Monkey knows which tree

IT IS quite laughable that the United States is now earnestly seeking the support of the United Nations to deal with the rogue government of North Korea which clearly presents a far more dangerous threat to the US and the rest of the world than Saddam Hussein ever did. The inconsistency is blatant and serves also to expose the gross hypocrisy in the Bush adminisration's proud boast that they had toppled a brutal dictator in Iraq whose weapons of mass destruction threatened the security of the US and the Middle East.

The Bush government has not only declared it has no aggressive intent on North Korea but is now seeking by a process of international diplomacy to persuade the reckless regime of Kim Jong Il to drop is overt programme of building nuclear bombs. Mr Bush contemptuously ignored the disapproval of the UN Security Council and world opinion to launch a pulverising invasion of Iraq, although Saddam Hussein had denied having any weapons of mass destruction and the UN weapons inspectors were asking for more time to complete their assignment. No such weapons have been found, it is now clear that the US President conned the entire world on that pretext and now US troops are reaping the rewards of their illegal invasion and occupation by a retaliatory guerrilla war in which they are picked off like sitting ducks on a daily basis.

But why now the appeasing diplomatic treatment of the North Korean regime which is no less brutal than Saddam's, far more unpredictable and devious and makes no bones about its nuclear programme and ambitions? Is it because Kim Jong Il's country is not an oil producer, has no strategic value to the US or, as a Trini would say, monkey know which tree to climb? After all, North Korea is a swaggering, isolationist, maverick military state with a standing army of millions. But its threat to the US, the Near East and the rest of the world is patent and frightening in its open admission of having built a number of nuclear bombs, that it is busily producing the stuff to build more and that it will make use of them in whatever ways it chooses. Having regard to Kim's chronic duplicity, there is no ruling out the possibility that he may want to auction off one to the highest bidder - any of the terrorist nations or groups which could include Osama Ben Laden.

The fact that Kim Jong Il is a serial agreement-and-promise-breaker makes the situation even more dangerous, since he apparently cannot be trusted. He began to play this game back in the early 1990s when his plutonium-producing programme broke both the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and an agreement with the South to keep the peninsula nuclear free. His recently discovered uranium enriching and his admission of resuming plutonium reprocessing have, in effect, consigned these agreements and his 1994 one with the US to the scrap heap. In addition, Kim has sent packing the few international monitors who were keeping an eye on the plutonium-laden spent fuel-rods which he had stored as part of an earlier deal. While smashing Saddam Hussein's regime, which had no WMDs and presented no threat to the US, was no big thing for bully Bush, the idea of dealing in the same fashion with the dangerous Kim and his determination to join the nuclear club, of course, will not occur to the man who governs the world's only superpower, nor will any recognition of the hypocrisy of the US approach to these two "threatening" regimes cause any readjustment in the self-seeking motives of American foreign policy.