Tuesday, November 05, 2002

A good analogy for North Korea's realtions with the West.

Dialogue with North Korea is like the running gag in the Peanuts comic strip: Lucy holds the football and invites Charlie Brown to kick it, but as he runs up she snatches the ball away and Charlie Brown collapses in an inglorious heap.

We have had three "negotiated solutions" with North Korea in a decade. In 1992, it agreed with South Korea that neither would have nuclear weapons. In 1994, after a confrontation with the Clinton administration that nearly led to war, Pyongyang signed a Geneva agreement to suspend its nuclear weapons program. At the Korean summit in 2000, it signed more pieces of paper about peace and cooperation on the peninsula.

Now South Korean President Kim Dae Jung is picking himself up from the heap again. He's game for another run at the football. It's very saintly of him, but it doesn't seem likely to produce what we all want -- a secure peace on the peninsula.

Now we are being told that Pyongyang's "voluntary" confession of its nuclear program shows that it is eager for dialogue and ready to show "transparency." But this confession was not volunteered; it was elicited by a U.S. diplomat who produced irrefutable proof, reportedly including receipts and customs documents, of Pyongyang's cheating.

Should we nevertheless try one more time to kick Lucy Jong Il's dialogue football? The danger of isolating North Korea, as Kim Dae Jung pointed out, is that it will only go ahead with both nuclear programs -- the plutonium reprocessing that was stopped by the 1994 agreement and the new uranium enrichment program. In short order, Pyongyang could have 10 or a dozen bombs and could sell fissile material to terrorists or rogue states.

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