BYLINER BY U.S. SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN

No Time to Sleep
The Washington Post

October 24, 2002

As we contemplate preemptive action to prevent Saddam Hussein from acquiring the world's worst weapons, it's worth understanding how the temptation to go home and get a nice quiet sleep led directly to the inevitable crisis we now face on the Korean peninsula -- where North Korea's acknowledgment of a secret nuclear weapons program demonstrates the perils of entrusting American security to dangerously flawed agreements with rogue regimes.

This crisis first came to a head in 1994 with North Korea's threat to weaponize plutonium from its Yongbyon nuclear facility. After months of American concessions, the Clinton administration agreed to build North Korea two civilian nuclear reactors and provide it with a half-million tons of oil annually until the reactors were built. Totalitarian North Korea became the largest recipient of American assistance in Asia as we propped up a regime that might otherwise have collapsed.

Serious people can differ honorably over the morality of feeding and funding a regime that starves, oppresses, tortures and kills its own people while threatening to destroy its southern neighbor, in order to prevent that regime from developing nuclear weapons. But there is scant moral refuge for those accommodationists who believe even today that we can concede our way out of this crisis. A decade of appeasement and assistance to one of the world's worst regimes provided it the time and the means to develop weapons that now threaten America and our friends.

We had a choice in 1994. We now face a harder choice because we did not then meet our responsibility to end the challenge to American and Asian security posed by North Korea's nuclear program. Similarly, we face a hard choice in Iraq today. But unless we act soon, we will face harder choices later, with costs that could be catastrophic.

The feckless pursuit of accommodation with regimes that scorn our reasonableness and revile our purpose is no substitute for a policy that matches the menace posed to America with the means and the will to confront it.

Iraq demonstrates that American resolve elicits a different response. Although no more than a ploy, Baghdad's professed openness today to renewed weapons inspections after years of defiance is made possible only by the compelling threat of military force. Our determination to confront Saddam Hussein openly and with all necessary means demonstrates a freedom to act against an enemy that does not -- yet -- possess nuclear weapons.

Rather than asking why we do not pursue the same strategy toward Iraq and North Korea, the American people understand we are confronting Saddam Hussein today because we cannot kick the can down the road, as the Clinton administration did with North Korea, waiting until he possesses nuclear weapons, as North Korea now does, thereby constraining our ability to respond to a developing danger. We cannot allow Iraq to become the North Korea of the Middle East.

America's options in North Korea are limited because we did not take action a decade ago to permanently end Pyongyang's nuclear program. Certain options once open to us are now foreclosed because we dozed while this threat gathered.

Our current predicament in North Korea could portend our future with Iraq if we do not use every means available to us to end the threat it poses while we still have the freedom to act.

Credibility is a nation's greatest asset in international affairs. It is the hardest to earn and the most difficult to maintain, but once possessed it makes it possible to compel changes in behavior. Credibility exists only in the eye of the beholder.

The Clinton administration's lack of credibility in dealing with North Korea emboldened the regime to defy America. The Bush administration's credible threat of force against Iraq is rallying American and international opinion in our favor, and has put Baghdad on notice. Pyongyang is watching.

The dangers posed by Iraq and North Korea are different, but as any surviving member of the Taliban will attest -- and as Saddam Hussein may soon learn -- in this new era, rogue regimes that openly defy and gravely threaten the United States put themselves in peril when they doubt our resolve to end challenges to our security. If we had met the North Korean nuclear challenge with resolve rather than accommodation a decade ago, we would be more secure now. North Korea teaches us that if we sleep in the face of the Iraq threat today, we may be sleepless tomorrow.