Looking Past Baghdad to the Next Challenge

Even as the battle for Baghdad is underway, the Bush administration is engaged in intensive debate over how to handle the two other countries it includes in its “axis of evil”: North Korea and Iran.

At issue is more than a simple ideological clash between hawks and doves, or a turf war between State Department and Pentagon officials. It is a struggle between risk-averse conservatives and hard-charging neoconservatives over what the U.S. can and should do about potentially hostile regimes that are developing weapons of mass destruction.

Both groups agree that it is unacceptable for North Korea and Iran to become nuclear powers. The question is how to stop them, with conservatives emphasizing diplomacy and neoconservatives willing to contemplate force.

Strategic decisions cannot be made until the damage from the Iraq war is tallied and the administration can gauge the extent of the U.S. diplomatic, military, financial and human resources that will be consumed by the postwar occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, two senior administration officials said last week.

Despite being a hawk, one administration source acknowledged that the United States has limited resources to pursue a global war on terrorism and weapons proliferation.

“Just because we’re the world’s only superpower ... there are still only 24 hours in the day,” he said. “It’s just a practical fact of life that you can only do so much on multiple crises at the same time.... If we hadn’t had Iraq, we could have done more on North Korea.”

Through the haze and confusion of war, one thing is clear: The lessons of Iraq will be vigorously debated inside and outside the administration.

“Human nature being what it is, history suggests that you’ll have no more consensus afterward than you had before,” Richard Haass, the State Department’s director of policy planning, said recently. “Every war is fought three times. It’s fought before, on whether you should go to war. It’s fought on the ground. And it’s fought afterward, about the lessons. And I expect this war will be the same.”

Which view wins out will shape the president’s decisions on North Korea and Iran. And the conclusions may not be as obvious as prewar punditry suggested.

Conversations with four senior U.S. officials over the last two weeks, all conducted on condition of anonymity, show an administration eager to dispel the image of a global “cowboy” with a one-size-fits-all-rogues approach that is ready to attack North Korea and Iran as soon as it finishes with Iraq.

All four expressed optimism that U.S. problems with North Korea and Iran could be resolved through diplomacy. But sharp differences emerged over approach.

On the eve of the U.S.-led assault on Iraq, one senior official was pressed for details on how the United States intended to deal with Iran’s nuclear programs. Asked what message Washington would like to send Tehran, the official replied: “Take a number.”

Upon being told of that remark, another senior official bristled with anger. “You’d better check the credibility of your source,” he said. Indeed, he argued, the war against Iraq could put the U.S.-Iranian relationship on a better footing. He said that U.S. contacts with the Iranians during the war had been frank and productive.

The two men work at the same agency.

It is a mistake to assume that President Bush will take the military action to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as a model for how to deal with other troublesome regimes, although some hard-line officials advocate such an approach, another official said.

Bush has not yet decided on the United States’ post-Iraq war game plan, officials said.

And though the president has acknowledged a personal loathing for North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, his stated goal is “a nonnuclear North Korea, peacefully obtained,” one official said.

U.S. officials said they are heartened by the fact that the North Koreans have not restarted their plutonium reprocessing plant, though American intelligence estimates deem them technically capable of doing so. Many analysts had anticipated that Pyongyang would wait until Washington was consumed with the Iraq war to trigger a crisis by churning out weapons-grade plutonium, firing a ballistic missile or provoking a military clash. So far, it has taken none of those steps.

North Korea is “still a situation we think can be managed,” one U.S. official said. “And you will notice that although the primary focus over the last two weeks has been Iraq, we haven’t taken our eyes off North Korea, and things have been moderately calmer.”

For several months, U.S. officials have been openly critical of China for not pressuring its North Korean ally enough to curb its nuclear brinkmanship. Such comments were notably absent last week. There were unconfirmed reports that the Chinese, who supply most of North Korea’s energy, had temporarily shut down an oil pipeline to North Korea as a warning to Pyongyang not to go nuclear.

One official hinted that some form of talks might be in the offing, adding, “Compared to three or four weeks ago, we’re in a better place with regards to North Korea.”

Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported Saturday that a U.S. special envoy had met in New York with North Korea’s deputy permanent representative at the United Nations for three days earlier in the week.

The U.S. also is pursuing action on North Korea in the U.N. Security Council. The council will take up North Korea’s noncompliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty on April 9. In January, North Korea announced it would withdraw from the treaty effective April 11, becoming the only nation among 188 signatories to do so.

U.S. officials hope to win a unanimous statement of condemnation from the council -- still bitterly divided over Iraq -- that will show Kim that the international community, and not just the U.S., abhors his nuclear ambitions.

On Saturday, North Korea lashed out at the United Nations, warning that Pyongyang would not abide by any action of the Security Council. “The U.N. seems to have lost its mandate because of the U.S. invasion of Iraq,” declared a statement on North Korea’s official KCNA news agency, which was monitored in Seoul.

Such measures as economic sanctions and interdiction of North Korean ships to stop nuclear or missile exports are possibilities, and force remains an option, one U.S. official said.

Preventing a nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula is one of three items on the administration’s postwar “to-do” list that are not deemed optional. The two others are continuing the reconstruction of Afghanistan and consolidating the U.S. position in Iraq, officials said.

Bush also has said he intends to push the “road map” he has released to try to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

But current and former U.S. officials are openly divided over one agenda item: Iran.

In a speech last month, Bush asserted the right to preventive strikes against terrorist nations that would harm the United States. “Responding to such enemies only after they have struck first is not self-defense,” the president said. “It is suicide.”

The administration is deeply disturbed by Iran’s harboring of top-level Al Qaeda members, its bankrolling of the Hezbollah terrorist group and the International Atomic Energy Agency’s recent inspection that confirmed what Washington has long asserted: that Iran is much closer than anyone had thought to developing a nuclear bomb.

Issues under discussion include whether the threat of sanctions or military force would push Iran to rush even faster for the security of nuclear weapons; whether its nascent democracy will triumph over or be crushed by theocracy; and even whether attempts by the “Great Satan,” as the regime portrays the U.S., to strengthen Iranian reformers are counterproductive and should be scrapped.

In the meantime, the U.S. is pressuring Russia and China to stop cooperating with what it believes to be a clandestine Iranian nuclear weapons program. Iran insists that the program is strictly civilian.

Russia and China have agreed in public that a nuclear North Korea would destabilize East Asia. But it is unclear that either sees keeping Iran out of the nuclear club as vital to its national interest.

Although some neoconservatives might like Tehran to think that force is an option, the U.S. would find it impossible to assemble an international coalition that supports military action against Iran, experts said.

It would be difficult even to secure political or economic sanctions, said Roger Cressey, a former director of the National Security Council’s Office of Transnational Threats who left the White House a few months ago.

“Iran has an internationally recognized government,” Cressey said. “So if you think we had trouble putting together a coalition against Iraq, stay tuned. There is no compelling military option, even though they are developing nukes, chemical and biological [weapons] and harbor terrorists. We can’t just march over the mountains like Hannibal and attack Tehran.”

In short, Cressey said, Iran is “the worst of all worlds” for American would-be interventionists.

And as if that postwar agenda were not daunting enough, the administration will also have to prioritize a dizzying array of other foreign policy challenges.

They include Syria, which the U.S. accuses of having sold arms to Iraq and which has said it hopes the U.S. loses the war in Iraq. Syria has “hurt itself in the eyes of this administration,” an official said. It has been a good client for North Korean missiles and is believed to be pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

And finally, there is Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi. Once considered the United States’ Enemy No. 1, he now seeks to rehabilitate himself with the West. But the U.S. and Israel believe that Kadafi is pursuing nuclear weapons even more vigorously since U.N. sanctions were eased in 1999, an official said.

Which of these many battles will the Bush administration try to fight -- and how?

“We’ll have to see what the scene looks like the morning after,” one official said. “We don’t have decisions yet. We’re in the land of hypotheticals here. What [resources] is Iraq going to be absorbing once the traditional military phase is over? I don’t know the answer to that. There are too many unknowns.”

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Times staff writers Josh Meyer and Doyle McManus in Washington and Barbara Demick in Seoul contributed to this report.