Ted Re..In spite of being an idiot [your words, not mine], you must be able to see the connection between NK's current aberrant behavior and when it started......right about the time
Bush labeled it one of the Axis of Evil nations.
And what exactly is the difference between the current aberration and all of the other aberrations NK has engaged in the last forty yrs. In the grand scheme of things, relations are better now than they were 40 - 50 yrs ago. You put up this site in one of your posts. At first I thought it was another one of your NK propoganda sites, however, after reading it, the site has a far more geopolitical articles than most. And it seems to be balanced between the two sides. Read this article.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/DL25Dg01.html
Korea
Move over Iraq, North Korea wants the spotlight
By Bradley K Martin
A quarter-century ago, Dear Leader Kim Jong-il was sharing absolute power in North Korea with his father, Great Leader Kim Il-sung. Their principal American-handler was Kim Yong-nam, a bespectacled functionary with Groucho Marx eyebrows - but no one-liners and no cigar. When I met him in 1979 his specialty was earnest, three-hour monologues over lunch.
And now? Kim Il-sung died in 1994, but otherwise at the top it's business as usual. Kim Jong-il is the Great Leader, flexing the dynasty's still enormous muscle. Kim Yong-nam acts as head of state.
In the United States, four presidents have come and gone, along with their principal North Korea-watchers.
The discontinuity in Washington may help to explain what otherwise would be a mystery: how the current US team imagines it can focus on invading Iraq while consigning to a back burner North Korea's revived threats to make trouble big time.
Consider the response recently when Pyongyang announced it was reactivating the Yongbyon nuclear power plant - a reactor that produces weapons-grade plutonium, and that the United States prepared to bomb in 1994 before the North Koreans agreed to shut it down. Bush administration officials were loath to attend to the challenge before dealing with Iraq. "One rogue state crisis at a time," a senior administration official was reported to have said.
But Pyongyang's history and circumstances dictate that it cannot and will not permit the United States to wait and deal with North Korea at a more opportune time when other foes have been vanquished and the field is clear.
Just put yourself in Kim Jong-il's place. You are a dictator whose top priority - far outranking such mundane concerns as feeding your people - is preserving your regime. Over decades you have fortified your country, hardening sensitive installations inside tunnels and bunkers.
Now US news reports tell you that your enemy is preparing more sophisticated weapons, and contemplates practicing with them on Saddam Hussein in Iraq. These include "smart" bunker-busters, which can penetrate to the correct underground level before detonating, and thermobaric bombs whose blast can destroy the germs in biological weapons.
You note that President George W Bush has termed Iraq, Iran and North Korea the "axis of evil". You don't need to be a tea-leaf reader to know that, once Iraq is out of the way, your time will be short.
Now, still imagining that you are Kim Jong-il, do you graciously wait in the anteroom and avoid interrupting while the Pentagon targets Iraq? Or do you see it as essential to your survival to take swift advantage of Washington's Middle Eastern preoccupation?
The question answers itself. Washington's refusal to acknowledge urgency guarantees that Kim Jong-il will follow his latest provocation with another provocation, and yet another, each one more threatening, until he has gained Bush's full attention.
The stage for the coming confrontation was set more than a decade ago, after the collapse of Soviet communism. Officials of the George Bush I and Bill Clinton administrations hoped to play a waiting game. They figured North Korea would collapse, perhaps to be absorbed into South Korea in the pattern of East and West Germany. Meanwhile they would rely on a balancing act: neither speeding things up through military intervention nor providing to the regime the means to prolong its existence.
Pyongyang caught on and made clear that studied neglect was not acceptable. Kim prepared his people for a war that might break out at any moment. That got Washington's attention.
War was averted in 1994 with a deal that Pyongyang believed would lead to diplomatic relations. Washington didn't follow through on that part of the deal, though. Thus Pyongyang issued periodic reminders of its capacity for hurting the United States and its allies, reminders such as its 1998 launch of a rocket over Japan.
Now Kim Jong-il can see clearly that he is now in a do-or-die situation.
The North Korean ruler has little hope unless he can pose to Bush a stark choice: attend to Pyongyang's demands or sign up to fight a far wider war. Kim can indeed do that. He can threaten to turn what the Pentagon now plans as a two-front war against al-Qaeda and Iraq into a three-front war - or a four-front war if Iran, whose nuclear-weapons progress was featured in satellite photos last week, gets involved. As a condemned man, Kim may feel he has little to lose from actual warfare.
North Korea's war plans always have contemplated fighting Uncle Sam only when he has one hand tied behind him. "It would be rather difficult for us to fight all alone against American imperialism," Kim Il-sung acknowledged in 1955. However, "under conditions where they must disperse their forces on a global scale, it would be comparatively easy for us to defeat them".
Kim Jong-il has the men and the weapons to do horrific damage to South Korea, where 37,000 US troops are stationed, and probably to Japan as well. In threatening, he would not be bluffing, any more than Bush is bluffing Saddam Hussein.
What does Kim Jong-il want from the United States?
His minions have made clear that Pyongyang demands a US guarantee of the regime's security. Why not give such a guarantee if it would lead to peace on the Korean Peninsula?
The devil is in the details. In exchange for a security guarantee, Bush and his advisors would want to obliterate all traces of Pyongyang's capability to produce and use weapons of mass destruction. Those weapons are Pyongyang's final card. There is little in the history of the relationship to suggest that Kim would trust Washington sufficiently to give them up.
Considering the likelihood that talks would prove fruitless - and considering the evident lack of enthusiasm in Washington for trying to force regime change in North Korea right now, ahead of Iraq - what alternatives exist for Washington?
One is to recognize that the Cold War is not yet over, as long as Kim Jong-il's regime exists, and to re-emphasize the Cold War policy of containment - so successful since the 1953 armistice in preventing a second outbreak of war in Korea.
The Bush administration will resist that alternative. Redoubling military, diplomatic and economic efforts to contain Kim Jong-il when he desperately seeks to avoid containment would imply giving North Korea an enormous quantity of attention. In those circumstances it would be difficult to concentrate with sufficient single-mindedness on invading Iraq.
But there may be no choice. Picking off evildoers one at a time may prove to be a task that is simply beyond Washington's present capability.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
Dec 25, 2002
Now none of this was news to the world at time but it is beyond me why Bush found it necessary to beat the war drums at a time when we had/have our hands full dealing with the terrorists.
If you would bother to read the article closely, you would see that in this situation, it is NK who is beating the war drums, and is is GW who is downplaying the situation. GW is beating the war drums in Iraq, not NK.
I am not about to continue to argue the point.
And of course you shouldn't, as your view doesn't incorporate the whole picture.
definitely see the connection and hold Bush accountable.
Now that is a shock. When haven't you held GW responsible for everything real and imagined. I have a feeling you would hold GW responsible if you got up in the morning and had to take a fart.
Whatever Bush hoped to accomplish I think is backfiring......but again, that is my opinion.
The endgame hasn't been played yet. We will see who laughs last. Read this part form the article.
One is to recognize that the Cold War is not yet over, as long as Kim Jong-il's regime exists, and to re-emphasize the Cold War policy of containment - so successful since the 1953 armistice in preventing a second outbreak of war in Korea.
The cold war may not be over yet, but it is about to be replaced by the West vs the Arabs war. By getting China and Russia to withdraw their support from NK, the die is cast; Kim IL is likely to go the way of the dodo bird without the US having to fire a shot.. As the article points out, it is just a matter of time; Kim knows it, and has played the nuclear card to try to prevent the inevitable.
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