So it might seem odd to call North Korea the far greater threat to America and world peace. And yet that is plainly the case. The reason is, to use one of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s favorite words, capabilities. North Korea may have little, but everything it does possess goes toward Kim’s Stalinist military. And a fully armed Kim has far greater capability to wreak havoc today than the partially disarmed and semicontained Saddam. Kim has as many as 200 medium-range missiles, and has tested one that approaches ICBM range. Saddam has only a smattering of short-range, inaccurate Scuds. Kim has nuclear, chemical and biological weapons at the ready that could kill a lot more people, including Americans, far more quickly than could Saddam, who may have only a few such weapons (we don’t know).
Let’s face it: the very reason the Bush administration wants to attack Iraq and not North Korea is because it can: it knows Iraq is less dangerous. Kim, in effect, holds South Korea, Japan and tens of thousands of U.S. troops hostage; in a matter of hours, he can cause casualties “on a scale we have not seen since World War II,” says a U.S. military official in Seoul. With nearly 1.2 million troops under arms, 70 percent of them forward-deployed, Kim Jong Il can order a crushing blitz southward much as his father did to start the 1950-53 Korean War. Not only does he almost certainly have a few nuclear bombs ready–most experts agree Saddam is some five years away from one–he possesses chemical weapons sufficient to kill millions.
Kim’s long-term threat is even scarier. The biggest danger to American lives for decades to come will be proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and missiles that could fall into the hands of terrorists. On this score North Korea is far more of a menace. And as Rumsfeld has said, North Korea is “the world’s biggest proliferator of ballistic missiles.” Missile exports are thought to make up half of Pyongyang’s annual $1 billion in exports; much of this technology goes to terror-generating nations in the Middle East. Kim also could build as many as 100 nuclear weapons by 2009, notes one CIA analysis.
Then there is the threat of a destabilized Asia–the likeliest place for America to be drawn into a major war decades hence. Bush officials privately concede that North Korea appears only steps away from declaring itself a nuclear power. That in turn could provoke South Korea, already questioning America as an ally, to go nuclear, which could make Japan rethink its nonnuclear posture. Nothing is likelier to make China rush into an arms race–it is now only slowly building up its forces–than a nuclear-armed Japan. And long after Saddam is in his grave, China will be Washington’s biggest future strategic headache. Saddam, by contrast, is something of a spent force in the Muslim world.
U.S. officials still insist, publicly, that Saddam is more dangerous because of what one called “the combination of capability and intent.” They dismiss Kim as a blackmailer who only wants to extort more aid from the West. True, Saddam has already invaded his neighbors and used chemical weapons; Kim has been, so far, a homebody. But it’s a fool’s game to try to gauge the intent of two dictators as dotty as these. Kim is credited with ordering the slaughter of a South Korean delegation in Burma; the 1987 downing of a South Korean jet, killing 115, and the abduction of dozens of foreign nationals. He also runs the world’s most repressive gulag. And he is as desperate as Saddam. “North Korea is disintegrating fast,” former British foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind wrote recently. “Desperate men are dangerous.” Indeed, Kim may be fomenting a crisis now because he’s running out of time.
All of which brings us back to the only useful criterion: capabilities. Both leaders have proved that they value no human life except their own. But Kim Jong Il can do more harm to more people more quickly and in more ways than Saddam Hussein.
