Making a deal with a double-dealing dictator.(Correction, Please!)

ITEM: "After years of a go-it-alone U.S. foreign policy, North Korea's nuclear test had the president looking to the United Nations Security Council to condemn the action," commented the Seattle Times for October 9. "All 15 U.N. members agreed. The administration immediately deployed Ambassador Christopher Hill to meet with North Korean representatives."

Continued the Times: "Part of the attitude change was a new flexibility about working with North Korea on the transfer of a disputed $25 million. Stocks of heating oil and economic emoluments were employed to win cooperation. China was brought into the picture, and its neighborly influence was used to good results. North Korea, last February, agreed to shut down its Yongbyon nuclear plant. In the best tradition of" 'trust but verily;' the International Atomic Energy Agency and U.S. inspectors will oversee closure. The latest good news is about fully disabling the facility."

CORRECTION: When you get an unverifiable promise from a proven liar with a protracted record of treachery, the one thing you can depend upon is that the new deal will produce more deceit.

North Korea knows its tactics are working. Alter all, just about a year ago Pyongyang exploded a nuclear device that President Bush said would have "serious repercussions"; such actions, said the president, "would not be tolerated."

Not only were the actions tolerated, they were rewarded. Within months, the Bush administration pledged aid to North Korea and an end to the sanctions it had imposed on an Asian bank that was involved in laundering funds for a long string of North Korean illegal activities. Pyongyang in February vowed, among other promises, to end its enrichment activities within two months.

It did not. But the regime has now resold that same pledge to the Bush administration. North Korea is also repeating its promise about opening up its plutonium facility in Yongbyon to inspectors, as it did with the Clinton administration, which offered Pyongyang two nuclear reactors. Although the United States and its allies did provide North Korea with fuel aid at that time, the communists kept conducting secret nuclear production, and the arrangement eventually fell apart.

Meanwhile, North Korea's latest guarantee about the Yongbyon facility doesn't mean much even if the communists do find it to their advantage to keep their word on this point. As former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton has acknowledged, Yongbyon is "an old facility at or near the end of its useful life,'" so giving it up "doesn't amount to much of a concession."