Deal with Kim, Mr Bush

WE NOW expect that George W Bush, being the great defender of freedom and protector of the United States that he is, will launch an immediate pre-emptive strike to topple the Communist regime in North Korea which, it is now clear, represents a far greater danger to the democratic world than Saddam Hussein ever did. Indeed, according to the authoritative Jane’s Defence Weekly, North Korea is now deploying new land and sea-based ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads and may have sufficient range to reach the United States. Surely the decisive enemy of terrorists cannot allow this unpredictable rogue regime to present such a dangerous threat to his country. And, lucky for him, there is no need in this case to depend on the CIA to concoct any fraudulent intelligence about weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for going to war.

The implications of North Korea’s open and defiant declaration of being the world’s ninth nuclear power have now become alarmingly clear. If Bush had chosen to disregard Kim Jong Il’s earlier claim to have developed a number of nuclear bombs he now has the evidence of North Korea’s nuclear weaponry from reports in the reputable Jane’s Defence Weekly and the testimony of two NK scientists who were engaged in that country’s development of chemical weapons before they defected to the South. According to Jane’s, the 12 former Soviet submarines which NK had purchased in the 1990s have been fitted with ballistic missiles which are potentially the more threatening of NK’s two new weapons systems. The weekly, which is regarded as an expert on weapons systems, noted that NK’s marine-launched missiles “could finally provide its leadership with something it has long sought to obtain - the ability to directly threaten the continental US.” In addition, the paper raised the possibility that cash-strapped NK might want to sell the technology to countries that have bought its missiles in the past, with Iran being a prime candidate.

A BBC special report on Tuesday night revealed the horror story of  NK’s experiments in developing chemical weapons as told by two defecting scientists. They told of the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of dissidents and their families, including wives and children, in cubicles injected with a mixture of cyanide and other gasses. The purpose, the defectors explain, was to determine the killing rate of the gas and the amount that would be required to annihiliate a city as large as Seoul. The BBC report also dealt with the wholesale starvation, torture and murder among the people of North Korea which had become routine under Kim Jong Il’s oppressive,  isolationist and  paranoid regime. Now clearly, the people of the Korean peninsula, the countries of that region and the United States would be better off or feel much safer if the contemptuous Kim were toppled.

In fact, NK presents a far greater and more realistic threat than Saddam ever did. And the NK dictator is not keen on hiding it. All the reasons that Bush has offered for his pre-emtive strike on Iraq apply more frighteningly to this eccentric regime in North Korea. So what is the great anti-terrorist fighter, the dynamic defender of the American people, the Commander in Chief of the forces of the world’s only superpower going to do about it? Surely he must be consistent and send his soldiers to deal with Kim, or betray his vaunted self-awarded credentials. Simply creating more paranoia among Americans by declaring another terrorist alert based again on bogus intelligence — three year old stuff — just will not do.