NEW YORK - Never trust an axis of evil. When President George W. Bush threatened to invade Iraq if it didn't readmit UN arms inspectors, that tricky Saddam immediately agreed. `Welcome back to beautiful Baghdad,' he told UN inspectors, leaving the Bush Administration gnashing its teeth in frustration.
If the UN didn't give him a green light to re-bomb Iraq back to the Stone Age, Bush thundered - with stunning illogic - he would ignore the UN Security Council and take action unilaterally. The very same Bush who had a few days earlier vowed to invade Iraq because it was ignoring the Security Council.
As this tragic farce was unfolding, a new bombshell erupted when that other tricky axis of evil, North Korea, revealed it had nuclear weapons. Now, the CIA has known since 1993 that North Korea had at least 2-3 nuclear weapons and 5,000 tons of poison gas and germs, plus the missiles and artillery to deliver them onto Seoul, the 37,000 US troops in South Korea, all of Japan, and US bases in Okinawa and Guam.
Readers of this column have also known since 1993 that North Korea had weapons of mass destruction. Since then, I've written half a dozen columns - the latest on 11 August - pointing out the utter illogic of whipping up hysteria over impotent Iraq while denying the very real threat to South Koreans, Americans, and Japanese from armed and highly dangerous North Korea.
Back in 1993-4, faced with the choice of remove North Korea's weapons of mass destruction through war, or pretending they didn't exist, the Clinton Administration chose to buy North Korea's silence with US $4 billion in oil, food and nuclear reactors. The Bush Administration followed this see-no-evil policy until last week's hugely embarrassing nuclear revelation from North Korea.
And what was Bush's response? He lamely called for `tough negotiations' with North Korea. This from the same president who absolutely refuses any negotiations with Iraq over the very same issue. So, the Bush Administration is rushing plans to invade Iraq, which has zero offensive capability, while calling for talks with North Korea, which has 100 intermediate ranged No-dong missiles pointed at South Korea, Japan, and US Pacific bases, 100,000 crack commando troops whose mission is to launch suicide assaults on all US military bases in the region, and is about to deploy an ICBM that can deliver a nuclear warhead to the continental USA.
Confronted by this glaring contradiction, a flustered Bush claimed war against Iraq was necessary because Saddam was a `uniquely evil' dictator who had gassed his own people. North Korea's `Dear Leader,' Kim Jong-il, with his alarming bouffant hairdo, pot belly, and weird, khaki jump suits looks and acts like a hostile alien from outer space in a cheesy Japanese sci-fi film. His Stalinist regime, with whom Bush wants to negotiate, has just allowed 2 million of its citizens to starve to death in order to amply feed and supply the communist party and the military, and conduct secret nuclear and missile programs. Hundreds of thousands of North Korea are in prison camps. North Korea has kidnapped Japanese, bombed civilian airliners, and committed many acts of aggression and terrorism.
As for Saddam gassing his own people - meaning Kurdish rebels during the Iran-Iraq War - Bush's outrage is brazen hypocrisy. The US and Britain supplied Iraq with its chemical and biological weapons, as this writer revealed back in 1990, financed Saddam's aggression against Iran, and made no protests when Saddam used such weapons.
Rather than calling for war against Iraq for events that occurred in the 1980's, President Bush would do well to do something about the current use by his closest ally, Israel, of US-supplied tanks, helicopter gunships, ground attack aircraft and heavy anti-tank missiles against Palestinian civilians, a clear violation of American laws which forbid the use of US weapons against civilians.
Why does Bush continue to fulminate against Iraq while pussyfooting around North Korea? Because North Korea has no oil and is not the target of powerful US domestic lobbies.
As former NY Times columnist Anthony Lewis writes, where would Bush, who has `the most dismal record of any president in memory,' be without his Iraqi crusade? Facing soaring deficits, financial scandals, and a world that sees his bellicose administration, led by a cabal of Pentagon Dr. Strangeloves, rather than Iraq, as a real international menace.
The Pentagon estimates it can crush Iraq's feeble armed forces in a week and totally occupy the nation in 30 days with only modest casualties.
Mr Bush's jolly little war in Iraq promises to be short and, he hopes, sweet.
North Korea is a different matter. The North has a tough, million-man army that has considerable defensive power in spite of obsolete equipment. North Korea has repeatedly threatened to `burn' Seoul and its 7 million inhabitants, as well as the US 2nd Infantry Division on the DMZ, with chemical and perhaps biological weapons. In 1993, the Pentagon estimated that a full-scale war with North Korea would cost US forces 250,000 casualties.
Better to create a straw bogeyman in Baghdad, reckons George Bush, and then triumphantly knock it down, than to tangle with those scary North Koreans.
Foreign Correspondent