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| Associated Press |
| Diplomats made their way to the State Department on Monday for meetings on North Korea. South Korea's deputy foreign minister, Lee Tae Shik, center, with other officials and reporters.
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| Associated Press |
| At far left is Mitoji Yabunaka with other Japanese Foreign Ministry officials.
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ASHINGTON, Jan. 6 — The White House sought today to defuse a worsening confrontation with North Korea, applauding the International Atomic Energy Agency's decision to condemn North Korea's nuclear activities but delay taking the issue to the United Nations Security Council for sanctions.
President Bush repeated three times this afternoon that he had no intention of attacking North Korea — an effort, it seemed, both to give the North a security guarantee and ease a diplomatically embarrassing difference with South Korea and Japan over how to handle the crisis.
"I'll repeat that," Mr. Bush told reporters after a cabinet meeting today to start off a new year of domestic and international initiatives. "We have no intention of invading North Korea."
Only a week ago, as Mr. Bush vacationed in Texas, his aides were saying they would support the atomic energy agency in taking the issue straight to the Security Council, which would then consider economic penalties.
Now that approach appears to have been reconsidered. In recent days, some senior officials have warned that penalties could prompt a military response from the North — just as the administration is preparing forces for the Persian Gulf.
Tonight, as Tuesday unfolded in North Korea, its government warned of exactly that. "Sanctions mean a war and the war knows no mercy," the official Korean Central News Agency said. "The U.S. should opt for dialogue" with North Korea, it added, "not for war, clearly aware that it will have to pay a very high price for such reckless acts." The statement echoed a similar warning to the Clinton administration in 1994.
Despite the apparent shift in approach by Mr. Bush, his aides said he would not budge on his refusal to talk to North Korea until it readmits inspectors and refreezes its nuclear programs.
A senior South Korean official criticized that approach today, saying: "Talk is essential here. How do we know what the North will say until there is some dialogue with the United States?"
North Korea is only one of a number of issues that the president confronts as he approaches his second anniversary in office.
Israel's announcement that it would bar Palestinian officials from traveling to London for talks on the Middle East later this month complicated his effort to show that some progress is being made on those issues even as he heads toward a military confrontation with Iraq.
Pakistan continued its arguments over whether American forces could pursue suspected members of Al Qaeda into its territory, once again calling into question the administration's claim that the country has been a full partner in its effort against terror.
While Mr. Bush planned to use the next few weeks to make the case for action to remove Saddam Hussein of Iraq from power, one leader of the inspection teams admitted that nothing incriminating had yet been found — and some allies began to question whether there was enough evidence yet to build a coalition for military action. "We haven't yet seen any smoking gun," the head of the atomic energy agency, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, said in Vienna. He said laboratory tests of samples taken at sites visited by his inspectors — presumably guided by some American intelligence data — "have not raised any eyebrows."
Such assessments only complicate the issue for Mr. Bush, as he faces the question of how — and whether — to make the case in the Council in the next few weeks that Iraq remains in violation of its resolutions, and that military action is required.
North Korea's actions in recent months have been far more provocative than Iraq's. In October, it acknowledged a secret program to enrich uranium, violating its 1994 agreement with the United States. The Bush administration and its allies responded by cutting off oil shipments. And in December, the North disabled cameras, broke seals and ejected inspectors at a nuclear plant capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.
Its flagrant violation of its nuclear commitments has put Mr. Bush in the position of arguing that Mr. Hussein, who is letting inspectors move freely even as he rails that they are gathering "intelligence," poses a more imminent threat to world security than North Korea. The North is believed to already possess two nuclear weapons and could reprocess its stockpile of spent nuclear fuel rods to produce enough plutonium for five or six additional nuclear weapons by this summer, the Central Intelligence Agency estimates.
"Part of the reason that we don't want to get North Korea's problems in front of the Security Council too quickly," one senior official suggested today, "is that the other Security Council members will be overwhelmed by too many problems at once. And these problems are different enough that you don't want one polluting the other."
At the United Nations, American diplomats say Mr. Bush has not yet decided whether to return to the Security Council to seek a second resolution authorizing war against Iraq. They concede, as Dr. ElBaradei seemed to suggest today, that the weapons inspections in the country are not yet far enough along to produce evidence that would convince skeptical Council nations that Iraq cannot be disarmed peacefully. Even Jack Straw, the British foreign minister, suggested today that it would be helpful to secure broad Security Council support for any military action — though he stopped short of saying that should be a prerequisite for a strike.
France, China and Russia, three of the other four permanent veto-bearing members of the Council, insist on a second debate and vote before they will support any military action against Baghdad. They contend that this second step is laid out in Resolution 1441, which was adopted unanimously in November to start the weapons inspections.
Top State Department officials are inclined to go for a second vote, one official there said. In December Secretary of State Colin L. Powell denounced the omissions in Iraq's declaration of its arms programs as a "material breach" of Council resolutions. But if the weapons inspectors do not uncover any secret weapons programs, American officials have little choice but to wait for a broad progress report that Dr. ElBaradei and Hans Blix, the chief United Nations inspectors, will give the Council on Jan. 27.
Mr. Bush plans to make the case, aides say, that the inspectors' failure to find evidence only proves Mr. Hussein's cleverness as an adversary — that he has spent the past four years hiding evidence of his weapons of mass destruction. Today Mr. Bush pressed his case anew, describing Mr. Hussein as "a threat to our friends and neighbors in the Middle East," though he did not describe Kim Jong Il of North Korea as a threat to American allies in Asia.
Over the next few days, the White House's diplomatic focus will shift back to North Korea. At a meeting planned for Tuesday among senior Japanese, South Korea and American officials, South Korea is expected to present a compromise proposal under which the United States and North Korea would make reciprocal moves — the former toward a nonaggression pact and aid, the latter toward nuclear commitments.
But today, Ari Fleischer, Mr. Bush's spokesman, said the issue was not who moved first, but the North's track record of going back on its agreements. "South Korea was in the midst of its `sunshine policy,' " he said, "when North Korea was setting the sun on its word."
