Global Policy Forum

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said on Monday that North Korea would be mistaken if it felt emboldened by the U.S. focus on Iraq to pursue a nuclear weapons program and said Washington was ready to fight two wars at once.

``I have no reason to believe that you're correct that North Korea feels emboldened because of the world's interest in Iraq,'' he told a questioner at a Pentagon briefing.

``If they do, it would be a mistake,'' he added, saying the U.S. military was capable of fighting two major regional conflicts plus the U.S.-declared war on terror at once.

``We are capable of winning decisively in one and swiftly defeating in the case of the other,'' he said. ``Let there be no doubt about it.

North Korea said on Sunday it had dismantled U.N. monitoring equipment at a nuclear reactor it had mothballed in a 1994 non-proliferation deal with the United States.

The North said it was reactivating the Yongbyon reactor to generate electricity. But the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. watchdog, said the North also had broken U.N. seals on about 8,000 spent fuel rods in a cooling pond at Yongbyon -- a possible prelude to recovering weapons-grade plutonium.

The Clinton administration had been prepared to go to war in 1994 if needed to bar the reclusive communist state from extracting plutonium that could be used to build as many as five or six nuclear bombs in as little as four or five months.

Asked if President Bush's administration would stick to such a policy, known as the ``red line'' beyond which Washington would brook no North Korean brinksmanship, Rumsfeld said, ``The situation today is somewhat different from then.''

Secretary of State Colin Powell consulted France, Russia and Britain about the situation on Monday and said the United States wanted a peaceful resolution, said State Department spokesman Philip Reeker. Over the weekend, Powell consulted his counterparts from China, South Korea, Russia and among others.

``PERFECTLY RATIONAL''

Such diplomacy ``seems to me a perfectly rational way of proceeding,'' Rumsfeld said, drawing a distinction with Iraq, where he said many years of diplomacy had fallen ``flat on its face.''

``The situation in North Korea is a fairly recent one,'' the defense secretary went on. ``The diplomacy that's under way there is in its early stages with the United States and the interested neighboring countries.''

But experts said North Korea appeared intent on capitalizing on U.S. preoccupation with the alleged threat of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in Iraq.

The U.S. military is poised to start a highly visible buildup early next month to give Bush the option of ordering an invasion to root out any Iraqi weapons banned since the 1991 U.S.-led war that drove Iraq from Kuwait.

``The North Koreans probably have concluded that they have some flexibility now in committing provocative acts without a high risk of U.S. retaliation,'' said Larry Niksch of the non-partisan Congressional Research Service.

The North's goal, he said, was to pressure the United States to sign a nonaggression agreement and end what Pyongyang regards as U.S efforts to isolate its economy.

Peter Brookes, the Pentagon's chief policymaker on the North until he left in September, told Reuters North Korea was involved in a ``very dangerous game of brinksmanship, extortion and opportunism.''

``I hope that Pyongyang makes the right decisions before the application of a more muscular policy is required,'' added Brookes, now director of Asian studies at the Heritage Foundation, a private research group.

Phillip Saunders of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, said the Bush administration had adopted a quieter, less assertive policy toward Pyongyang than would be the case if not for Iraq.

``But since North Korea has the ability to provoke a crisis whenever they want, the U.S. may not have the luxury of waiting until the Iraq situation is resolved,'' he said by e-mail.

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