Bush hits direct N. Korea talks

The White House yesterday rejected direct talks with North Korea, and President Bush said dictator Kim Jong-il had isolated himself from the rest of the world by attempting to fire a long-range missile that could strike the United States.

As international condemnation grew and the U.N. Security Council held an emergency meeting, the president — in language more subdued than his words from last week that a missile launch would be “unacceptable” — said North Korea must abandon its nuclear ambitions and return to six-party talks.

“What these firings of the rockets has done is, they’ve isolated themselves further, and that’s sad for the people of North Korea,” Mr. Bush told reporters in the Oval Office after a meeting with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili.

“The five of us — Russia, South Korea, Japan, China, and the United States — spoke with one voice about the rocket launches, and we will work together to continue to remind the leader of North Korea that there is a better way forward for his people,” he said. “I also strongly believe that it is much more effective to have more than one nation dealing with North Korea. It’s more effective for them to hear from a group of nations rather than one nation.”

The White House said yesterday that it did not know whether the missiles carried any payload. Department of Defense officials told The Washington Times that there were no indications the missiles carried warheads.

White House press secretary Tony Snow went further in supporting the U.S. insistence on multilateral talks and rejection of one-on-one diplomacy, despite some calls yesterday from Congress for bilateral talks.

“This is not a U.S.-North Korea matter, and we’re not going to let the leader of North Korea transform it into that,” he said. “If it was the desire of Kim Jong-il to turn this into a two-party negotiation or standoff between the United States and North Korea, he blew it.”

Mr. Bush was dismissive of the launch of the Taepodong-2 missile that failed 42 seconds after liftoff Tuesday.

“One thing we have learned is that the rocket didn’t stay up very long and tumbled into the sea,” he said.

But Mr. Bush said that the failure “doesn’t, frankly, diminish my desire to solve this problem.”

“I view this as an opportunity to remind the international community that we must work together to continue to work hard to convince the North Korean leader to give up any weapons programs. They’ve agreed to do that in the past, and we will hold them to account,” he said.

Despite the administration’s dismissal of bilateral talks, Mr. Snow played down the significance of the tests themselves.

“There are attempts to try to describe this almost in breathless World War III terms. This is not such a situation,” he said.

The president said his top national-security officials and U.S. diplomats were working with other nations to try to persuade North Korea to return to the negotiating table.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said earlier in the day that global outrage showed “it is now not a matter of the United States and North Korea.”

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