Stoopid Stuff

What's Up with the Wacky Dictator with the Bad Hair?

I don't get it. What's the plan? Kim Jong-il has suddenly rolled over? Doesn't make sense. Oh sure, we're all just sitting back, waiting for him to "fail to live up to the terms of the agreement". But why play this game, this way? I don't think that anybody could be faulted for being a little skeptical that Kim would give up his nuclear weapons for fuel oil. What's he planning on heating? The crumbling grey apartment blocks where the people are trying to live on a handful of rice, tree bark and an occasional rat?

I think it's reasonable to assume that pressure from China has something to do with this move. I can hear Hu Jintao now, laying it out for the politically naive Kim. "Look, my friend, America is currently out of it's mind. Batshit insane. There is an old proverb, 'a man who taunts an insane person will find himself at the wrong end of a chainsaw'. We are doing pretty well over here manufacturing crap for the Americans to buy at Walmart, keeping our currency artificially low and banking nearly one trillion dollars in hard currency. You are rocking the boat, and that's not acceptable. You need to agree to a deal with the Americans. You can string them out for a few months, then accuse them of not living up to their commitments and break the deal. But for now, cool it".

Northeast asia is truly the far corner of the world. They have nothing of note. No agriculture. No resources. No oil. America threw away 36 thousand lives there fifty years ago. There's a lesson there. It's not worth it. We're not holding the line there, unless you call preventing unification of the penninsula "holding the line". The same rules that applied during the cold war apply now, to North Korea as well as Iran. If they were actually to use a nuclear weapon, at least if they used it against an American ally, they would suffer complete atomic destruction. They know that. You can't win if you can't live to enjoy your winnings. So any concern America might have over their nuclear development program is very likely a pretext for engaging them over something else.

That something else, in the case of North Korea, is a long-standing case of knee-jerk anti communism. The same mindless political calculation that has kept the Cuba embargo in place for decades after it no longer mattered. Hopefully, nobody was truly willing to spend lives in that rotten place again. I don't think Kim was particularly concerned about US military action, considering there's no oil, the North could demolish Seoul with tremendous loss of life in a few hours and the demonstration that they may be able to deliver a nuclear weapon. So what do you suppose caused him to accept this deal?

It seems to me, like many small but vocal nations, he was winning in a way simply by standing up to the United States. Like Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Hezbollah and the like, they win by not losing. If the mightiest of militaries, the US and Israel, for example, cannot rorce them to acquiesce to authority, their stock rises. It seems odd that he would actually trade away the power and prestige provided by nuclear weapons in exchange for something as transient as fuel oil and food aid. There has to be something else going on here. I just can't see it yet.

posted by mikey @ 11:32 AM