North Korean government is its people's worst enemy

Perhaps China can talk sense to North Korea and convince that isolated, rogue state that the worst thing it could do now is reactivate three nuclear power plants that produce weapons-grade by-products.
Otherwise, it is going to be a very long, very cold, very painful winter for the North Korean people.
Perhaps the North Korean regime believes that the Bush administration is so preoccupied with events in the Middle East that it can do as it pleases. Or perhaps it sees a threat to reactivate the reactors as a way of extracting concessions of some kind from President Bush.
In either case North Korea would be wrong. While there is no doubt that President Bush has given Iraq a higher priority than North Korea, it is not as if North Korea has fallen off the administration's radar screen. And this is not a president who takes kindly to being blackmailed.
North Korea announced its intention to reactivate the power plants, which have been sealed by United Nations inspectors and are being monitored, in reaction to a U.S. decision to stop shipping fuel oil to North Korea.
Reneged on deal
The fuel oil was part of a 1994 deal in which North Korea agreed to stop producing weapons grade plutonium in exchange for U.S. construction of two new plants and interim shipments of fuel oil.
The whole point of the agreement was to keep Korea from producing nuclear weapons. Korea breached that agreement by embarking on a new weapons program that didn't require material produced by the three closed plants.
The United States did not act unilaterally in suspending the oil shipments. Japan, South Korea and the European Union were also signatories to the 1994 deal and backed the suspension. The foreign ministries of Germany and Russia issued statements saying urging North Korea to abide by its obligations.
The United States is often accused of acting arrogantly from its position of power. North Korea is proof that superpowers have not cornered the market on arrogance.
North Korea is a nation that cannot provide its people with the barest of necessities. Without international aid, North Koreans will freeze and starve to death this winter. No one wants to see that.
But the fate of the North Korean people is in the hands of its leaders. If it chooses to build its nuclear weapons program on the cold, emaciated bodies of its own people, that will be a tragedy -- but a tragedy of North Korea's making.