SEOUL — Hours after Saddam Hussein's capture became public, a Korean American political activist dashed off a congratulatory e-mail to President Bush offering advice.
"I must remind you that there is another evil dictator in North Korea who is much worse than Saddam Hussein. His name is Kim Jong Il.... He has to be tried and captured NOW!!" wrote Sin-U Nam, a prolific critic of the North Korean regime, in the letter later made public.
Bush has said that the United States has no plans to depose Kim. At his news conference Monday, Bush repeated that North Korea will be handled differently from Iraq because Hussein represented a unique threat the world had been unable to resolve for 12 years.
Saying he was reluctant to use force, Bush praised the ongoing diplomatic efforts to create a nuclear-free Korean peninsula.
"We're now co-participants in the process of convincing Kim Jong Il to change his ways," he said. "And that's exactly where we are in the process, and I'm pleased with the progress we're making. And I hope, of course, he listens."
Yet Hussein's capture is certain to be viewed as an ominous development by the North Korean government. It will embolden U.S. hard-liners who want the administration to push for regime change in the communist country, where the Kim family has ruled for more than half a century. And the arrest will strengthen the U.S. position in six-party talks aimed at persuading North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.
"The image of Saddam Hussein hiding like a rat in a hole in the ground has got to have a powerful psychological effect on Kim Jong Il," said one American analyst, who asked not to be named.
A standoff over the country's atomic arms has been percolating for more than a year. North Korea has expelled United Nations weapons inspectors, cranked up an old nuclear reactor and begun extracting weapons-grade plutonium, while publicly challenging the United States. The regime in Pyongyang may have assumed that Washington was so beleaguered in Iraq it would be negotiating with a weak hand.
"The North Koreans must be really shocked," said Kim Tae Woo, a diplomatic analyst with the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul. "This will make the U.S. much freer and stronger in its dealings with North Korea. And this will highlight the direct threat that the North Korean leadership feels from U.S. military power."
