It's wrong to overreact to the coat-trailing of North Korea's cot-rattling Kim, writes Peter Preston
The trouble with North Korea - the echoing trouble over the years - is knowing when to laugh. And that is precisely the trouble now as Pyongyang twists Washington's tail in malign parody of the Iraqi stand-off: historic melodrama replayed as farce.
Saddam doesn't have the bomb yet but George thinks he needs 300 UN inspectors outside every palace.
Kim Jong-il may or may not have a few bombs, but he does have 8,000 spent fuel rods and a poky old nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, with three UN inspectors sitting in the car park since 1994.
While Saddam submits, Kim snaps his fingers and snarls. The UN trio prepare to depart. The security council heaves with apprehension. Even Donald Rumsfeld doesn't fancy making a meal of this one.
The very first change of Pentagon doctrine under Bush, remember, was that America could no longer fight two major wars at the same time.
So, as long as the hardware pours lugubriously into Kuwait and points south, North Korea is quite safe. It can howl for attention, dominate headlines, demand deals. It can have glorious, cost-free fun. Too larky a diagnosis? Perhaps. There was nothing remotely comic about the Korean war. There is nothing comic about the sub-Stalinist remnant it left behind, locked in poverty and isolation.
But hang on, nevertheless, to some semblance of balance.
Do you remember Kim il-Sung, the first "dear leader" and those excruciating full-page newspaper ads he used to unleash on a cowering West in the 1970s?
I remember them all too well. I also remember the first confirmed sightings of his son, Kim Jong-il. Not the remote beast the CIA told us about but a young man taking holidays in Malta and picking up his first lessons in sophisticated statecraft from Dom Mintoff.
The Mintoff touch - flamboyant, mischievous, making great waves out of little water - hasn't left him. It's there again today. It demands to be noticed by the high and mighty of the world. It wants something in return. A baby rattling the sides of the cot. And the questions thus asked, of course, are far from infantile. Why such a lather over Saddam when the alleged peril in Pyongyang is so much further advanced?
Why hasn't Tony Blair flown back from Sharm to counsel restraint on the White House? Do we believe this threat or don't we?
Intelligence has threat dossiers by the hundred. Thirty months ago, when the embryo Bush team was peddling Son of Star Wars to a dubious electorate, the talk was all about the menace from the North (and not a word about Baghdad or oil). Ordinary Americans were conditioned to fret about Kim's Korea (sometimes in its own right; sometimes as a kind of stalking symbol for Beijing).
What has changed?
Everything in a sense since 9/11. China is now a trusted American partner against terror and terrific investment opportunity. Russia is similarly trusted. Nobody needs to confect rogue states with nukes to get Star Wars Two through Capitol Hill. Osama bin Laden has done that already. Saddam is back on top again - world enemy number one. And the truth, the essential balance? The truth, as usual, is best found close up. Iran and Jordan watch Iraq obsessively: the last thing they want is a Bush war. Seoul watches Pyongyang obsessively. If something is going badly astray over the 49th parallel, South Korea would know first and react first. Instead, it has just elected a new president promising more links with the North. The last thing Seoul wants is a global flap.
The truth is that nuclear weapons are dangerous and need to be diminished. Even a handful of them in the hands of some tiny state adds to the dangers. But, equally, there is always a balance. The most worrying nukes around belong to India and to Pakistan, where bin Laden has some of his best popularity ratings.
China isn't worried about North Korea. Russia is openly scornful. There is a well-grounded assumption that too much attention merely inflates a problem into a crisis.
Poverty, incapacity and failure contain Kim Jong-il, and he, in turn, seeks to contain a military apparatus bent only on hanging on to what privileges and powers it possesses.
One fine, distant day, with more trade and more aid, the barriers will come down. That is the best kind of regime change. One day the rules about non-proliferation will be automatically observed. There's no bonus in overreaction as the cot rattles.
But why (baby Kim asks slyly) get so het-up over Saddam and not over me? Aren't I a menace too? Where's my almighty fuss? And the answer, of course, is that our leaders haven't got one. They can fume but they can't laugh.