Talking Peace for North Korea
The announcement last week that China, Japan, North and South Korea, Russia and the United States will meet within one month for multilateral talks on the North Korea issue has been greeted worldwide with unbridled optimism (‘A Welcome First Step on the Path to Korean Peace’, South China Morning Post, 2 August, 2003). A military solution has largely been ignored or downplayed, with the exception of a predictably hawkish article by former CIA Director R. James Woolsey in the Asian Wall Street Journal, detailing why an invasion of North Korea would be logistically easier and politically less sensitive than the invasion of Iraq.