■"Dancing With the Dictator," op-ed by Jasper Becker, New York Times, 9 June 2005, pulled from web cause dog ate paper. A1.

Great op-ed. Brilliant really, in the British meaning of the word.

I excerpt the best:

Since South Korea's president at the time, Kim Dae Jung, met with North Korea's Kim Jong Il in 2000 (and pocketed a Nobel Peace Price for his efforts), Seoul has gone to remarkable lengths to gain the North's trust. Unsurprisingly, the only real changes under this Sunshine Policy have occurred in South Korea. And efforts by President Roh, who was elected in 2002, to engage Kim Jong Il have led him to plunge his own nation into North Korea's world of lies.

For example, Seoul no longer sees any evidence of North Korea's crimes: the government tries to keep South Korean newscasts from showing a smuggled tape of the public execution of "criminals" by the North that has been broadcast in Japan and elsewhere; reports that China is shipping refugees back to North Korea are denied by the Roh government; the North's testing of chemical weapons on live prisoners goes largely unmentioned; and even Pyongyang's apparent preparations for nuclear weapons tests are played down Ö

Many of those pushing the Sunshine Policy came of age while trying to force South Korea's postwar dictators to step down; they believe that the North can follow their model, in which economic gains paved the way for democracy. But forcing North Koreans to remain under Kim Jong Il's rule and hoping that he will make gradual reforms is unlikely to bear fruit.

North Korea undertook some economic changes in 2002, but they actually left the people worse off. A United Nations World Food Program report last month noted that the market price of rice in North Korea has nearly tripled and that of maize has quadrupled in the last year . . .

Kim Jon Il has conned the South's big businesses as well as its government, luring them in with offers of exclusive concessions. For example, in 2000 the automaker Hyundai gave the North $500 million . . . Hyundai has yet to realize any profit from the deal and its chairman, who faced criminal charges stemming from his dealings with the North, killed himself in 2003.

Why does Seoul pay so dearly to prop up the criminal regime? It has claimed that if North Korea were to collapse, it would cost $1.7 trillion to rebuild it . . . But this figure seems preposterous. Given its population of about 23 million people, the North would need an emergency influx of only about $1 billion a year to pay for food, medicines and fuel until it got back on its feet. South Korea, with its trillion-dollar gross domestic product, could easily afford this Ö.

But beyond the economic factors, we must consider the moral ones. South Korea is seeking to keep a tyrant in power against the wishes of his own people Ö

Rather than coddling Kim Jong Il and paying him nuclear blackmail, we should b be working to arraign him before an international criminal tribunal, just as we did the murdering leaders of Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

Becker's book is called Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Theat of North Korea.

No, my friend, not the looming threat. The looming opportunity.

But rest assured, you wonít hear of any "missed developments" in our intell here. No, no. The Pentagon loses North Korea and the two major-theater-wars construct, built originally around Iraq and North Korea, evaporates.

Then all we'd have left is China for the threat. And if China helped us topple Kim and on that basis entered in strategic understanding with the U.S. on East Asia, then where would all our Big War budget items go?

We'd be stuck doing a whole lot of SysAdmin work and not enough else!

Sounds like a future worth creating . . .