Editorial: Danger of selective policing

North Korea and Iraq had not much in common until nearly a year ago when the United States President decided to lump them with Iran in an "axis of evil".

It was one of the more maladroit moves of George W. Bush and the phrase quickly disappeared from White House scripts. But it seems to have awakened North Korea with a vengeance.

The arrest of a North Korean cargo ship carrying Scud missiles towards the Gulf last week was symptomatic of the embarrassments the unreconstructed Stalinist state has caused the US this year. The missiles turned out to be destined for Yemen, an ally of the US in the tension over Iraq, and Yemen demanded their release.

The US could do little but lamely hand the weapons and ship back to the rightful owners. The incident served no purpose except to illustrate the continual trade in the weapons that Mr Bush is determined to banish from Iraq.

More seriously, North Korea's October admission that it has a nuclear weapons programme places the Bush administration in an invidious position.

Other countries, particularly those it calls "rogue states", cannot help but notice that the US reaction to a rogue with a declared nuclear capability is a great deal more circumspect than its attitude to one it suspects of an intention to acquire such arms. The paradox was probably foreseen in Pyongyang.

As if to underline the proliferation of these weapons, India last month accused Pakistan of helping North Korea's nuclear programme in return for missiles. Pakistan promptly denied any such deal but the argument reminded the world that the risks of a nuclear exchange are probably greater between the nuclear neighbours of the subcontinent than anything threatened by Iraq of late.

Consistency is the necessary ingredient of a credible world order. Officials in Washington explain they are treading carefully with North Korea while the issue with Iraq remains unresolved.

They confined their response to a suspension of oil supplies to North Korea. Now the North Koreans have retaliated by resuming development of a nuclear power plant, thought to be capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. That project had been suspended since 1994 under an agreement that the US and allies would provide the country with light water reactors instead.

New Zealand has been one of the donors to those reactors, despite the opposition of successive governments to any form of nuclear power generation in this country. After North Korea's nuclear weapons admission Foreign Minister Phil Goff says the Government would like to withdraw from the power project but Apec partners had urged it to remain.

North Korea is having a charmed ride for a state that depends on foreign generosity to ensure its people are fed. Its three largest food donors, the US, Japan and South Korea, are the very countries it most delights in antagonising. By suspending aid they could probably bring about its collapse. But the prospect of absorbing millions of impoverished and starving people from the north is the reason South Korea is taking a careful approach to reuniting the peninsula.

China and Russia, the North's powerful neighbours, joined in condemnation of its nuclear weapons programme at their recent meeting of leaders. But those two countries, particularly China, remain the reason the US would tread carefully whether or not Iraq loomed larger in its sights.

It needs, however, to be doubly careful to ensure it is not seen to concentrate on Iraq simply because that part of the world, unlike Northeast Asia, has no power to rival that of the US. To selectively police weapons of mass destruction, picking only on countries safely out of China or Russia's region, is not the conduct of respectable international law. It looks more like the behaviour of a bully.