Negotiate with North Korea. (Comment).

With all eyes on the Iraq war, we thought we'd look to the next war on Bush's list: the one against North Korea. As grave as the consequences of Bush's Iraq war may be, those from any conflict on the Korean peninsula could be even more ghastly.

The Pentagon has estimated that as many as one million people could be killed in the first five days. Many of these could be U.S. citizens, as the United States has 37,000 troops stationed in South Korea, and more than 100,000 U.S. businesspeople and tourists are in that country.

For South Koreans, the toll would be even higher. Seoul, a city of eleven million, is just a few miles from the border. North Korea's dictator Kim Jong Il has threatened to turn the peninsula into a "sea of fire" and has vowed "total war" if the United States preemptively attacks Pyongyang's nuclear facilities. The North has a million-man army, possibly one or two nuclear weapons already, and a huge arsenal of conventional weapons. "Its artillery is especially fearsome: More than 10,000 guns, along with 2,500 rocket launchers capable of launching 500,000 shells an hour, are positioned within range of Seoul," Seymour Hersh wrote in the January 27 issue of The New Yorker.

This is no idle threat. On top of that, Pyongyang has missiles that can reach Tokyo.

Since the cost of military confrontation between Washington and Pyongyang is so exorbitant, you might think the Bush Administration would be doing everything it possibly could to tone down the rhetoric. But you'd be wrong.

Secretary of State Colin Powell said, "No military option's been taken off the table, although we have no intention of attacking North Korea as a nation." His last three words there suggest to Selig Harrison, author of Korean Endgame (Princeton, 2001), that the United States may have the intention of attacking North Korea's nuclear facilities, however.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the clumsiest bully in the Bush Administration, called North Korea a "terrorist regime" in the midst of the current crisis. "Let there be no doubt," Rumsfeld said, that the United States is capable of defeating North Korea, and he ordered twenty-four long-range bombers on alert for possible deployment so as to be within shorter range of North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear facility. That facility may soon be able to produce half a dozen nuclear weapons a year, and the United States fears not only those weapons but the fissile material that North Korea could sell to other countries or groups.

"What is going on at Yongbyon is a huge foreign policy defeat for the United States and a setback for decades of U.S. nonproliferation policy," said Ashton Carter, former Assistant Defense Secretary in the Clinton Administration, at a Senate Foreign Relations hearing on February 4.

The Bush Administration and much of the mainstream media--notably Newsweek's cover "North Korea's Dr. Evil"--pin the blame on Kim Jong Il and impute to him irrational motivations.

But it may be that he is behaving perfectly rationally, if recklessly.

Kim Jong Il felt betrayed by the Clinton Administration, which didn't follow through with its side of the 1994 bargain called the Agreed Framework. Donald Gregg, former ambassador to South Korea under George the First, visited the North twice last year. "What I heard from them is that, from their signing of the 1994 Agreed Framework, they had hoped that this would be a start of a new era," Gregg testified at the same Senate hearing. "But with the election results of '94 ... there was a great deal of skepticism voiced about the Agreed Framework by the newly ascended Republican leadership. And some of the ancillary agreements designed to improve the overall relationship between North Korea and the United States were not particularly followed up with."

Harrison, who has been to North Korea seven times, agrees. "The North Korean perception, which is really a reality, is that we weren't carrying it out, so the hawks in North Korea, who had opposed this in the beginning, were vindicated," says Harrison. "We were dragging our feet on building commercial reactors and on normalizing economic and political relations."

Once Bush took office, according to Gregg, relations turned chilly. The new Administration immediately put the Clinton policy of negotiation on hold. Then Bush gave the cold shoulder to South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and his "Sunshine Policy." And memorably in last year's State of the Union address, Bush lumped North Korea into the "axis of evil."

"Here were the North Koreans who had hoped for the start of a dialogue, and all they got was a confrontation," Gregg testified.

Kim Jong Il may also feel directly threatened by Bush's national security doctrine, which sets as policy the right to preemptively take out another nation's nuclear program. And Kim Jong Il and his military fear that Bush's war against Iraq is a dress rehearsal for an attack on North Korea. "They have a heavy expectation that they are next," Gregg said. "And I think that accounts for their drive toward nuclear weapons."

North Korea has offered to negotiate its nuclear program away. The United States should take it up on the offer. But the Bush Administration, seeing Kim Jong Il withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Pact and apparently restart his nuclear facility, says it doesn't want "to reward his bad behavior." But by being macho and paternalistic, the Bush Administration is running a huge risk, and may be misreading the North's intentions.

"The North's ultimate goal is its own survival," Toshimitsu Shigemura, a Tokyo-based scholar on North Korea, told The Washington Post. "They could not afford to trigger a war. This is an act of desperation. They are desperate to improve their relationship with the United States and bring the U.S. to the negotiating table."

Washington should sit down with North Korea, as soon as possible, and engage in bilateral negotiations. "You sort of feel almost like a Quisling in saying, `We ought to deal with this guy.' And yet I think that is our best option," Gregg testified. "And I think this is the unanimous view of North Korea's neighbors."

The State Department has been saying it is ready to talk, but then it backs off and stalls. "We're going to have to speak to the North Koreans, and we shall at a point in time when it's considered efficacious," Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said at the Senate hearing.

This is not a helpful approach, especially as events and rhetoric are spinning out of control.

North Korea desperately wants a nonaggression pact with Washington. Why not sign such a pact if North Korea would agree to abandon its nuclear program?

North Korea also wants better economic relations with Washington. This, too, should be explored. There is no reason for the United States to look gleefully on as the North Korean economy implodes and millions fall prey to starvation.

South Koreans greatly resent the arrogance of the sole superpower. They want the "Sunshine" policy of Kim Dae Jung and newly elected President Roh Moo Hyun to continue, and the citizen diplomacy to work its course.

The United States, the Korean peninsula, indeed, the whole world, would be better off if Washington would shelve its military plans, dispense with the belligerent rhetoric, and get down to serious bilateral negotiations with the Koreans leading up to the signing of a nonaggression pact in exchange for North Korea agreeing not to reprocess fuel rods.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell ought to learn, at some point soon, that the sledgehammer military approach is disastrous. If they don't learn this lesson in Iraq, they are sure to learn it on the Korean peninsula.

But by then it will be too late for the huge numbers of innocent people who will die. Cause of death: recklessness on Pyongyang's and Washington's part.