What are Americans to make of the overt opprobrium recently leveled against President Bush for the inclusion of North Korea as part of his so-called "axis of evil"? To hear Bush's critics tell it, North Korea's continued military buildup is only an understandable expression of insecurity in the face of a much greater US military threat and not, as some have suggested, any indication of an eventual North Korean offensive. Unfortunately, such remarkable naivete is an acute symptom of a diplomatic delirium that befalls those well-intentioned yet sadly misguided individuals who spend too much time on South Korea's "sunshine policy" of engagement with North Korea.

Clearly, the scores of South Koreans who protested Bush's recent visit believe they have nothing to fear from the North. Likewise, the South Korean leader Kim Dac Jung treated Bush with more icy disdain than the warm sunshine he reserves for the North Korean leader Kim Jung II. Then of course there are those Korean experts, many employed during the Clinton administration, who believe Bush's simplistic morality threatens their historic negotiations, the predictable consequences of which remain insubstantial. In fact, one could easily infer from this triumvirate chorus of North Korean apologists, that North Korea really isn't such a bad place after all. While at best North Korea is benignly stubborn and seriously misunderstood, at its worst it only occasionally affects a belligerent posture. But evil? Come on now. How can such talk, Bush's critics wonder, possibly advance America's national security interests?

With all due deference to Fukuyama's end of history theory, such moral clarity has served America well in the past and no doubt will continue to do so now and in the future. Bush's "axis of evil" clearly demonstrates a rare political maturity for addressing the real and present dangers currently threatening America, rather than, as is so often the case, merely postponing and imposing a still greater menace upon succeeding administrations.

But if Bush is to be legitimately criticized for anything, it should be for his identifying as evil the geo-political reality of North Korea and not the more appropriate object of Kim Jung II himself. For it is the degree to which both Kim Jung II and his father Kim II Sung have so thoroughly corrupted and poisoned the population above the 38th parallel dividing the Korean peninsula that ultimately distinguishes North Korea from the other members of the "axis of evil."

While it is necessary to acknowledge that the governments of Iran and Iraq certainly hate America and that that hatred may even be shared by the majority in those countries, the control these governments have over their respective populations pales in comparison to that currently being exercised in North Korea.

Kim Jung II's all pervasive and pernicious cult of personality has effectively rendered his captive subjects as political automatons held in perpetual service for the greater glorification of a paranoid schizophrenic. One need only recall the recent historic exchange of family members between the North and South and the North Korean's continual zombie-like recitations praising their "Dear Leader." Consequently, when compared to Iran and Iraq, North Korea is a matter of being so different in degree as to be different in kind. And that difference in kind is the very embodiment of evil, which is Kim Jung II.

Indeed, if we hold empathy to be a defining quality of one's humanity, then clearly something other than human holds captive the North Korean population. By any objective consideration, what empathy has Kim Jung II for Koreans whose suffering is the direct consequence of his failed policies and evil ideology? The simple answer is none, and the simple remedy for their suffering is freedom.

Haskell Carter