pattern in which the White House pursued a foreign policy aimed at inflating its own moral vanity, while giving a slapdash treatment to real threats to our national security. First we put our diplomacy and our armed forces at the service of the Idi Amin of the Caribbean. In reinstalling Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti, we focused our national defense on besting a Haitian military whose asses the Salvation Army could have kicked. Then we joined the side of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Saddam Hussein to back Kosovo against Serbia, bombing the civilian population of a traditional ally to the end of establishing an Islamic mafia regime in the Balkans. As the former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack puts in his excellent Iraq book The Threatening Storm, "The most difficult questions I was always asked by my bosses were those such as, 'Why should we devote all of these resources to Iraq to head off a problem that we may have in the future, rather than using them to solve the crises we have right now in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, etc.?'" Of course, we all sleep more soundly now, knowing that the Haitian tiger is at bay.

To look at our dealings with Kim's dictatorship is to be reminded of Jimmy Carter's tortured realization that "Brezhnev lied to me!" And that is why anyone who thinks the North Korea incident weakens the case for going to war against Iraq is out of his mind. The proper lesson to be drawn from it is: This is exactly what you get when you negotiate with communists and other tyrants. North Korea told us they had no nuclear program in 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2002. Saddam Hussein now tells us he has no interest in weapons of mass destruction. In an op-ed in The New York Times composed with the help of Saddam's apologist Jude Wanniski, Iraq's UN ambassador Mohammed Aldouri writes:

"We have no intention of attacking anyone, now or in the future, with weapons of any kind. If we are attacked, we will surely defend ourselves with all means possible. But bear in mind that we have no nuclear or biological or chemical weapons, and we have no intention of acquiring them."

Sounds good, doesn't it? I would suggest we read such lies in the spirit of Pyongyang.

Steele Drum

Shelby Steele has a superb essay on race and individualism in this month's Harper's. It is worth a subscription to read. In fact, Harry Belafonte ought to be made to learn it by heart. Belafonte, for those who missed it, appeared on Larry King Live last week. There he accused Secretary of State Colin Powell of being a "house slave" for participating in the Bush administration's war effort.

Powell is not always my favorite member of the Bush administration, and Belafonte is entitled to think what he wants about him. But Belafonte's intervention was?at the risk of overusing a term of abuse?sad. I am no expert in black life. It is the easiest thing in the world to invoke it in a way that (a) teaches me something new and (b) challenges the way I think. And yet this hoary house-slave-versus-field-slave metaphor is one I've heard two dozen times. And if I've heard it two dozen times, believe me, it's a cliche. If Belafonte can't make me think, then he's not thinking himself.

When Belafonte began to catch flak from viewers, he explained, "The metaphor used about slavery?it is my personal feeling that plantations exist all over America." But that's just the point?it's not a personal feeling at all. It's a piece of impersonal agitprop. It's what the French call prêt-à-penser. Colin Powell is a man of considerable distinction: Does Belafonte believe that the choices of even a man as distinguished as Colin Powell boil down to the dialectic of slave/non-slave? How bleak?for Belafonte.