Feed North Korea

According to all indications, famine is stalking North Korea. For political reasons, the United States thus far is reluctant to feed the hungry. It should put politics aside and offer help.

North Korea is undoubtedly the world's least deserving country. Its paranoid and tyrannical rulers keep its 23 million inhabitants inside a virtual prison, and within that isolated Stalinist nation an untold number are locked up in a real gulag.

The government routinely threatens South Korea and its allies, the United States and Japan, in the vilest terms, and it has sponsored bloody terrorism.

Last September, when a North Korean submarine ran aground off the coast of South Korea, commandos spilled into the woods. Now the North has angered the South by agreeing, in its desperation for cash, to accept nuclear waste from Taiwan.

Meanwhile old accusations of North Korean agents kidnapping Japanese girls have reappeared -- allegedly to provide models of Japanese behavior for North Korean spies-in-training.

With such a record, it would seem obvious that the United States should offer no help. In this case, though, the obvious answer is not the right one.

The downfall of the North Korean regime is fervently to be wished for, but using famine to bring that about is more than risky. Famines breed chaos, not democracy. The current regime could be replaced, difficult as it is to imagine, by something worse.

North Korea's million-man army could launch a suicide attack. A hungry population could press against the South Korean border. Even setting those dangers aside, humanitarian motives should prevail. U.S. policy has long held that starving children should be fed, no matter how evil their rulers.

U.S. grain went to Ethiopia when its regime was unswervingly anti-American (and in the process won the respect of many civilians). The United States helped feed Iraqis, Sudanese and Angolans.

Why is the United States not upholding this tradition now? Mostly because South Korea objects to providing food aid. South Korean officials said they would be flexible if only the North apologized for (last September's) submarine intrusion.

Improbably and thanks to U.S. diplomacy, the North apologized -- and now the South remains reluctant, insisting that North Korea engage in face-to-face diplomacy. This is a worthy goal, but it should have nothing to do with famine.

In fact, the United States should only set one condition for providing food -- that North Korea allow sufficient UN monitors into the country to ensure that food ends up where it should.

All other issues should be negotiated separately.

-- The Washington Post