Kim still poses nuclear threat

The News Virginian
Published: June 27, 2008

Inclinations to invite Kim Jong Il for Fourth of July hot dogs and hamburgers should be considered with skepticism. So too should the notion that North Korea’s removal from a list of terror sponsors somehow translates to an alteration of that country’s status as an enemy of the United States. The destruction of a cooling tower neither reduced North Korea’s atomic arsenal nor its evident animus to liberty. Nonetheless, credulity’s limits expand.
North Korea brought to rubble Thursday the 60-foot tower that stood at its Yongbyon nuclear complex as an icon to its production of weapons-grade plutonium. News networks and the U.S. responded in the fashion of Pavlov’s dog, chronicling the event in footage broadcast around the globe and lifting the dread terror label that had prevented Kim from doing business at the World Bank.
However, the event does not prevent Kim from continuing a business in which he long has been engaged, pedaling ballistic missiles and nuclear technology to Iran and Syria, prominent among other enemies of America tainted by terrorism’s blood stain. President Bush disseminated caveats with the sort of vigor he ordinarily reserves for clearing brush at the ranch in Crawford.
“This isn’t the end of the process, this is the beginning of the process,” the president said, demonstrating the relativity of a term.
There is assuredly benefit in what so far has transpired in North Korea, principally in the U.S. acquiring access to Yongbyon records, which should paint semblance of a picture regarding Kim’s capacity to build nuclear weapons. But the concept of access may vary from its execution. Believing that America will gain a full accounting requires belief that Kim will fulfill promises, which perhaps approaches belief in the mystical.
Further, it requires neglect in contemplating the possibility that Kim’s aim is not détente but acquiring badly needed aid in a place where food is a scarcity. What happens after North Korea acquires sufficient help to sustain a later bout of pariah status endured while rearming? Cynics, plagued by realism, suggest not much.
“I am not impressed,” Korean Institute Defense Analyses senior fellow Kim Tae Woo told the Christian Science Monitor. “What the U.S. is doing is for political effect. The declaration is becoming a political game.”
Such games are decidedly the stuff of diplomacy, but for the credulous, they are also the stuff of eventual shattered faith. Iran surely is encouraged. Its message is press on with nuclear programs in anticipation of opposition ostentatious in display but feeble in spirit. When needed, concede in a form rich in symbolism but hollow in meaning, and live to proliferate in future days.
If Bush has lacked will to seek full disarmament rather than ostensible progress toward it, what will be the case with America’s next president, particularly if that mantle falls to Barack Obama, with his idea of negotiating with enemies rather than confronting and defeating them? Surely, Kim has wondered as much with relish.
Recalling a clash with another rouge state, Libya, in an era 20 years past reminds us anew that America could use a man like Ronald Reagan again. Obama reflects the Gipper’s political charm but what is needed with regard to North Korea is that soft-spoken leader’s unbending mettle in the face of tyrants.