Romancing the Thugs

By CHARLES KRAUTHHAMMER

In 1992 candidate Bill Clinton excoriated president George Bush for "coddling" dictators. Now forget about General Raoul Cedras and his golden Panamanian parachute. Consider only that President Clinton last week bestowed one of the highest presidential honors on one of the world's chief thugs, President Hafez Assad of Syria. The usual place for meeting the likes of him is some neutral site like Geneva. (One comes away less soiled that way.) Yet Clinton decided to pay court to Assad in Damascus. It was the first visit by a President to a nation on the U.S. list of terrorist states.

The catalog of Assad's atrocities goes back far, highlighted by the 1982 massacre of 20,000 of his own people in the rebellious town of Hama. But put that aside. Put aside the fact that Damascus is headquarters for a dozen terrorist groups, principal Arab supporter of Iran, controller of Lebanon's Hizballah terrorists (who last month launched rockets into Israel in support of the bus bombing that killed 23 people).

Put aside the moral affront of an American President who denounces terrorism, then visits the capital of a terrorist state. Consider only the question of political logic: What did the U.S. get out of this trip?

"An investment in peace," said the President's Near East adviser. Now that Syria is negotiating with Israel, the trip was meant to encourage Syria along the path of peace.

Problem is, it didn't. There is not a shred of evidence, despite the defensive protestations of Administration officials, that Assad moved or that Clinton got anything at all for this investment of American prestige. The only clear return was to Assad, in the coin of international legitimacy and respectability.

No one says that the U.S. should not talk to Syria.The question is whether the U.S. should reward an intransigent -- forget terrorist -- Syria with the ultimate presidential plum. The laying on of hands is earned by those who, like King Hussein of Jordan, make peace, not those who only dangle it while playing dirty games on the side.

Yet Syria is not our only uncollateralized "investment in peace." Nor is it the most egregious example of up-front payment to a terrorist state in return for promises or promises of promises. The nuclear deal just concluded with North Korea earns that prize.

Here the up-front American blandishments are staggering. North Korea gets: 1) a free supply of oil, 500,000 metric tons a year, for the next eight to 10 years; 2) construction of two shiny new nuclear reactors worth $4 billion, also free; 3) diplomatic ties with the U.S., which will immediately lead to 4) diplomatic ties with Japan, from which will flow 5) aid and trade and whatever else the North Korean regime needs to keep going -- and keep threatening South Korea.

In return for what? North Korea promises to allow the inspection of nuclear- waste sites -- inspections it was committed to by treaty provisions it signed three years ago -- oh, perhaps five years from now. And North Korea promises to shut down its plutonium reprocessing plant. Nice promise. Unfortunately, we've been here before. North Korea made the same pledge in a 1992 deal, which it then blithely broke. This time around it promises to dismantle the plant. When? In the next century.

Meanwhile, the oil flows, the diplomatic isolation ends, the North Korean economy is revived by Western trade -- and its nuclear program remains intact! It is to be "frozen," meaning ready to restart anytime in the next 10 years when Pyongyang decides it has got all it wants from the West. Not a brick of the North Korean program has to be removed until around 2002.

And what of our most critical, nonnegotiable demand, that North Korea ship out of the country the plutonium-laden fuel rods that it brazenly removed from its reactor in May in defiance of the sternest U.S. warnings? From these rods North Korea can make half a dozen Hiroshimas. Did we get them? No. We got more promises. The rods, we are assured, will be out -- in the next century.

The Administration defends this investment in peace by saying that the only alternative is war. This is a simple capitulation to blackmail. The U.S. never threatened war as an alternative to agreement. It threatened economic sanctions to squeeze North Korea into complying now, not someday, with its nuclear-treaty obligations. Pyongyang, economically moribund and starved for oil, then rattled its saber. Clinton caved.

The Clinton Administration is getting high marks for its recent foreign policy successes. Haiti has gone well, meaning no Americans have died in combat. In a place of zero strategic significance to the U.S., however, this falls more into the category of disaster avoided. In the two areas where we have the most abiding strategic interests -- fighting terrorism and nuclear proliferation -- the Administration has reacted by romancing the thugs. Offer the goodies, let the dictator pocket his gains, then hope for the best.

There is no denying that appeasement smooths things over and postpones crises. But as we learned long ago, the respite tends to be temporary.