The North Korean Crisis...

Well, North Korea has really stepped into it with its missile launches yesterday. The country itself is broken - over 2,000,000 of its own citizens have starved to death during the past ten years, its infrastructure is circa 1950 and in shambles, and it's led by a nut. The Clinton Administration, to its credit, attempted diplomacy and incentives, and America was burned - North Korea continued its nuclear weapon development under our very noses. I find it comical that the Clintonistas involved in that failed attempt such as Madeline Albright, Wendy Sherman, Bill Richardson, and Sandy Burger are plastered over the airwaves saying that the Bush Administration has failed, has been ignoring North Korea, and has essentially caused this crisis.

Wrong on all counts. It was the Bush Administration who discovered that the North Koreans' had violated all agreements with the United States from Day 1 during the Clinton Administration, although till the end of his presidency Clinton and his minions highlighted the North Korea agreement as one of their major foreign policy successes (and some, such as Albright and Sherman, still do so today). Bush was (and is) right to place the burden of negotiations in this particular case on multilateral talks, for China (and to a lesser extent Russia) is the key to this whole mess. No financial incentives or punitive trade measures are going to stop North Korea. And Fearless Leader Kim Jong Il proved to us once again that he is pretty much insane yesterday by launching not one but seven missiles that all failed. This is a man who does this type of thing to get the world's attention. My fear is that he'll one day detonate a nuclear bomb also just to get the world's attention.

If I thought that a military strike would be in order I would say so. I just don't think so right now. To vastly oversimplify, in Iran we have a majority of the population that is pro-West and pro-democracy. Many of them would love us to get rid of the mullahs militarily, for it would enable them to gain more democratic powers and run their own country. In North Korea, it's different. It's a closed society that is very difficult to penetrate. Its citizens are basically brainwashed, and would likely fight to the death for their leader. They know not what they do, nor do they know the truth about the world and their leader.

The solution is China. China has become a major economic power in the world. North Korea imploding would threaten that. And that's what North Korea is doing. Kim Jong Il is steadily moving his country towards an armed conflict with the West, which will end horribly for North Korea and result in millions of refugees pouring into China. The Chinese leadership is very pragmatic - if they have gotten to the point where they believe that Kim Jong Il is a liability to their economic and world power designs, they will move to eliminate him themselves, perhaps secretly.

Adding to this pressure on China is the revelation that North Korea, who has been accepting massive amounts of food and medical aid from China via railway, has been confiscating the trains themselves! The North Koreans basically accepted delivery of the aid, took the Chinese workers off the trains, and sent them back to China. This can't please China, who probably would have given Jong Il railway equipment if he asked for it. It is just this type of illogical (also read as "crazy") behavior that might cause China to pre-emptively end Kim Jong Il's reign to the relief of the world.