WASHINGTON: From the start of the Bush administration, the president’s foreign policy advisers have debated whether diplomacy or confrontation should characterize their approach to Iraq and North Korea.

Last week, a divergence became clear. Diplomacy toward North Korea, which peddles missiles and may have one or two nuclear weapons, along with chemical and biological weapons, but confrontation toward Iraq, which has no nuclear weapons and, depending on the analysis, could be years from obtaining them, though it possesses chemical and biological weapons.

Administration officials who are pursuing a punishing United Nations resolution against Iraq at the same time they play down the revelation that North Korea has a secret nuclear weapons programme, said there are substantive reasons for treating the potential nuclear threats differently.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, officials said, is a sworn enemy of the United States who has shown no sign of abandoning his weapons programmes despite years of sanctions. If Saddam obtained nuclear weapons, it would greatly destabilize the Middle East, they said.

By contrast, officials said, even a nuclear-armed North Korea poses a smaller threat to US interests and is likely more amenable to international pressure because of its pressing humanitarian needs.

“To the best of my knowledge, Saddam Hussein is the only world leader who openly glorified the attacks of September 11th,” said Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, adding that such “clearly expressed animosity to the United States” is not visible in North Korea.

“The North Koreans are desperately in need of help from the outside,” Wolfowitz said. “We have leverage on North Korea that we do not have on Iraq.”

Most analysts agreed that, at this moment, Iraq poses a much bigger threat than North Korea. “Iraq is an aggressive power, and weapons of mass destruction would embolden that aggression,” said James B. Steinberg, deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration and now a vice president at the Brookings Institution. “North Korea in recent years has been a status quo power mostly trying to ensure its own survival.”

Other factors also have served to restrain the administration’s initial response to the North Korean disclosure, according to administration officials and diplomats. Under the 1994 agreement that shut down North Korea’s plutonium weapons programme, the United States agreed to consult closely with Japan and South Korea on North Korea.

Another factor is the presence of 34,000 American troops on the Korean peninsula, where North Korean missiles could easily devastate Seoul, the capital of South Korea, about 35 miles from the demilitarized zone that separates the countries. “Force in the Korean peninsula would be very different than in the deserts of Iraq,” said a former military officer. “It would be bloody, terrible. The North Koreans ... will fight to the last bullet, the last cave.”

While administration officials quickly decided they would take a low-key approach to North Korea, they are grappling with their next step.

More fundamentally, President Bush and his aides are debating the meaning behind North Korea’s disclosure of its secret nuclear weapons programme, a move that continues to baffle and divide US officials who have rarely agreed on how to handle the Stalinist country.

Was North Korean President Kim Jong Il confessing in hopes of improving relations with the United States? Was he staking a belligerent claim to membership in the nuclear club as a way of pressuring the United States and its allies to buy a promise of peace? Administration officials who represent a variety of political perspectives said they do not know.

The Japanese and the South Koreans have been willing to consider the North Korean admission a sign that the Pyongyang government is becoming more open, particularly in light of other recent overtures. North Korea has apologized for a deadly naval skirmish with South Korea, admitted to abducting Japanese citizens and undertaken some economic reforms.

While the view has sympathy in some quarters of the administration, other senior officials believe a much harder line must be taken for North Korea’s wilful violation of the 1994 agreement. Under that agreement, which shut down a working reactor that could contribute to the production of plutonium, the United States provides 500,000 metric tons a year of fuel oil to the North Koreans, and has permitted the construction of light water nuclear reactors.

Many US officials say the violation means the 1994 agreement is dead. But Japanese and South Korean officials argue that while the agreement is not functioning, this provides an opportunity to force North Korea to abide by its terms.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.