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Bush keeps his focus on Saddam

BY JON SAWYER

WASHINGTON - In a world suddenly full of competing dangers, President George W. Bush is determined to keep the focus on what he considers a matter of first things first - eliminating the threat posed by Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

Last weekend the world got a brutal reminder that while al-Qaida-style terrorism may be on the run it still packs a brutal punch - the nightclub car-bombing on the Indonesian resort island of Bali that claimed at least 180 lives.

And then on Wednesday came the bombshell news that North Korea was acquiring additional bombs - nuclear, that is - in flagrant violation of pledges to the United States and to the international community.

Yet when Bush appeared in Springfield, Mo., on Friday, campaigning for Republican Senate candidate Jim Talent, he mentioned the Indonesian terror attack only in passing and North Korea's disclosure not at all. The focus, when Bush turned to national security, was Saddam.

"The world has been put on notice," Bush said. "Mr. Saddam Hussein is now on notice. We expect him to disarm. We expect him to live up to the obligations that he has told the world that he would meet."

Yet even as Bush spoke, his diplomatic representatives at the United Nations were scrambling to salvage a resolution on Iraq that voices the bold resolve he feels - after an open debate before the Security Council in which only two of 60 nations backed the U.S. call for a single resolution threatening military action if Saddam refused immediate disarmament.

Most analysts believe the administration will eventually get what it needs in the way of U.N. authorization. Many support Bush's assessment of Iraq as the essential first target. Almost all, however, say the developments this past week in Indonesia and North Korea were unwelcome complications in the effort to rally U.S. and world support in taking on Iraq.

Delayed disclosure

North Korean officials confirmed the nuclear violation to U.S. officials at a meeting in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang on Oct. 4. The administration did not disclose it publicly, however, for 12 days - until after the Iraq war resolution had been debated in Congress, approved and signed into law.

House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., said that as of late Friday he had still not been briefed on the North Korean developments. An aide said Gephardt was "disappointed" that the administration had not been forthcoming but that he welcomed administration statements pledging to work with allies in the region to seek a diplomatic solution.

Critics said earlier disclosure of the North Korean news might have complicated the congressional debate on the Iraq war resolution but would probably not have affected the outcome - a strong vote of support for Bush.

"If Congress and the public had known as soon as the administration knew (about North Korea) it would have raised questions about blowing up Iraq that the administration couldn't have easily answered," said John Pike, a nuclear weapons specialist at globalsecurity.org, a Washington-based think tank.

"It would have suggested that a vote for war with Iraq was also a vote for war with North Korea, for war with Iran, and anybody else we don't like," Pike said. "Some people might have had a hard time signing up for that.

"But the essence of the administration policy is that we are going to launch wars against all these countries," he said. "Iraq is kind of the low-hanging fruit, the easiest one to do militarily and politically. But the inevitable logic of their policy is that having blown up Iraq we're then going to blow up North Korea."

"Nothing has worked"

Not so, say senior administration officials.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on ABC's "Nightline" that international diplomatic pressure was likely to prove more successful in disarming North Korea's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction than has been the case, at least so far, with Iraq. "We've tried everything with Saddam Hussein," Rice said. "Nothing has worked."

Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a Capitol Hill audience Friday that there were clearly similarities between North Korea and Iraq, the countries that Bush had listed - along with Iran - as part of the "axis of evil" in his State of the Union address in February.

"But of course there are also differences," Wolfowitz said, among them Iraq's "clearly expressed animosity toward the United States" and its continuing violation of 16 U.N. resolutions. The fact that North Korea is "desperately in need of help from the outside," Wolfowitz added, gives an opening for diplomatic leverage not present in oil-rich Iraq.

North Korea is in violation itself, however, of both the 1994 "agreed framework" that it signed with the United States and of its obligation to admit inspectors as a signatory to the international nonproliferation treaty.

Daniel Poneman, a former National Security Council official who advised Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton on North Korea and proliferation issues, said it was difficult to gauge why the North Koreans had broken the agreement - and why they had chosen to confirm that fact now.

"I'm not a psychologist, much less a Korean psychologist," Poneman said. "That being said, a reasonably familiar tactic employed by the North Koreans is that when they don't like the way things are going they turn over the card table, just to see what happens - to create an incident out of which they may somehow enhance their position."

A less immediate threat?

Poneman said North Korea's defiance could also buttress the case of those who argue for acting against Iraq now.

"The North Korean case shows we're not talking simply about series of bilateral issues but rather a global issue as to whether the international community can tolerate countries that flout the universal norms against the proliferation of nuclear weapons."

David Kay, a senior U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq after the Persian Gulf war, said he wasn't surprised by North Korea's disclosure.

"A lot of people laughed about that axis-of-evil speech," Kay said, "but now you've got one of those axis-of-evil members confirming that yes, it does belong on that list.

"It proves that we cannot just sit back and rely on absorbing a first attack in this very dangerous world," he said.

Kay said North Korea's support for global terrorists was stronger than that demonstrated so far in the case of Iraq. He said North Korea's record is also more threatening in terms of its proven "willingness to sell anything to anybody" - from missiles to weapons technology. If Iraq should acquire the fissile material it needs for assembling a nuclear bomb, North Korea looms large as a possible source.

"Yet as I rack and stack them," Kay said, "North Korea is less of a catastrophic immediate threat to the United States than is Iraq. The difference is that, in the case of Iraq, you have a leader whose reckless risk-taking has involved an invasion of two of his neighbors, who harbors an absolute animus against the United States, and who threatens to disrupt two-thirds of the world's oil supply.

"At any time, those factors could explode into a horrible situation."

Second thoughts

Kenneth M. Pollack, a former CIA Iraq analyst, agreed that the North Korea developments should not pose an obstacle to U.S. military action in Iraq, should U.N. efforts to disarm Iraq peacefully fail.

"North Korea hasn't attacked anyone for 50 years," Pollack said. "They may be a Mickey Mouse government, they may be crazy, but they have been prudent. That's the main difference. Saddam is not prudent."

Pollack said that in his view last weekend's attack in Bali was more relevant to the timetable for acting on Iraq.

Pollack is the author of "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq." He comes down on the side that says the United States, and the world, cannot afford to ignore Saddam. But he said the question was whether to act now or to wait - perhaps as long as a year - and to focus meantime on disabling the ability of al-Qaida to wreak the kind of carnage that Bali saw last week.

"That's the important one," he said. "It shows that al-Qaida is still out there, still dangerous. It raises what I consider the much more legitimate argument: Do we want to be going after Iraq before we have reduced the threat of al-Qaida?"

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