As I wrote in April 2001: "In the hospitals one sees kids too small for their age, with hollow eyes and skin stretched tight across their faces. They wear blue-and-white striped pajamas, like the children in Hitler's Auschwitz."

While Western critics denounced President Bush's decision to include North Korea in the axis of evil, the long-suffering people of North Korea cheered it. I know; refugees have told me. They know how Ronald Reagan's description of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" was an early and important step toward its collapse. Moreover, the axis-of-evil remark proved prescient after North Korea's confession that it had a large, covert nuclear-weapons program. More and more high-ranking defectors have told us that Kim Jong Il's government is in a desperate situation, much closer to collapse than the outside world knows. This, they say, is why he needs the fear of nuclear annihilation to win concessions from the West, prop up his regime, and subjugate his own people.