The Rising East
Calling N. Korea ‘evil’
triggered protest but won
applause from U.S. votersPresident Bush sure kicked up a firestorm when he included North Korea along with Iraq and Iran in his now famous "axis of evil" that he proclaimed in his address on the State of the Union in late January. Even so, he has held his ground and generated popular support.
The president asserted that "states like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil" and that, for Americans and their allies, "the price of indifference would be catastrophic."
The North Koreans, as might have been expected in a regime that conducts diplomacy by diatribe, were apoplectic. The foreign ministry in Pyongyang accused the president of "moral leprosy" and thundered that "this is, in fact, little short of declaring a war against the DPRK," or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Then, this past week, the Bush administration produced ample evidence that the government of Dear Leader Kim Jong-il is evil. The State Department, in its voluminous annual report on human rights, pointed to Pyongyang's kidnapping, torture and killing of its own citizens, its arbitrary arrest and detention of uncounted political prisoners, and its acquiescence in the death by starvation of perhaps two million North Koreans.
"Stereotyped vituperation" Pyongyang shrieked. This "smear campaign," the foreign ministry fulminated, "is as ridiculous as trying to sweep the sea with a broom."
Give those people in Pyongyang credit: Their speech writers are competitive with those of President Bush in ginning up slogans.
In South Korea, supporters of President Kim Dae-jung were aghast because, they contended, lumping North Korea in the "axis of evil" undercut Kim's "Sunshine Policy" of seeking to engage North Korea in a process of reconciliation. Polls and press reports argued that Washington was responsible for the decline and perhaps death of the Sunshine Policy.
It seems much easier for South Koreans to blame that failure on the Americans than look to their own shortcomings, mainly unrealistic expectations, or to lay the blame at the feet of Kim Jong-il, where it rightly belongs. The Northern Kim has broken one promise after another, most notably that he would visit Seoul in return for the Southern Kim's journey to Pyongyang in June 2000.
In the United States, former President Jimmy Carter tut-tutted that the "axis of evil" was simplistic. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called the phrase "a big mistake." European leaders were critical as were leaders throughout the Muslim world. Through Xinhua, the government news agency, North Korea's Chinese allies asserted that Bush was preparing "public opinion for possible strikes against these hardened foes under the banner of anti-terrorism."
Bush softened the rhetoric a bit during his recent journey to Japan, South Korea and China, but did not back down in substance.
He also has had his defenders, although they have not been much in the public eye.
>> Norman Podhoretz, retired editor of Commentary magazine, was laudatory: "In this single image the president brilliantly defined our present enemies as a fusion of those we fought in World War Two with the evil empire we battled in World War Three," meaning the Cold War.Most important, Gallup polls showed that American voters applauded Bush's stance. The polling organization said: "Americans are firmly behind the general concept of attacking the 'axis of evil' countries." More than 90 percent said the United States should prevent North Korea from obtaining nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.>> Marin Strmecki, vice president of the conservative Smith Richardson Foundation, argued that applying the "evil" brand to North Korea "was accurate, entirely appropriate, and needed." He asserted that North Korea's leaders are cynically starving their own people and building weapons of mass destruction.
>> Marcus Noland of the Institute for International Economics in Washington and an authority on North Korea told a conference in Tokyo that the mass starvation in North Korea "is the appalling product of a cynical act of man ... It is a tragedy made possible only by totalitarian repression unparalleled in the world today."
Lest Kim Jong-il miscalculate and think that Bush is bluffing, American military forces in Korea, Japan and the Pacific have war plans ready. Said a senior U.S. defense official: "There is no question that an attack by North Korean forces would be repulsed." He added: "That would be the end of the North Korean regime."
Richard Halloran is a former correspondent
for The New York Times in Asia and a former editorial
director of the Star-Bulletin. His column appears Sundays.
He can be reached by e-mail at rhalloran@starbulletin.com