Hah! You clearly haven't got a degree in Korean studies. Listen (via Real Clear Politics) to this less-than-brilliant essay:
SOMETHING extraordinary is happening in Korea, and Washington appears to be paying no attention. The two Koreas have plunged headlong in to unknown territory: reunification. For 50 years, aside from the occasional defector, it was impossible to cross the demilitarized zone dividing the Korean Peninsula.
Of course, the path to this happy time isn't obstacle free:
True, the heavily militarized DMZ that separates the two Koreas is still there. North Korea hasn't given up its nuclear weapons. The Bush administration still considers North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, a disreputable negotiating partner and Pyongyang an ''outpost of tyranny." North Korea recently labeled Vice President Dick Cheney a ''bloodthirsty beast."
North Korea is nuclear armed and, of course, Americans calling North Korea what it is has spoiled the whole hand-holding festival planned for, oh, the year 2055.
What's that, you say? 2055 or abouts? Why yes:
According to conventional wisdom, German reunification started with the Berlin Wall's collapse and was cemented by elections and mass celebrations. Koreans don't want a bang. Besides, the German experience turned out to be much more expensive than anyone expected. When translated into the Korean context, it would cost more than Seoul could afford. A ''big bang" collapse of North Korea would unleash an economic shock, a potential outflow of refugees, and an uncertain future for an unknown number of weapons of mass destruction.
Because of its fear of the ''big bang," South Korea would prefer a gradual phasing in of reunification instead of a single, explosive event. Indeed, the leaders of both Koreas speak of reunification as a decades-long project that will only gradually bridge the large economic, political, and cultural gaps between their countries. That's what happened in the German case: dozens of years of exchanges and economic cooperation before reunification became a possibility.
South Korea doesn't want unification, so they want North Korea to survive. If reunification comes they want it in the distant future when North Korea has caught up with the south. Or if that can't happen since there is no way a psychopathic regime with starving people like North Korea could ever catch up with prospering South Korea, then at worst a goal at least several decades away puts the problem to the next generation of politicians to avoid in their turn. Faced with the prospect of North Korea collapsing, the South Koreans don't even want victory!
As for North Korea, you can understand why they like this approach. They of course always wanted the "big bang" approach to unification. With the North Korean army conveniently located just north of Seoul poised to do the banging big time. Alas, weakness has all but eliminated their chance to march south and conquer South Korea. No fuel for the tanks. Shrinking food-deprived army recruits. And weaponry so old that it wouldn't even cut it for display in front of a North Korean VFW post. Even if America stands aside and lets the Koreas fight it out, South Korea would likely repel any invasion handily. Buying time for a nice bout of student-driven civil unrest to cripple the southern military while seeing what goodies the south will give the north to rebuild the North Korean military is all the Pillsbury Nuke Boy can do at the moment.Just bide their time and hope the South screws up. Heck, if your enemy lets you get away with that, why not?
But really, a slow-motion reunification? Feffer and Greco need to lay off the kimchee binges. This is possibly the dumbest analysis of the peninsula I have seen since the last time I read a Selig Harrison article.
And speaking of Selig. He's been on another pilgrimage (again, via RCP) to the north (Gee, I wonder why the Pillsbury Nuke Boy keeps letting him in? Hmmm. Nine times for Selig Harrison and none for John Bolton. That is a world-class mystery. Have to ponder that tough one …). This is what Selig observes:
In the standard U.S. image, North Korea is a monolithic, Stalin-style dictatorship controlled by one man, Kim Jong Il. But the key reason for North Korean intransigence in the nuclear crisis with the United States is that Kim does not have unchallenged control over foreign and defense policy. The North Korean power structure is deeply divided between pragmatists who favor a nuclear deal with the United States and increasingly assertive hard-liners who argue that a tough posture is needed to stop the Bush administration from pursuing "regime change" in Pyongyang.
Silly me! And I thought North Korea was a Stalin-style dictatorship controlled by one man! Really, it's just like a League of Women Voters state chapter where proper debate and cookies and tea are served! No torture going on at all! Next he'll tell me the whole gulag stuff is really an extensive Jenny Craig campgrounds network. Well, he doesn't go that far, to be fair. But he does patiently explain that North Korea is going nuclear only because bad old President Bush wants regime change. We'll ignore the fact that the decades-long Northern nuclear program predates the Bush 43 administration by quite a bit. We'll ignore the fact that we have just one brigade of Army troops on the peninsula and that the South Koreans will not under any circumstances follow it north of the DMZ as our brigade slashes its way up to Pyongyang and digs Kim Jong-Il out of his bunker. Nope. The mythical pragmatists of Pyongyang would like to get along without nuclear weapons—really—but that Bush just mucks everything up.
Selig is horrified by the evidence of this that he sees in the north:
My most disturbing finding on a recent visit to North Korea was that a showdown over nuclear policy occurred in early February between the "dealers," led by First Deputy Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju, the principal foreign policy adviser to Kim, and a coalition of hard-line generals and Workers' Party leaders. The hard-liners prevailed. On Feb. 10 Pyongyang made its pronouncement that it has manufactured nukes" and is a "nuclear weapons state." Then a March 31 declaration served notice that North Korea will no longer discuss dismantling its nuclear weapons capabilities until the United States normalizes economic and diplomatic relations with the Kim regime.
The ascendancy of the hard-liners is the direct result of the Bush administration's ideologically driven North Korea policy and can be reversed only if the United States makes a fresh start attuned to the conciliatory engagement approach now being pursued by South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun, who is scheduled to meet President Bush today.
Wow. This is big news for the Bush bashers if a happy-go-lucky nation of joyful peasants can go from nuclear-free status in November 2000 prior to Bush's first electoral victory to a nuclear missile-armed state only four short years later. And all because the "hard liners" overcame the objections of "moderates" who seem to have sprung from nowhere to be a force in early 2005 only to lose the policy debate. And we can only change this by pouring money into Pyongyang (that's what "conciliatory" means in Surrenderspeak).
This is serious rock-pounding stupidity. I'm honestly not sure if it exceeds the previous article or not since they cover different subjects (though in both the common fault lies with President Bush). Comparing stupid apples with stupid oranges isn't easy.
In the end, I think I have to give the edge to Selig for turning the "stupid dial" to eleven. He shows why I sometimes get so frustrated with area experts. They go native. They learn so much about the local thugs that they can divine differences between the 90% psychos and the 95% psychos. And they seriously think this difference is significant. In the end, the experts such as Selig use their insights in order to identify who we should surrender to. As Selig notes:
In the February showdown, I was told by several of those involved, the dealers argued in favor of preserving ambiguity concerning the extent of North Korean nuclear capabilities as part of a continued effort to get economic quid pro quos in return for step-by-step denuclearization.
See? They just want aid and respect? Not nukes! Oh, no! Well actually, the pragmatists just didn't want to admit to having nukes. That's not nearly the same. They wanted ambiguity to get goodies out of us. Really, I prefer the honesty of the hardliners to the "dealers'" willingness to appear moderate. At least we know where we stand and there is no denying the threat Kim Jong-Il poses.
So all we have to do is pay the north and all will be well. The North Koreans wouldn't lie to a man who has been to North Korea nine times, would they?
Ignore the likes of these three gullible dupes. Squeeze those psychos in Pyongyang quietly and they will implode. Don't let them up off the mat just because fools say a peaceful, unified, non-nuclear Korea will arrive if only we weren't so mean to the Pillsbury Nuke Boy. The North desperately needs us to save them from their own wretched domestic policies and I see no reason to throw a life line.
