Nine months in the making, revision of a now admittedly flawed policy toward North Korea is an important step in the right direction in dealing with a problem where there is no good option. But there is a troubling gap in logic between former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry's sagacious assessment (see "U.S./North Korea: Choosing paths to peace," Oct. 23) and his modest mid-course policy corrections.
Perry conducted his review admirably, with great acumen and in a spirit of bipartisanship (although to say that "President [Bill] Clinton decided to establish an outside review of our entire policy toward North Korea" is wrong. Clinton had no choice: The review and the appointment of a high-level envoy to lead it was not just called for, but legislatively mandated. Congress should be credited for its wisdom in demanding a rethinking of the policy and adult supervision -- a special envoy -- to conduct it.
Yet four years after the 1994 "Agreed Framework" with North Korea, which froze Pyongyang's known nuclear-weapons program, the security situation on the Korean Peninsula deteriorated significantly. This was dramatized when North Korea test-fired a Taepodong intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan on Aug. 31, 1998. Amid suspicions that it was continuing a covert quest for nuclear weapons, North Korea had in fact been busy building new ballistic missiles of increasing range. Worse, this devotion of scarce resources to weapons of mass destruction occurred while 1 million or more of its citizens were quietly starving to death.