Heed Perry's wake-up call

San Jose Mercury News: When the quiet man says we're on a path to war, he deserves to be taken seriously. And when the quiet man sounding the warning is Stanford's William Perry, it's cause for genuine alarm.
Former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry has mostly held his tongue as the Bush administration has stumbled around for a reply to North Korea's attempt at nuclear blackmail.
Many have tried to get Perry, an Asia expert at Stanford's Institute for International Studies, to say publicly and passionately what he's been saying privately for months. On Monday, he did, telling the Washington Post:
UThat the U.S. and North Korea are on a path toward war, perhaps as early as this year.
UThat President Bush won't negotiate directly with President Kim Jong Il because he believes the North Korean leader is "evil and loathsome ..."
UThat "the nuclear program now under way in North Korea poses an imminent danger of nuclear weapons being detonated in American cities."
The architect of the 1994 policy of North Korean containment urges "coercive diplomacy" -- threatening the North Koreans, but offering them badly needed economic aid. The Bush administration insists on multilateral negotiations involving the Chinese, Japanese and South Koreans.
Some in the administration accuse Perry of being alarmist. They say revelations that Pyongyang began a weapons program several years ago, in violation of the agreement reached with the Clinton administration, prove the North Koreans can't be trusted.
But, there's no debate: North Korea either has or is in the process of manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. Instead of facing up to the situation in North Korea, the other war has provided the Bush administration with a weapon of mass destraction.
Public warning
With the clarity of a claxon, the quiet man made it clear why, now, he offers a blunt, dramatic public warning: "I have held off on public criticism to this point because I had hoped the administration was going to act on this problem, and that public criticism might be counterproductive. But time is running out, and each month the problem gets more dangerous."