Sounds to me like they are bluffing. And if not, better they should attack prematurely than when they have a lot more nukes.
And it does amaze me that they think have a right to have us give them stuff. And then do what they wanted to anyway. But I wasn’t aware that we were going to blockade them. I thought we were just going to stop helping them and pressure others to stop helping them. That’s a tad different from an act of war. Let them buy all the food and oil they want. We just shouldn’t be giving it away. Maybe that will cut into their military readiness.
Former Defense Secretary Cohen says correctly that this is a crisis regardless of what the administration says. He also believes that since war is not wise and withdrawal is not wise (I concur in both judgments), at some point concessions will be necessary. It depends on what he means by concessions. If he means pay the blackmail—heck no. If he means that we should be able to give something in return for something substantial and of higher value to us, then sure. But let’s remember who we are dealing with here. North Korea’s track record is awful.
Yet David Ignatius says that the president made a mistake calling North Korea evil because we cannot possibly negotiate with evil. He says, “It's time to choose. On Korea, Bush can't be a moralist and a pragmatist at the same time.”
As I like to say when I read something like this, huh?
North Korea is evil. From nukes, to hacking our unarmed soldiers to death with axes in the DMZ, to blowing up South Korean government officials, to kidnapping civilians, to digging tunnels under the DMZ, to wearing 1950s era bad guy uniforms, these thugs qualify as evil. Yet some would have us maintain some false sort of consistency and argue we cannot deem them evil while negotiating?
Ignatius says, “Bush may still talk about North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as someone he "loathes," who "starves his people." But meanwhile, Powell continues to insist that "nobody's going to attack North Korea" and that a diplomatic solution will be found. No wonder people are confused.”
Again, huh? Who is confused? This is nonsense. Why on earth is having the moral clarity to know that a country’s rulers are evil preclude one from negotiating? Why is it considered an impossibility to refrain from invading someone because we loathe their regime? It is a false choice that we must declare them evil and destroy them or accept them as a normal country and negotiate. Did not President Reagan famously call the Soviet Union an “evil empire?” (For which he was mercilessly attacked at the time) And did not that same president negotiate with that evil state’s rulers? And did we not in the end win? I’d rather talk to the North Koreans than unleash a nuclear war. Even one in which we don’t get hit. But there is a long way to go before talking becomes paying blackmail. I think we are better armed to avoid that slippery slope if we have no delusions about who we are dealing with—one hopes that Powell will never be seen dancing with those dictators as Albright did. Drag out the talks, make the squeezing so gradual that at no point will any incremental increase seem like a reason to Pyongyang for war. (I’ve read that if you put a frog in water and raise the temperature fast, it will jump out; but if you do it slowly, it will boil to death, unaware of the peril.)
Kristoff complains that the administration is making the situation worse. He may have a point (although part of making it worse is dragging out our invasion of Iraq, a point that Kristoff would surely disagree), but our harsher talk and refusal to pay while they play did not start this crisis of North Korean noncompliance. They have been at it for years—we just called them on it last year. But remember who we will talk to and what they are. Kristoff provides one chilling fact that just reeks of “1984” when he relates:
While in North Korea years ago, I barged into as many private homes as possible, and every single one had The Speaker.
The Speaker is like a radio, but permanently on and without a choice of stations. It's the electronic umbilical cord from the Great Leader, waking citizens up each morning and putting them to bed each evening with a mix of heroic songs, denunciations of "the American war-maniacs" and tributes to Kim Jong Il, "the greatest of great men produced by heaven."
(Oops. Now North Koreans are going to wake up to hear The Speaker declare that even the imperialist reactionary New York Times has hailed the Great Leader as, quote, the greatest of great men, unquote.)
The Speaker is a reminder that North Korea is like no other country in the world today. It was eerie to interview groups of North Koreans and then hear them praise Kim Jong Il in unison, like synchronized robots[.]
Oh, and one more painful description of that gulag with a UN seat.
And by all means, finish off Iraq already. We really need to clear the decks to deal with North Korea. It is a crisis.
