WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- President George W. Bush restated his view Tuesday that the North Korean nuclear crisis can be resolved peacefully through diplomacy and drew a contrast to the dangers he said the world faces in Iraq.
In a brief chat with reporters in Crawford, Texas, near his ranch, Bush said Iraq posed more danger "because the international community has been trying to resolve the situation in Iraq through diplomacy for 11 years. And for 11 years, Saddam Hussein has defied the international community."
But Bush asserted that he hoped war would not come in any foreign crisis. "I hope this can be done peacefully, " he said.
Meanwhile, international weapons inspectors left North Korea Tuesday amid Pyongyang's continuing intention to reopen a plutonium-producing nuclear reactor and bolster what is believed a one- or two-bomb nuclear weapons arsenal.
Two inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, monitoring previously sealed spent fuel rods from the Yongbyon reactor and the shuttered facility itself, arrived in Beijing from the North Korean capital Tuesday morning, news reports said.
The inspectors, however, would give no comment other than to say they were proceeding to the agency's headquarters in Austria.
The inspectors were ordered to leave North Korea last Friday by the North Korean government, ratcheting up tensions in what is believed a dangerous game of brinksmanship to secure badly needed international aid and a more prominent place on the international political stage, if not just the regional one.
"That's (aid) certainly part of it," Peter Brookes, a scholar, former Defense Department official and CIA officer, told United Press International. "There is no doubt about it that they have certainly had a foreign policy of opportunism, blackmail, extortion and brinksmanship for some time and I think this a another cycle of that.
"But, also, we have to be concerned that North Korea wants to be a nuclear power in general. Besides having the Agreed Framework (a 1994 deal with Washington) that they were supposed to comply with, they had this nuclear enrichment program.
"They were taking the benefits of the framework while continuing to build nuclear weapons," said Brookes, currently with the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based think tank.
North Korea, a Stalinist-style state, in 1994 agreed in a deal brokered by former President Jimmy Carter to shut down Yongbyon in return for 500,000 tons annually in fuel oil and the building of two nuclear reactors, which could not be used to produce weapons grade nuclear materials.
The deal came amid increased tensions between Washington and Pyongyang over its nuclear weapons program and the threat by the Clinton administration of preemptive U.S. military action to eliminate the threat.
Last October, when presented evidence by a U.S. diplomat of their having broken the agreement, North Korea unexpectedly 'fessed up to having started a nuclear enrichment project soon after signing the 1994 accord, which they declared "null."
The United States then cut off promised fuel supplies and began an international lobbying effort to bring pressure to bear on North Korea, setting the stage for the current crisis, which the White House repeatedly declines to characterize as a crisis.
"There is no doubt in my mind that they never anticipated this, that they thought they could solve Iraq before focusing on North Korea," Lawrence Korb, a former Reagan administration defense official and a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations said. "In fact, they neglected it."
Korb said President George W. Bush had quashed early suggestions by Secretary of State Colin Powell that the new administration pick up on earlier engagement by the Clinton administration. Labeling North Korea, an exporter of weapons technology, as part of the "axis of evil," didn't help the situation, he said.
North Korea, demanding direct talks with the United States and an official non-aggression pact, has also threatened to pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It made the same threat in 1993.
The Bush administration, preoccupied with a possible, if not probable, war with Iraq over its weapons of mass destruction, has chosen the diplomatic path in dealing with Pyongyang, hoping the threat of sanctions and a block to aid for sustaining the country would act as a carrot to elicit cooperation.
"We are going to be patient. We're going to continue to apply pressure. We're going to consult with our friends and allies," Powell said in a recent television interview. "And we're going to hope common sense will ultimately prevail."
Brookes, however, not "to underestimate the ability of dictators to make back decisions."
Iraq and North Korea are two separate problems, and cannot be solved with a cookie-cutter approach, the White House says.
Diplomacy is near the end of its road with Iraq, which has used weapons of mass destruction before, is aggressive toward its neighbors and which has defied international mandates for more than a decade, it says.
Brookes says "both are snakes and dangerous," but Saddam Hussein, with his past behavior, makes him more dangerous. Korb disagrees and believes diplomacy can handle both.
"It seems to me that the logic here is that if it can work with North Korea, why can't it work with Iraq? That's the real question. Why do you have to go to war with Iraq and not North Korea?" he asked.
Iraq possesses an active military force of between 350,000 and 389,000 troops. Units are believed badly undermanned, training is slack and there are serious shortages of equipment and spare parts as a result of the embargo officially imposed follow the 1991 Gulf War.
The Bush administration, however, says Iraq poses a grave and growing danger because of its suspected weapons of mass destruction -- chemical and biological arms -- pursuit of nuclear weapons and possibility as a future conduit of WMD to terrorist groups.
"If you don't deal with Saddam Hussein, you end up with two North Koreas," Brookes said.
North Korea has about 1 million active-duty personnel, most on the border with South Korea. The country is starving, but troops are well-fed and well-equipped.
The border is also just 20 miles from Seoul, the South Korean capital, well within artillery and missile range.
What's more, Iraq has its oil revenue to keep it going, while North Korea is on the brink of economic collapse.
South Korea -- where the United States has about 37,000 troops -- has serious reservations of trying to further isolate the north and has warned Washington that sanctions will not work, using Cuba as an example.
The South has been pursuing a "sunshine policy" of engagement with the North for several years and does not want to endanger it, despite the threat.
China, said to provide North Korea with about 80 percent of its energy and 40 percent of its goods, is opposed to a nuclearized Korean peninsula, but has not appeared to have leaned heavily on its North Korean ally.
