By Lee Byong-chul

``He is arrogant, impatient, rageful and cruel.''

``He is highly intelligent and a flexible thinker.''

``He is very decisive and serious… a good listener and interlocutor.''

``His pale and sunken face should be seen as a dead mask''

Can you guess whom these strikingly contrasting remarks refer to? He is the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who has been viewed as an old headache or the root of all evil to President George W. Bush. In spite of the limitations of official data about Kim and his unchecked dictatorial rule, I find it meaningful the deliberate use of phrases from those who have met with Kim, because it offers some defining elements of debunking the much described dictatorial myth that continually remains solid over five decades, since the time of his late father, Kim Il-sung.

At the age of 82, Kim Il-sung died in July 1994 of heart attack. His sudden death came as a powerful shock to the Korean psyche, because then South Korean President Kim Young-sam planned to fly to Pyongyang to hold historic first inter-Korean summit talks. Instantly, many analysts invested themselves professionally in the idea of forecasting the communist regime's political uncertainty, but no one could talks authoritatively on the prospects of the regime facing the vacuum of absolute power.

Like Stalin, Kim Jong-il painted by a variety of unproven gossip has the mix of a rare combination: both intellectual and killer. Kim is, in the words of the outgoing South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun who held the second inter-Korean summit talks with Kim Jong-il in October 2007, ``a leader having the intellectual potential of pinpointing the state affairs and a solid charisma toward his regime'' enabling him to wrest the levers of power from the old revolutionary generation surrounding him.

At the same time, Kim was known as the mastermind of the 1983 Rangoon attack in which 17 South Korean high-ranking officials who were accompanying President Chun Doo-hwan, on a state-visit there were killed; the 1987 bombing of a Korean Air Lines aircraft that saw 115 casualties; the murder of Lee Han-young, a 36-year-old nephew of Kim's late wife Sung Hye-rim, who was shot to death in 1997. A political scapegoat of Hwang Jang-yop, one of 11 members of the secretariat for the ruling Worker's Party and a tutor to the North Korean leader, whose political asylum put Pyongyang into a state of panic that year, Lee was the first North Korean defector to be killed in South Korea since the 1950-53 Korean War.

Many North Korea analysts, if not most, schooled in the impact of the conspiracy theory-based bloody power struggle from the inner circle in Pyongyang, have often expressed skepticism about the ability of the regime to shape the foreign and economy policies. Indeed, while they all saw what they wanted to see, their inconsistent worldviews have lived with people as the starting point of all their value judgments. That was not a fair characterization of reading the world but today comforts American neoconservatives who point out that the Kim Jong-il regime should be deleted on the map.

There is always a military option in the final alternative of the neocons' foreign policy analysis, as if the Israeli Jews cannot live together with the Palestinians. The Clinton administration had plans in the early 1990s to attack and destroy the nuclear facilities after the secretive communist state was found to be producing weapons-grade plutonium. On February 2003, President Bush stated that "all options are on the table" to resolve the North Korea's nuclear weapons program, while insinuating that he now could pick up the 'unfinished business' of transforming the Kim regime. Clinton and Bush, in short, called quick action on North Korea's nuclear uncertainty, fueling claims that they are preparing possible air strikes against the suspicious nuclear site in the North.

There is not much doubt that Pyongyang's never-ending ambition for an atomic arms program quickly captured the mood of the neocons and pulled off a political masterstroke, while deepening the image of Kim that he was quite clearly a cruel terrorist and starving his people to death. The neocons' words are very carefully chosen and negative as a whole. Privately, some South Korean officials say that ``economically containing North Korea is perfectly doable; it's just a matter of time.''

Washington needs to see Pyongyang ― Beijing's backyard ― differently and consider itself a ``strategic partner'' to the Kim regime, something unthinkable to neocons. Condoleeza Rice said that America was still committed to diplomacy to resolve the nuclear standoff. Kim, unlike Hugh Chavez of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, has not yet challenged America voluntarily and directly. Given that Kim's days are virtually numbered, his ambitions look like a lemon to America. Despite its rhetorical antagonism to the United States, North Korea, unlike Iran, does not pose a serious threat to American security interests. Not coincidentally, perhaps, the English language in North Korea is no longer seen as the American imperialist's mother tongue.

In contrast to the previous years' addresses, where the Kim regime was branded as part of an axis of evil together with Iran and Iraq in 2002, President Bush did not even touch upon North Korea at his seventh and final State of the Union address on January 28. Probably the most plausible explanation for Bush's 'quiet diplomacy' against North Korea rests on a specific request by Secretary of State Rice who continually seeks pragmatic patience toward the North Korean regime, rather than applying 'shock therapy' recipes to it.

Given that North Korea has already failed to meet a December 31 deadline to release a list of its fissile material and nuclear weaponry as well as clear away U.S. suspicions of enriching uranium for weapons, Bush's complacency looked unusual. While the majority of the press still side with Bush against the hawks trying to roll back diplomatic negotiations, Bush's move seems to contain an element of calculation.

Bush is nearing the end of his second term with less than a year left in office while gradually losing his political asset of time. At the same time, North Korea goes, although imperfectly, nuclear. Kim acts as if he is on the wall of a prison by playing a high-risk-and-high-return game. Yet it won't be long to get to know what Bush's silence toward Kim means.

Lee Byong-chul is senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Coopertion (IPC), a non-partisan policy advisory body based in Seoul. He can be reached at bcleebc@gmail.com.