Misplaced Priorities

Throughout Asia the talk is of impending war. Yet the potential conflict that has so many Asians concerned is not the one debated daily in the U.N. or blustered about in Washington. The issue of whether Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, and where he is hiding his empty shell casings, seems in this part of the world secondary to Kim Jong Il's admission of restarting his nuclear program and Pyongyang's assertion that it might strike first if the U.S. deploys more forces in the Western Pacific. These escalations, coming from a country that, by most accounts, already possesses precisely...