Aiding and abetting the "Axis". (Cover Story: Korea).

Even as he prepares to mount an unnecessary war against a prostrate Iraq, President Bush is offering critical aid to Saddam's more dangerous axis-mate, North Korea.

Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime may be close to building a nuclear weapon. Kim Jong-Il's North Korean hell state, according to intelligence estimates, currently possesses two nukes, and will shortly develop the capacity to produce an entire arsenal. Under threat of war, Saddam has allowed UN weapons inspectors to canvass Iraq for evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Last December, North Korea summarily evicted UN weapons inspectors from its Yongbyon nuclear plant, and disabled surveillance equipment used to monitor the suspected weapons production facility.

Crippled by the 1991 UN-led Gulf War, intermittent bombings by U.S. and British aircraft, and 12 years of devastating sanctions, Saddam's military poses little threat to Iraq's neighbors, let alone the United States. North Korea, on the other hand, boasts the world's fourth-largest military; it has 37,000 U.S. troops within easy striking range of its artillery. Seoul, the South Korean capital, is 34 miles away from the demilitarized zone and well within striking distance of North Korean artillery tubes. And Kim's regime has successfully tested the Taepo Dong, a missile capable of hitting Japan; the missile's next generation may be able to strike Alaska.

Moreover, North Korea brazenly and unrepentantly sponsors and participates in international terrorism. Adept in using infiltrators and sleeper agents, Pyongyang poses a real threat of nuclear terrorism against the region--and conceivably even the United States.

Of these two members of the "axis of evil," North Korea is--by any rational calculation--a far greater threat than Iraq. Yet in dealing with Pyongyang, the president displays none of the stiff-spined, bellicose rectitude that characterizes his treatment of Baghdad. Crusading for war against a prostrate Iraq, Mr. Bush strikes poses of jut-jawed, Churchillian resolution; confronting an insurgent, nuclear-equipped North Korea, he essays a credible Neville Chamberlain impersonation.

Why is this so? How could the same president who identified North Korea as a member of an "axis of evil" now stand ready to lavish that terrorist regime with aid, trade, and technology? Mr. Bush, recall, has condemned not only terrorism but those countries supporting terrorism. "[W]e will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism," he said in a nationally televised address to a joint session of Congress shortly after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."

How does Mr. Bush reconcile this tough stance with aiding North Korea, the most militant of the three "axis of evil" regimes he named? And how does he reconcile that stance with counting as allies in the war against terrorism Russia and Communist China, who are the puppet-masters behind the three "axis" nations? Based on Mr. Bush's own definition, would not his policies qualify his own administration as "a hostile regime"?

Power Behind the Axis

Last December 12th, while the attention was focused on Baghdad and Pyongyang, Russian President (and KGB veteran) Vladimir Putin made what the New York Times described as "a quick but high-profile visit to Beijing" for a summit with Communist Chinese ruler Jiang Zemin. "China and Russia will be good neighbors, friends and partners forever," proclaimed Jiang during the quickie summit, held to reiterate the Sino-Russian "Good Neighborly Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation" signed in 2001.

One tangible item of business in the December 2002 Beijing meeting was a joint declaration urging the U.S. to normalize relations with North Korea "on the basis of continued observation of earlier reached agreements, including the framework agreement of 1994." Under that agreement, the U.S. and key allies--particularly South Korea and Japan--would pay at least $4 billion to supply North Korea with light-water nuclear reactors (which would be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium) and unspecified amounts to provide Pyongyang with heavy fuel oil and upgrades to its decrepit power grid. In exchange, North Korea supposedly agreed to "freeze" its nuclear program, and submit to international inspections beginning in 1999. In predictable fashion, Kim Jong-Il and his cohorts eagerly accepted these incredible concessions while covertly continuing their "frozen" nuke research.

Incredible as it may seem, the Bush administration allowed oil shipments to North Korea to continue after Pyongyang announced in October 2002 that the 1994 agreement was "nullified." "Can you imagine the uproar if Bill Clinton had let the deliveries to go forward [sic] if he had been told the agreement was nullified?" commented a Democratic congressional aide to the October 23rd Washington Post.

According to the CIA, North Korea attempted to buy equipment for a uranium weapons program from Communist China in 2001. During the same year, Beijing provided crucial missile-related technology to Pyongyang, and Russia concluded a defense agreement setting the stage for arms sales and weapons technology transfers to North Korea. This is curious behavior for powers hailed by President Bush as valued allies in the "war on terror"--and North Korea was hardly the only beneficiary of this treacherous Sino-Russian support. The CIA report, as summarized by Washington Times defense affairs analyst Bill Gertz, "identified Russia, China, and North Korea as major suppliers of chemical, biological and nuclear-arms goods and missile systems to rogue states or unstable regions."

A Terror Regime

North Korea is a museum-quality exhibit of Communism in the full flower of its malignancy. In congressional testimony last year, Norbert Vollertsen, a German physician who lived in North Korea for a year and a half as a humanitarian volunteer, described how that nation's wretched hospitals are filled with people "worn out by compulsory drills, the innumerable parades, the assemblies from 6:00 in the morning and the droning propaganda. They are tired and at the end of their tether. Clinical depression is rampant. Alcoholism is common because of mind numbing rigidities and hopelessness of life."

Mass starvation is a hallmark of Communism, and North Korea has preserved this tragic tradition as well. Since 1992, at least one million North Korean subjects--and perhaps as many as four million, or one-quarter of the population--have died from starvation. And as has been the case in Soviet Russia, Red China, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe, famine has been used as a weapon of social control. "North Korea is a terror regime," testified Dr. Vollertsen. "They are committing genocide there.... They are using food as a weapon against their own people.... North Korea [represents] the real killing fields of the 21st Century."

The Bush administration, citing humanitarian concerns, has repeatedly promised to continue providing food shipments to North Korea via the UN's World Food Program. But such aid actually compounds the humanitarian crisis by helping to prop up Kim's regime, which rations the food through the country's Public Distribution System (PDS). A North Korean subject's access to food and other necessities is strictly defined by his loyalty to the regime. According to Sophie DeLaunay of the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders, "the three class labels--'core,' 'wavering,' and 'hostile'--continue to be used to prioritize access to jobs, region of residence, and entitlement to items distributed through the Public Distribution System...."

"There are two worlds in North Korea," observed Dr. Vollertsen. "The world for the senior military, the members of the [ruling] party and the country's elite.... In the world for these ordinary people in a hospital one can see young children, all of them too small for their age, with hollow eyes and skin stretched tight across their faces, wearing blue-and-white striped pajamas like the children in Auschwitz and Dachau in Hitler's Nazi Germany." In September 1995, Kim Jong-Il issued orders to arrest wandering homeless children found Outside their home counties and imprison them in the North Korean gulag.

While the common people starve, North Korea's Communist oligarchy lives in royal splendor. Seeking to co-opt Dr. Vollertsen, the Communist government awarded him a "friendship medal" and offered him unprecedented access to the "festivities ... [of] all those who are in charge of power in the foreign ministry."

In that company, the German physician saw the country's elite "enjoying a nice lifestyle with fancy restaurants, diplomatic shops with European food, nightclubs and even a casino...." The North Korean nomenklatura does little to disguise its privileged status. The October 5, 1999 South China Morning Post reported that Kim's regime purchased a $20 million fleet of 200 Mercedes-Benz S500 class cars for its leadership.

Gangster State

An unavoidable consequence of Communist central planning, the North Korean famine has been exacerbated by the regime s investment in narco-terrorism. The February 15, 1999 issue of U.S. News & World Report observed that up to 17,000 acres of farmland have been locked up by state-mandated opium farming, which began in the mid-1980s under dictator Kim Il-Sung, the present dictator's late father.

Kim Jong-Il has "ordered a major expansion of the drugs-for-export program," noted the magazine, which also reported that "U.S. food aid to the regime--over $77 million worth this year--may be needed in part because farm acreage is used to grow poppies for opium." To that figure can be added millions of additional dollars stolen by the regime from charitable aid sent to North Korea by private and religious relief organizations.

"Interviews with law enforcement officials, intelligence analysts, and North Korean defectors suggest that the regime is now dramatically expanding its narcotics production and that much of the criminal activity is controlled at the highest levels of government," reported U.S. News. "[lit is clear that the worldwide network of North Korean embassies, coupled with the use of diplomatic pouches and immunity, offers the ideal cover for a criminal enterprise...."

"Authorities in at least nine countries have nabbed North Korean diplomats with a virtual pharmacy of illegal drugs: opium, heroin, cocaine, hashish," continued the report. In July 1998, two North Korean diplomats were arrested in Cairo with six suitcases containing 506,000 tablets of Rohypnol, the so-called "date rape drug." During the same month, Japanese authorities intercepted a North Korean methamphetamine shipment worth $170 million.

Pyongyang is also deeply involved in counterfeiting. According to South Korea's National Intelligence Service, North Korea has printed vast quantities of counterfeit bills, including $15 million in "super notes"-- bogus bills that are very difficult to detect--using new counterfeiting technology. The South Korean report charges that the counterfeiting operation was authorized at the highest levels of the North Korean government and cites as evidence that, in 1999, an aide to Kim Jong-Il was caught trying to exchange $30,000 in counterfeit notes in Vladivostok.

In typical Communist fashion, the North Korean gangster regime often sends politically suspect subjects to the gulag on spurious criminal charges. This was the case with Sun-Ok Lee, a survivor of Pyongyang's gulag. Lee was convicted of spurious embezzling charges - and eventually escaped from North Korea to bear witness of the regime's unfathomable crimes against its most innocent subjects.

"In the 'reform institute' in Kaechon where I was held, there were 200 women housewives as prisoners," recalled Lee in congressional testimony. "In the case of these women, if any is pregnant, the baby would be killed. If the baby's mom was a political criminal, inside her the baby is the same political criminal. So the seed of a political criminal should not be allowed to be born."

Lee personally witnessed instances in which gulag officers would murder newborn infants by "stepping on the baby's neck with his boots once he or she was born. If the mom would cry for help to save her child, it was an expression of dissatisfaction against the party. So such a woman would be dragged out of the building and put to public execution by firing squad."

True Face of Evil

Such is the nature of the regime directly supported by our "allies" Russia and Communist China--and which the Bush administration is courting with humanitarian aid and promises of economic and technical assistance.

The Bush administration's treatment of North Korea exemplifies the utter phoniness of the "war on terrorism." Of the three "axis of evil" states, North Korea is undoubtedly the most oppressive and aggressive, and it poses the most immediate threat to U.S. citizens. Yet the administration has chosen to temporize in its dealing with Pyongyang in order to focus on the unnecessary, UN-authorized confrontation with Iraq.

And indeed, the North Korean hell state is a direct product of our nation's tragic entanglement with the UN. As the article beginning on page 19 will show, in the early stages of the Korean War the U.S.-led coalition liberated the entire peninsula from Communist hands--only to see the UN reverse this victory. That betrayal, and its tragic consequences, serves as a compelling illustration of the utter foolishness of fighting a "war on terrorism" through the UN.