TOUGH TALK ON NORTH KOREA

A coalition of hard-line North Korean generals and Workers’ Party leaders won out at least temporarily in a February showdown over nuclear policy with a “dealer” faction that sought a diplomatic solution of the current crisis. Their position was helped by the Bush administration.

That is just one of the insights that President George W. Bush would get if he would listen to Selig S. Harrison, an American scholar who has just returned from his ninth visit to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, over the past 33 years. Instead, the president has spent 40 minutes last week with a North Korean political refugee, whose shocking tale of 10 years in a forced labor camp reinforced Mr. Bush’s fixed belief that North Korea is a monolithic Stalinist nation run by a crazy, all-powerful (and loathsome) dictator.

Mr. Harrison, director of the Asia Program of the Center for International Policy in Washington, reported his latest findings in a recent article in The Washington Post and in an online discussion. He said that North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Il, is not an all-powerful figure like his father was, though the horrendous suffering he has imposed on his own people is undeniable. Instead, control over foreign and defense policy is deeply divided between pragmatists and the hard-line coalition.

The pragmatists want a nuclear deal with the United States and reached a temporary agreement with the Clinton administration in 1994. The hard-liners argue for a tough posture to prevent the Bush administration from pursuing “regime change” in Pyongyang by invoking its pre-emptive war strategy against a member of what Mr. Bush has called an “axis of evil.” The hard-liners see the Iraq war as a sign of what’s to come for their country.

Mr. Harrison reports persuasively that the Bush administration strengthens the hand of Pyongyang’s hard-liners by rejecting then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s plan to “pick up where the Clinton people left off.” The 1994 “framework,” including a nuclear freeze with full inspection by U.S. and international monitors, broke down when the Bush administration insisted on complete dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear program before any discussion of economic aid or normalization could be discussed. The hard-liners responded by boasting about their nuclear weapons progress.

In September 2002, the administration declared its right to pre-emptive military action against any country perceived as a potential threat. In October, it accused North Korea of cheating on the 1994 accord by starting weapons-grade uranium production,

a charge not backed by any evidence and greeted with skepticism or disbelief by South Korea and China. A further slap at North Korea’s sensibilities came with the administration’s attempt to use China as a diplomatic intermediary. Mr. Harrison says that strategy cuts across both “dealers” and hard-liners as an offense to North Korea’s angry nationalism.

The Bush administration has been listening too often to its own hard-liners instead of its “dealers” like Mr. Powell, who recently expressed the sensible view that North Korea will not threaten or use its nuclear weapons, because “they’re not suicidal.”