Inconsistency? What Inconsistency?
White House Defends Iraq, N. Korea Tacks
Pyongyang Threat Called Containable

By: Howard Witt

Defending their varying approaches to confronting the nuclear dangers posed by Iraq and North Korea, senior White House officials insisted Sunday that the threat of force is appropriate in the case of Baghdad but premature for Pyongyang.

"We're not going to have a cookie-cutter foreign policy, where we try to apply the same formula to every case. It would be foolhardy to do that", National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said on CNN.

"The President put it very well when he said there may be many modalities, but there's only one morality", Rice said. "And the morality is that we are not prepared to allow nuclear powers of this kind to grow up."

Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell, the administration's two most senior foreign policy officials, were pressed on all the Sunday television news shows to explain why the White House is threatening military action to prevent Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from acquiring nuclear weapons but pursuing diplomatic pressure against North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, who is presumed to have one or two nuclear bombs.

Leverage With Pyongyang

"North Korea... is deterred by 37,000 American forces and a strong alliance with the Republic of Korea that has kept the peace for 50 years", Rice said. "It is also a poor and isolated power that... can be told very bluntly that it cannot break out of that isolation at the same time that it pursues illegal nuclear weapons."

Rice said that "we have tried everything" since the 1991 Persian Gulf war to compel Hussein to surrender his weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, the Iraqi dictator has invaded Iran and Kuwait and used chemical weapons against Iranians and his own Kurdish population, facts that prove the danger posed by Iraq is more urgent, she said.

"We believe that we have different methods that will work in North Korea that clearly have not and will not work in Iraq", Rice said.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham (D-FL) disagreed.

"If you put the two, North Korea and Iraq, on the scales and ask... which today is the greater threat to the people of the United States of America, I would answer the question: North Korea. And I think that needs to be part of the rebalancing of our foreign policy priorities", Graham said on CBS's Face the Nation.

Powell said that North Korea's admission earlier this month to breaching a 1994 agreement with the United States to not build new nuclear weapons means that the pact is effectively dead. Pyongyang has declared the agreement nullified.

"When you have an agreement between two parties, and one says it's nullified, then it's hard to see what you do with such an agreement", Powell said on NBC's Meet the Press.

Nevertheless, Powell said, the United States may not immediately scrap all the provisions of the accord, under which Pyongyang was to cease its weapons programs and submit to international inspections. In exchange it was to receive shipments of fuel oil from the United States and two civilian nuclear power reactors. Construction on the reactors began over the summer.

Deal Expected on Iraq in U.N.

On the Iraq front, meanwhile, Powell said he expects the United Nations Security Council to agree to a compromise resolution the United States will introduce this week to meet the objections of France and Russia. The new resolution will require Hussein to submit to weapons inspections leading to disarmament and will warn of unspecified "consequences" if he resists.

If Hussein refuses to permit U.N. inspections, Powell said: "the United States believes that it and like-minded nations... will have all the authority it needs at that point if it chooses to take action."

Although the Bush administration's policy calls for "regime change" in Iraq, Powell repeated an earlier suggestion that Hussein could remain in power if he consents to surrender his presumed stocks of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.

"All we are interested in is getting rid of those weapons of mass destruction", Powell said. "We think the Iraqi people would be better off with a different leader, a different regime, but the principal offense here is the weapons of mass destruction, and that is what this resolution is working on."