Has Bush Overstated North Korean Threat?

Just how much danger is posed by North Korea, and what should be done about it?

President Bush’s inclusion of North Korea in an “axis of evil” with Iraq and Iran in last week’s State of the Union address has touched off a raging debate about whether the eccentric Communist regime is as immediate a menace as the president suggested.

Although there is little doubt that North Korea is armed to the teeth--the country with a population of only 24 million is said to have at least the fifth-largest army in the world--the prevailing view is that the threat has waned because of an effort by South Korean President Kim Dae Jung to engage the North in dialogue.

Kim’s so-called sunshine policy has won him considerable international support, as well as a Nobel Peace Prize. Germany and Britain are among the U.S. allies that have opened embassies in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, in the last two years.

Now, South Korea is in political turmoil over Bush’s remarks and the suggestion that the war against terrorism could spill over to the Korean peninsula.

Newspaper editorials have labeled the U.S. president a “cowboy” bent on war, while labor unions, church groups and a Buddhist association are among those that have issued statements this week accusing Bush of endangering world peace.

And in what was widely viewed as a veiled criticism of Bush, who will visit South Korea in two weeks, Kim warned in a speech Tuesday to government appointees that “we must think of the monstrous damage that a war on the Korean peninsula would cause.”

The uproar has to do with one simple sentence in the Jan. 29 speech, in which Bush said, “North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction while starving its citizens.”

Oddly enough, for all the fuss, few are disputing the truthfulness of Bush’s allegations. Rather, it is the implication that the war against terrorism should extend to North Korea that has raised objections.

“The basic language about having weapons of mass destruction and starving its citizens, well, nobody is going to challenge that. [Instead], it is the nature of the rhetoric, the bombast that is not backed up by any real policy,” said Scott Snyder, the Asia Foundation’s representative in Seoul.

William Taylor, a Korea specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that Bush is confusing the issue of weapons proliferation with the war on terrorism.

“If you want to deal with missile proliferation and missile technology, you can do that, but North Korea is not part of any evil empire connected with the war on terrorism,” Taylor said.

Of course, any discussion of how much of a threat is posed by North Korea is shrouded in partisan politics. In South Korea, as in the United States, conservatives tend to rail about the Communist menace of North Korea, while liberals believe that the country merits more sympathy than fear.

In recent years, the CIA and State Department have tended to diverge in their assessments of North Korea, with the latter more swayed by progress on the diplomatic front to open up isolationist North Korea to the outside world.

“I always used to call North Korea the long-running failure in the history of American espionage,” said a former intelligence official with many years of experience on the peninsula. “We are good at assessing their capabilities but have very little idea about their intentions.”

Perhaps because of its desperate need for humanitarian aid, North Korea has been on relatively good behavior in the last few years. Since 1998, when the world’s nerves were set on edge by a test launch of the Taepodong missile over Japan, North Korea has observed a moratorium on missile testing. North Korea’s nuclear program at its Yongbyon facility has been frozen since 1994 through a framework agreement under which a U.S.-led international consortium is helping the nation build a light-water reactor to address its energy shortage.

No evidence has emerged of any North Korean connection to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and Pentagon. In fact, Taylor, the Korea expert, said that North Korea had not been implicated in any terrorist incidents for more than a decade, although its name remains on the State Department list of terror-sponsoring countries.

In its last months in office, the Clinton administration was considering removing North Korea from the list as part of a deal in the works under which the Communist nation would be paid to give up its missile sales.

“I’m a Republican, but I’ve got to say that the Clinton administration’s policy on North Korea--constructive engagement and deterrence--was working, maybe their only foreign policy that was successful,” Taylor said.

The South Korean government believes that although the Pyongyang regime has moved slowly to open up, the “sunshine policy” has succeeded in at least in reducing tensions on the peninsula and letting normal life flourish.

“Now we worry that South Korea will become a hostage in the rhetoric between the United States and North Korea,” said Park Young Ho, a director of a government-run think tank in Seoul.

The prospect of a war on the Korean peninsula is a terrifying scenario. The DMZ that has separated the two nations since the end of the Korean War in 1953 is the most militarized border in the world.

Taylor said it would be a mistake to look to the Afghanistan campaign or even the 1991 Persian Gulf War against Iraq for a model of how to deal with North Korea.

“If there were to be a war on the Korean peninsula, we would win but at a horrendous cost,” he said. “It would be a classic pyrrhic victory. We could devastate North Korea, but we would lose hundreds of thousands of South Korean and Japanese allies in the first few days.”

Gen. Thomas Schwartz, commander of U.S. troops stationed in South Korea, testified last March before Congress that the North has 1.2 million soldiers on active duty and that it commands the largest submarine fleet in the world. Even after President Kim made a historic visit to Pyongyang in June 2000, North Korea continued to mass forces near the demilitarized zone between the two countries, becoming an ever more serious threat to South Korea and to the 37,000 U.S. troops stationed here, Schwartz said.

“The perception of a peaceful peninsula differs from reality,” Schwartz testified. North Korean leader Kim Jong Il “stubbornly adheres to his ‘military first’ policy, pouring huge amounts of his budget resources into the military. . . . As a result, his military forces are bigger, better, closer and deadlier.”

Two declassified CIA reports released last month gave similarly dire assessments of North Korea. The agency said in a report made public after Bush’s speech that North Korea is “capable of producing and delivering via missile warheads or other munitions a wide variety of chemical agents and possibly some biological agents.” The report also said that, before the 1994 freeze on its nuclear program, the Communist nation had accumulated enough plutonium for at least one nuclear weapon.

The other report said North Korea was continuing work on developing its Taepodong missile, which would be capable of reaching Alaska and Hawaii.

North Korea has reacted to Bush’s statements with characteristic bluster, calling them tantamount to a declaration of war. In statements reported Wednesday in South Korea, Radio Pyongyang said that the U.S. president’s upcoming visit to Asia was designed to “heighten tension in the Korean peninsula and stage a war against North Korea.”