North Korea is not quite the paranoid, soulless and isolated dictatorship US propaganda would have us believe. The “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-Il and his henchmen appear to have a sense of humor. This week when they announced that they would go ahead and build nuclear weapons, unless the US gave up its “hostile policy”, the North Korean leadership also explained that the country needed nuclear armaments so that they could reduce conventional military expenditure and concentrate on improving the lot of the ordinary people. The tragic truth for most North Koreans is that their service in, and subsequent control by, the armed forces is what keeps their odious government in place. The North Korean threat is plain blackmail. The Kim dictatorship cannot survive without outside food aid. Even a regime as draconian as it is could not control a militarized population that has been going crazy with hunger. Blackmail was a tactic that worked before, ten years ago when Pyongyang first threatened to abandon the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. But the economic crisis was not then anything like as bad as it is today.
It was interesting how Pyongyang first pushed to get its own way when the USA was shaping up to fight Iraq. Clearly Kim hoped that even though he shared “axis of evil” billing with Saddam, Washington would keep him quiet because it did not want an Asian military diversion from its Middle East target. The tactic didn’t work. Pyongyang went quiet as it watched the devastating US fire power assault upon Iraq. Some in Washington may have concluded that it would be a shocked and awed and much more cooperative North Korea with whom they would be negotiating post-Iraq. Exactly the opposite seems to be true. Far from compromise, Pyongyang has upped the stakes.
Maybe from the US point of view, Kim and his henchmen have picked up the wrong message from Iraq. Maybe the North Koreans are reasoning that Saddam did not have nuclear weapons and the Americans invaded. We have nuclear weapons and the Americans won’t. Pyongyang will be calculating that George Bush will not want anything to divert his attention from the buildup to an assault on yet another Muslim country. Therefore, one way or another, the demanded blackmail will be delivered and the Kim dictatorship will survive a little while longer.
What is sure is that the way in which Washington handles Pyongyang will provide some idea of the way White House Middle East thinking is going. It would be nice to believe that the Bush administration will not duck the issue of a nuclear Korea but we should not hold our breath. The US will talk tough, do nothing in the Far East, and stick instead to its Zionist-inspired intervention in the Middle East.
