President Bush, the United Nations Security Council, and the American foreign policy establishment are all aflutter about the North Korean missile launch. But the one who by our lights appears to understand the matter better than anyone is the 39-year-old president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili. “I just sent over to President Bush the letter that Georgian freedom fighters sent him seven years ago, and it never made it to the White House. It was intercepted by KGB and all the people who wrote it were shot,” Mr. Saakashvili said yesterday during a visit with the president in the Oval Office. “I’m sure lots of people out there in Korea are writing similar letters today. And I’m sure that North Korean missiles will never reach the United States, but those letters will, eventually, very soon, because that’s a part of the freedom agenda that President Bush has and we strongly believe in.”

The point we take from Mr. Saakashvili’s comments was that it isn’t the North Korean missiles themselves that are the threat but rather the Communist regime in Pyongyang. The reaction to the missile launch – American consultations with Russia and Communist China and a race to the U.N. Security Council, which itself includes Russia and Communist China, is in that sense beside the point. Communist China does not want a free North Korea, for that could lead to a free mainland China. Nor is President Putin, who spent 17 years in the KGB, particularly interested in chalking up another big win for freedom and democracy. Even South Korea isn’t particularly interested in being unified with a free North Korea. Seoul is wary of the economic challenge of bringing its impoverished Northern neighbors up to modern standards of living the way West Germany did when it was reunited with a liberated East Germany.

But the approach Mr. Bush – and the Clinton administration before it – pursued with North Korea, of trying to negotiate a settlement with the regime in Pyongyang, hasn’t worked. It hasn’t worked to disarm North Korea of nuclear weapons or of missiles, nor to alleviate the suffering of its people. The Bush approach has been less abject than the Clinton approach in its appeasement of North Korea and its reliance on multilateralism, but only marginally so.

The objection that gets raised to a proposed American policy of regime change in North Korea is that it turns the people of South Korea – and the American troops based there – into nuclear hostages of Kim Jong Il. The key will be finding the freedom fighters within North Korea and helping them win before the Pyongyang potentate even knows what hit him. Mr. Saakashvili knows how it is done.