Tuesday, August 25, 1998

Korea may be greatest threat to our security

For much of his presidency, when his credibility seemed in reasonable repair and no scandal clearly threatened his attentiveness, President Clinton was blessed with quietude in foreign affairs.

Now, when his Lewinsky tales have left him bereft of believability and given him possible impeachment proceedings to worry about, trouble is bursting out all over. The terrorism as witnessed at U.S. embassies in Africa is less than half of it, and maybe less a national imperilment than what is now going on in North Korea.

Spy satellites have told the tale. Some 15,000 North Koreans are digging a huge underground facility, apparently to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs. The North Koreans had previously agreed to do no such thing. They supposedly had abandoned other above-ground nuclear facilities and their A-bomb ambitions after the United States and other nations agreed to a $6 billion program of providing fuel while constructing two power plants incapable of spewing forth weapons-grade material.

Zany situation

It's zany to put this aid as well as international contributions of food at risk, experts and non-experts agree, but North Korea is zanily and even demonically governed, many also agree. While hundreds of thousands of its people are starving and its infrastructure is crumbling, North Korea pumps its depleted resources into a million-man military force, reckoned to be the world's fifth largest. The regime is reputed to promote terrorism and export missile technology to other rogue regimes. Its leader, Kim Jong Il, who propagandizes his life as if it were divine, is said to be responsible for terrorist acts himself, including the 1987 downing of a South Korean airliner. One report has it that this leader of a famine-struck nation spends $1 million a year on cognac for his pals.

Could a nation so desperate, morally degraded and irrationally inclined someday send nuclear missiles South Korea's way, plot the deaths of 37,000 American troops in the Korean demilitarized zone and maybe even attack Japan?

Best preventative?

Some observers have written that they think so, and some have questioned in print whether the best preventative is to try to coax North Korea into rational, civilized conduct with billions in aid. Surely it isn't, but there then comes another question being bruited in the press: Can this administration cope with myriad foreign perplexities - this problem, terrorism, the Asian and Russian financial crises, the bombing in Ireland, the killings in Kosovo - when presidential actions may have forfeited the trust of the American public and foreign allies and when a weakened president has his administration's very survival to focus on?

The U.S. attacks on terrorist operations in Afghanistan and the Sudan, coming after the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, might appear to be an affirmative answer, but cannot be taken as final proof that national security is in the most reliable of hands at the moment. It's a peculiar situation, to say the least, for the world's only superpower to be in.