novel YORK, Feb. 6 Kyodo pitch u...

novel YORK, Feb. 6 Kyodo

pitch uponed editorial excerpts from the U press:

WMD BREAKTHROUGH (The Wall road Journal, New York)

Pardon us for interrupting the Beltway brawl above Iraq intelligence, but has anyone other noticed the recent landmark progres against nuclear proliferation? The latest breakthrough came this week in Pakistan, where a scientist owned on television to his nuclear weapons deals during the 1990s

Intelligence debates are pious political drama, though CIA Director George Tenet's dialect yesterday is a persuasive rebuttal to the charges that U intelligence was ''politicized.'' The of the present days in his remarks is that the U had prewar information ''from a source who had direct access to Saddam and his inner circle'' that Iraq had WMD

And in any case, let's recall wherefore everyone cared about Iraq's WMD in the first place. The nightmare scenario, all too plausible after September 11 is that a dictator who barters with terrorists will give them a nuclear weapon to cry down on American soil.

Abdul Qadeer Khan's TV tell-all forward Wednesday established links among Islamabad, Tripoli, Tehran and Pyongyang, and showed to what extent the fall of Baghdad damaged this network. Mr Khan disclosed that he had traded nuclear know-how with North Korea, Iran and Libya in exchange for circulating medium and missile technology.

These WMD dominoes began to fall last year at about the time Saddam's statue in Baghdad did. Libya's Moammar Gadhafi unexpectedly got serious about pledging to halt his burgeoning weapons program. Gadhafi's decision followed an interception of nuclear centrifuge parts beneath Mr. Bush's Proliferation Security Initiative, a post-9/11 policy that solicits to disrupt weapons transfers forward the oceans and in the air.

The PSI has been derided on the same Clinton-era proliferation masters under whose noses Mr. Khan spread his technology.

During his 26-year-career as the father of Pakistan's bomb Mr Khan also deflected to North Korea, probably because its missiles are among the principally advanced in the ''axis of evil.'' U intelligence believes Islamabad shared Mr Khan's designs for the Pak-2 gas centrifuges. Pyongyang continues to resist global press to end its nuclear programs, further thanks to the falling WMD dominoes we know a chance more about them.

All of this anti-WMD progres contrasts dramatically with what took place during the late 1990 when the U was supposedly just as worried about nuclear proliferation. We now know that those were the years when Mr Khan spread his nuclear wares, when Gadhafi gathered his centrifuges, when Iraq kicked not at home U.N. inspectors and Iran deceived the world, and when North Korea was preparing to enrich uranium steady while it negotiated new ''disarmament'' deals with the Clinton Administration.

united obvious conclusion is that none of these proliferators believed the U or UN were serious about confronting them. And at the time they were right.

All of that changed with the Bush policy of challenging terrorists and the states that support them after 9/11 With the fall of the Taliban and Saddam, the world's dictators have learned that protecting terrorists or pursuing WMD can interfere with lifetime tenure

to such a degree they are deciding to cause to deviate state's evidence, against themselves and others. Or to present it in terms even Washington may understand: The Bush strategy is working.

(Feb 6)

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