Prepare for War in Korea
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

News that North Korea has “agreed” to give up its nuclear weapons program in exchange for aid and security reminds us of the controversy that greeted an editorial that ran in the Forward in 1994 under the headline “How to End Whitewater.” The way for President Clinton to end his troubles, the Forward offered, was to bomb North Korea. It prompted an irate letter from no less than Alfred Kazin, who thought the editorial an outrage in a paper founded “on the blood and toil of peaceful laboring people who believed in harmony with people like themselves.” The Forward then reprinted its editorial of June 27, 1950, in response to the Communist onslaught against South Korea. It said that the aggression showed “the swindle and hypocrisy of the so-called ‘Peace Campaign’ which Moscow’s agents have been promoting” and concluded that if the Kremlin didn’t retreat, a new world war would be inevitable.
President Clinton, in the event, eschewed the wisdom of those labor hardliners of the 1950s and of a military solution, choosing diplomacy. He ended up in the dock for Whitewater, and his 1994 “Agreed Framework” with the Pyongyang camarilla turned out to be a typical communistic trick. Kim Jong Il’s Stalinist state was rewarded with aid and light-water reactors in exchange for promising to halt a nuclear program it shouldn’t have had in the first place. Mr. Kim took the aid and got Secretary Albright to pay obeisance and clink glasses with him in 2000. It wasn’t until 2002 that he was discovered to have been continuing to build his nuclear program in secret, which is why the stakes are so much higher today.
The draft accord the Bush-administration has agreed to – concrete details will be discussed in November – does have differences to Mr. Clinton’s efforts. North Korea has to give up, rather than just freeze, its program. And it isn’t given a light-water reactor as it had demanded as a precondition for giving up its program. Instead the draft says a light-water reactor will be discussed at a later date. But like the Clinton agreement, the accord announced yesterday is rewarding Mr. Kim for giving up what he shouldn’t have had, with a guarantee that America won’t attack North Korea. And also like the Clinton agreement, the accord, at least in draft, ignores the other half of why North Korea was included in the “axis of evil”- its domestic repression.
Pyongyang has killed millions of its own people, and today it holds more than 200,000 in concentration camps. Torture and forced abortion are regular occurrences. And economic mismanagement has led to mass starvation. What signal is sent to the North Koreans by America entering into any agreement with Mr. Kim absent measures to address the human rights violations? Not the same message they heard when President Bush said to oppressed peoples across the globe: “the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors.”
Details of the draft agreement will be negotiated in November, and the president’s record of championing democracy across the globe gives hope he’ll attach riders to any final agreement demanding human rights reform. Mr. Bush welcomed the former North Korean political prisoner Kang Chol-hwan at the White House, and he recently appointed Jay Lefkowitz as his special envoy on human rights in North Korea, a position created in the 2004 North Korea Human Rights Act. At Mr. Lefkowitz’s swearing-in ceremony Secretary Rice said “people all over the world have a right to live in dignity,” and “we believe the people of North Korea to be no different.”
As part of any final agreement made with North Korea, any aid could be made conditional on improvements in human rights. Mr. Bush could demand that Mr. Lefkowitz have access to the concentration camps, just as President Reagan did in respect of the Soviet Union. Surely this is what the North Korean people are hoping the Bush administration has in mind for November’s discussions. But most of all a priority should be placed on preparing a military response to North Korea’s nuclear program so that the moment intelligence discovers that the communists who run the North Korean state have been cheating, its atomic weapons program can be dealt with directly, before things reach the point that more countries than South Korea and possibly Japan are within range of North Korean guns.