A truly criminal empire
THOMAS BARNETT BLOG
EDITORIAL: “Fission worries: At cross-purposes in the six-party talks,” The Economist, 11 February 2006, p. 14.
ARTICLE: “A frustrating game of carrots and sticks: Tensions persist over how to tackle the North Korean nuclear problem,” The Economist, 11 February 2006, p. 39.
North Korea’s latest excuse, we are told, for boycotting further talks among the Party of Six, is that America has too viciously cracked down on its myriad criminal networks: narcotics, counterfeiting, bogus drugs, bootleg cigarettes, peddling endangered species, money laundering, and the sale of any military technology that Pyongyang gets its hands on. As The Economist says, “North Korea is not a failed state taken over by criminals, it is a regime organized to maximize profits from its illicit activities,” which, thanks to extensive linkage to Chinese “triad” gangs, it amazingly profitable.
North Korea’s “supernotes,” or near-perfect counterfeit hundred-dollar U.S. bills, are legendary in their global reach, so America cracks down. But when are we to convince Beijing that North Korea’s manipulation of its own criminal networks is costly the regime too much?
According to one American expert, as much as 40% of North Korea’s exports are criminal in nature, so if that sort of rule breaking doesn’t get you a warrant for your regime’s arrest, what will? The two million dead from the preventable famine in the mid-1990s? The malnutrition and shrinky-dink nature of childhood in rural North Korea today?
The worse it gets in North Korea, the more Kim squeezes his criminal nets for profit, meanwhile kicking out most of the remaining international relief groups, something he can do only because South Korea and China prop him up with food supplies.
At some point, all this complicity in criminal activity must stop, and the ghetto crackhouse that is the DPRK must go.
Instead on fixating on Iran’s slow-motion pursuit of the Bomb, this is where we should be focusing our attention right now. By ending Kim’s regime, we bring China more into the fold of a rule-abiding member of the Core.
The worst crime comes in dragging this debacle out for years to come, knowing as we do the suffering that continues there."
thomaspmbarnett.com |
