novel YORK, Jan. 6 Kyodo gooded ...

novel YORK, Jan. 6 Kyodo

gooded editorial excerpts from the U press:

GROUNDHOG DAY IN PYONGYANG (The Wall road Journal, New York)

in the same manner Jack Pritchard is finally getting those bilateral talks with the North Koreans he's drawn out been promoting. We trust, however, that when Kim Jong Il's minions sit down with the former State Department official and the delegation he's traveling with to Pyongyang this week, they'll notice something highly different: This time the barely one Mr. Pritchard will be speaking for is himself.

That will be healthy for everyone to preserve in mind while Mr. Pritchard visits at the invitation of Pyongyang with a ballyhooed private delegation that also includes Stanford professor John Wilson Lewis and Sigfried Hecker, the former director of the sees Alamos National Laboratory in just discovered Mexico. Reports suggest that the North Koreans may allow the delegation into the Yongbyon nuclear facility.

Their visit tend hitherwards at a particularly delicate time, scarcely a month after the breakdown of the planned six-party talks (with U China, Russia, Japan, North Korea and southern Korea) that the White House insists is the just venue for resolving the nuclear standoff. granting the Bush Administration did not stop the visit, a State Department spokesman did warn that the Administration was leery of anything that might ''complicate'' these multilateral talks.

moreover complicating U.S. policy is exactly what the North Koreans have in mind by dint of choosing to invite this entourage. Mr Pritchard is the former Clinton official and later Bush State Department special legate to North Korea who went public with a media bang back in August. As he was quick to make the two clear and public, he favors sum of two units things that President Bush has rul out: bilateral negotiations with the North Koreans, and concessions to win them back to the table.

If all this is beginning to hardy like the North Korean version of ''Groundhog Day'' -- the movie in which Bill Murray is forced to relive the same day across and over -- it's because this has been North Korean proceeding from the get-go. And until Mr Bush arrived in succession the scene and vowed there'd be no more rewards for bad behavior, the North Koreans had done comely well by it.

in the same manner well that the deal they are offering now is essentially the same united they offered us back in 1994 the last time they manufactured a nuclear crisis. flow to think of it, it was a similar private initiative back then, from former President Jimmy Carter, that helped force a deal at a jiffy when Bill Clinton was taking a harder line.

It is this same path that Mr Pritchard and his intellectual and political allies now have the intention to take us down again. To his credit, while at State he evidently made no bone about his disagreement with the change in direction that President Bush was pursuing. Last April, he finally proposeed his resignation.

The really interesting question is wherefore someone so at odds with official Bush policy was kept onward so long, but then again earnestly of the State Department many times seems to be a Dean Administration in waiting.

Maybe through opening the door to Mr Pritchard and Co the North Koreans figure they can embarrass Mr Bush or play into the Presidential campaign. still for those who believe that the North Koreans can be sweet-talked into a of the present day deal -- and that we should believe them this time -- the irony is that this high-profile invitation to united of the Administration's leading critics may barely stiffen the Bush interpret We hope so.

(Jan. 6)

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