White House officials defended the different U.S. policy approaches toward North Korea and Iraq, saying the two nations threatened U.S. and international security in different ways, the Washington Post reported yesterday (see related GSN stories, today).

One of the main reasons for the different approaches is that Iraq is believed to be more openly hostile toward the United States than is North Korea, Bush administration officials said.  Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is a sworn enemy of the United States who, if allowed to develop nuclear weapons, would become a major destabilizing force in the Middle East, they said. 

Even if North Korea developed nuclear weapons, however, it still would pose a smaller threat to U.S. interests and is likely to be more open to persuasion due to its reliance on international humanitarian assistance, officials said.

“To the best of my knowledge, Saddam Hussein is the only world leader who openly glorified the attacks of Sept. 11,” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said, adding that “such clearly expressed animosity to the United States” is not seen in North Korea.

“The North Koreans are desperately in need of help from the outside,” Wolfowitz said.  “We have leverage on North Korea that we do not have on Iraq.”

Iraq is also believed to pose a larger threat to international security than does North Korea, according to analysts.

“Iraq is an aggressive power, and weapons of mass destruction would embolden that aggression,” said James Steinberg, deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration and now a vice president at the Brookings Institution.  “North Korea in recent years has been a status quo power mostly trying to ensure its own survival.”

While the United States has been preparing for possible military action in Iraq, similar action is not considered appropriate for North Korea, which has much larger forces that are deployed very close to the North-South border.  Military planners also assume that Seoul would come under devastating missile attack in the case of a military conflict with North Korea, according to the Post.

“Force in the Korean peninsula would be very different than in the deserts of Iraq,” said a former U.S. military officer.  “It would be bloody, terrible.  The North Koreans . . . will fight to the last bullet, the last cave.”

In addition, the United States has strong alliances in Northeast Asia with Japan and South Korea.  Such relationships force the United States to consider the needs of its allies more than it needs to in the Middle East, according to the Post.

“We’ve been acting almost as one country on this issue,” said a diplomat closely involved in the North Korean issue (Kessler/Slevin, Washington Post, Oct. 20).

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