Recently in North Korea Category

[Retiring] Representative [and future Senator] Pete Hoekstra, ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, says the United States needs to treat North Korea like the “rogue nation that it is” or risk a nuclear arms race in the region. He also tells Newsmax.TV “it’s crazy” not to profile airline passengers — and vows that Congress will thwart President Barack Obama’s “ill-guided mission” to try terrorist suspects in civilian courts.

The only words missing from this story are, "....or we'll nuke you":

Cash-strapped North Korea has demanded the United States pay almost $US65 trillion ($75 trillion) in compensation for six decades of hostility.

The official North Korean news agency, KCNA, says the cost of the damage done by the US since the peninsula was divided in 1945 is estimated at $US64.96 trillion....

KCNA said the figure includes $US26.1 trillion arising from US "atrocities" which left more than five million North Koreans dead, wounded, kidnapped or missing.

The agency also claims sixty years of US sanctions have caused a loss of $US13.7 trillion by 2005, while property losses were estimated at $US16.7 trillion.

The agency said North Koreans have "the justifiable right" to receive the compensation for their blood.

.....or they'll shed all of ours.  Hey, who they hell do they think they are, a Big Labor union pension fund?  Besides, Kim jong-Il has light years to go before he drags the Hermit Kingdom as far to the left as the Purpleshirts reside.

Seriously.  Public employee union pensions are a $130 trillion unfunded liability sitting (natch) off the feds' "official" books.  The NoKos only want half of that.  So that either makes the latter comparative rightwingnuts or they've got a lot to learn from their American ideological counterparts about the fine points of sheer avaricial, piratical greed.

I'm sure Captain Open Hand will be willing to go to Pyongyang and talk it over with Comrade Kim - in the interests of "peace".  He'll just get the $65 tril from British Petroleum.  Shoot, Tony Hayward probably had that much spare change in his office sofa.

On the Korean Peninsula, temperature's rising...sort of:

“If our territorial waters, airspace or territory are militarily violated, we will immediately exercise our right of self-defense,” Lee said in an address to the nation, televised live Monday morning.

“From this moment, no North Korean ship will be allowed to make passage through any of the shipping lanes in the waters under our control, which has been allowed by the Inter-Korean Agreement on Maritime Transportation,” Lee said. “The sea routes meant for inter-Korean exchanges and cooperation must never again be used for armed provocations.”…

“Trade and exchanges between the Republic of Korea and North Korea will also be suspended,” Lee said.

“However, we will continue to provide assistance for infants and children,” he said. “Matters pertaining to the Kaesong Industrial Complex will be duly considered, taking its unique characteristics into consideration.”

President Lee has to take this more seriously than Barack Obama does, since, obviously, he's a lot closer to the front line.  Also because Lee was elected on a pro-hawk platform vis-a-vie the NoKo's.  Which is doubtless one of the reasons why the latter torpedoed the ROKS Cheonan a month ago.  In plain, non-Klingon English, Kim is attempting to call Lee's bluff.

No doubt the SoKo leader hopes that by delivering an almost-ultimatum, he can face down Kim while allowing them both to save face, while we go hat in hand yet again to Beijing to beg the ChiComms into pulling back the leash on Pyongyang, while not giving brain cell #1 over to pondering that maybe, just maybe, they are the ones using their client to test us through our ally.  If the latter is so - and, for the record, I wholeheartedly believe it - it makes it more, not less, likely that Kim will push this confrontation to the next level.

There is where Lee's and Obama's perceived interests will diverge.  If pushed to the wall, South Korea will have no choice but to fight or be humiliated and likely destabilized.  Does anybody seriously believe that Red Barry will go to war in East Asia under any circumstances?  Spare me the surprise at his "offering 'unequivocal' support for South Korea’s defense, ....rattling the saber by ordering U.S. commanders in Korea to 'ensure readiness,' and authorizing joint naval exercises with SK in the 'near future.'”  That's not "sabre-rattling"; it doesn't even qualify as empty bluster.  It's the L'il President saying what he thinks his weak domestic political position requires him to say.  At the most, it's meant to prop up President Lee's almost-ultimatum in the hopes it can help this crisis blow over.  If it fails, the SoKos will look around and find the vapor trail that Captain Courageous left behind.

Put even more succinctly, B.O. has no interest in this particular crisis, because it isn't the kind he can exploit.  That's the lesson a resumption of the Korean "police action" will teach.  'tis profoundly lamentable that it's only the ChiComms that will learn it.

Nope:

The United Nations Command launched a probe Saturday into whether the deadly sinking of a South Korean navy ship blamed on North Korea violated the Korean War truce agreement.

Pyongyang denounced the investigation as a "bogus mechanism."

Representatives from 11 countries — South Korea, United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, France, New Zealand, Turkey, Denmark, Switzerland, and Sweden — will review findings of a multinational investigation into the sinking and determine the scope of any North Korean armistice violations, U.N. Command spokesman Kim Young-kyu said.

An international team of civilian and military investigators declared Thursday that a North Korean submarine fired a homing torpedo on March 26, ripping the 1,200-ton Cheonan in two. Fifty-eight sailors were rescued, but 46 died — South Korea's worst military disaster since the 1950-53 Korean War.

Pyongyang has vehemently denied any role in the sinking and claimed that South Korea fabricated evidence to frame it.

If I may translate: There is no "mystery" about a SoKo warship blowing in two and sinking while in close proximity to a NoKo warship.  The NoKos torpedoed the damn SoKo ship.  They did so for the same reason that a lion licks his balls: because they can.  They hold the South Korean capital, Seoul (and 37,000 U.S. troops), hostage beneath the looming destruction of their ten-thousand artillery guns, and Japan - and, therefore, us - hostage beneath the reach of their nuclear missiles, including the Taepodong-II, which can hit Hawaii and possibly even the U.S. West Coast.

If Bill Clinton hadn't foolishly handed the keys to the nuclear kingdom to Kim il-Sung fifteen years ago, the "Stalin Kingdom" would still hold a lot of conventional cards, but not the nuclear trump card, and a deterrence factor would still exist.  Instead, the ROK bows and scrapes to Turtle Bay, where cowards and warmonger-enablers make a show of furrowed brows and "concerned deliberation" and will do nothing beyond performing the ritual circle-jerk to the ChiComms' satisfaction.

And so humanity takes one more step towards Armageddon in the name of "peace".  And the Assholiated Press can't muster the journalistic gonads to even leave in their "report" the possibility that the SoKos think they've got enough "evidence" to take the matter to the Security Council to die meekly instead.

Makes you wonder why the NoKos keep pussyfooting around.  What really do they - or the ChiComms - have to lose from just letting fly?  Would massive barrages of Foggy Bottom "appeals for restraint" really be so devastating?

Following current events these days stretches the boundaries of the adjective "surreal".  So much so that I could almost forget that I'm not an outside observer but am right in the same predicament with everybody else.

Take this statement of the day-glo obvious:

A source close to the U.S. intelligence community tells Newsmax that North Korea’s launch of a missile was, contrary to widespread reports, a big win for the reclusive communist state.

The three-stage Taepodong-2 missile was launched on Sunday, and according to North Korea was intended to place a satellite in orbit.

North Korea claimed the launch was a success and the satellite was in orbit broadcasting patriotic tunes. But American officials said the missile’s payload instead splashed into the Pacific Ocean after a flight of about 2,000 miles, and the New York Times termed the launch “a failure.”

But the close source told Newsmax the launch that North Korea’s satellite claim could well have been a “ruse” – with the real goal of the launch to test the missile’s range.

Naw - ya think?  What was your first guess, Cap'n Obvious?  But hey, we have to cut Newsmax's intelligence source some slack in all his glorious anonymity, since he's tipping the gray matter scales compared to the appalling credulity of the New York Times, which faithfully swallowed the NoKo's risible alibi of Kim jong-IL's becoming a competitor with Direct TV.  George W. Bush they never believed on anything, no matter how painfully honest he was, but Pyongyang they not only take at face value, but spin it in such a way as to pooh-pooh the NoKo ICBM test even in a military context.  Nothing to see or worry about here, folks, so move along.

At least until you get to the part about their honored guests for the occasion:

“A 2,000-mile shot is a significant technical achievement. And a test is a test. It provided North Korea with valuable data and experience, not to mention publicity to help it sell more missiles to Iran, Syria and other countries.”

Iran’s involvement in the North Korean missile launch is worrisome.

There were in fact reports that Iranian missile experts were at the scene of the launch.

Currently Iran’s most advanced missiles, the Shahab-3 and Sajjil, have a maximum range of about 1,200 miles. A missile with a 2,000-mile range could not only strike Israel with ease, but threaten Europe and other targets throughout the Middle East.

This would be the same Iran to whose nuclear weapons program Barack Obama may soon give his effective blessing:

Officials are mulling whether the U.S. will reverse course and allow Iran to carry out uranium enrichment to produce nuclear fuel only, not weapons-grade material, according to a report in London’s Financial Times.

Such a concession, being considered as part of a policy review by President Barack Obama, would be a sea change from the Bush Administration’s hard-line policy [heh] of forbidding uranium enrichment per se....

“There is a growing recognition in [Washington] that the zero [enrichment] solution, though still favored, simply is unfeasible,” said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, according to the Times. “The U.S. may still have zero as its opening position, while recognizing it may not be where things stand at the end of a potential agreement.”

Sound familiar?  It should; this is the same deal that Bill Clinton gave the NoKos fifteen years ago, which enabled the "Hermit Kingdom" to officially cross the nuclear threshold seven years later (and in reality, long before that).  And the mullahs have almost certainly churned out a warhead or two by now.

Ms. Parsi is wrong, of course.  "The zero enrichment solution" is entirely "feasible".  It simply will not, as it never has, come from pointless, futile, weak-kneed "diplomacy" with a demonic regime that hates us for what we are and seeks our destruction no matter what we do or say, and is all the more certitudinously convinced of their ultimate triumph with each "messianic" prostration proclamation and each weapons program that meets up-close and personal with the Chosen One's sole manifestation of "fiscal restraint".

As the Battlestar Galactica catch-phrase states, "All this has happened before."  The first time it got us Pearl Harbor and forty-five months of all-out global war.  The second time it got us 9/11 and three thousand dead American civilians.

Anybody want to start taking bets on what the trifecta will be?  That couldn't be any more surreal than watching my country skip loopily down the same primrose path to strategic disaster for the third time in as many generations.

Make that the fourth - Ronald Reagan was elected just in time to avert the radioactive consequences of Jimmy Carter's pacifistic idiocy.  Looks like that was just a deferral of the inevitable.

Doesn't get any more surreal than that.

If my fellow Americans ever wanted to know what it's like to live on death row, guess what, folks?  You're doing it right now - in bipartisan fashion (via Newsmax Insider):

A meeting in London between President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ended with the announcement that the U.S. and Russia will seek to further reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

But Newsmax has learned that progress toward arms reduction was set in motion by a little-publicized meeting last month involving Russian strong man Valdmir Putin and the two American elder statesmen, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz.

Kissinger, who served as Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford, and Schultz, President Reagan’s Secretary of State, traveled to Moscow along with former Senator Sam Nunn and former [Clinton] Defense Secretary William Perry.

They were acting as private citizens and not on an official visit, but Obama was using the statesmen to sound out the Russians on arm reduction.

A source revealed that Obama and Schulz spoke by telephone before the Russian meeting, and that Obama voiced his strong support for their nuclear initiative. Obama reportedly said the matter was a priority for his new administration, though economic issues were taking center stage for the moment.

Kissinger told the Los Angeles Times that after meeting with Putin he had found ample grounds for cooperation.

“I’m happy to report that the differences were not so remarkable and the agreements were considerable,” he said.

Kissinger, Shultz, Nunn and Perry made their views on arms reduction clear in an article that was published in the Wall Street Journal in January.

The four statesmen advocate “reversing reliance on nuclear weapons globally as a vital contribution to preventing their proliferation into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world.”

They argue that the end of the Cold War made the doctrine of mutual deterrence obsolete, but warn that the world is now “on the precipice of a new and dangerous nuclear era” in which North Korea and Iran could become nuclear powers and terrorists might obtain nuclear weapons.

To deal with the threat, what is needed is “intensive work with leaders of the countries in possession of nuclear weapons to turn the goal of a world without nuclear weapons into a joint enterprise,” the Kissinger team wrote in the Journal.

“Such a joint enterprise, by involving changes in the disposition of the states possessing nuclear weapons, would lend additional weight to efforts already under way to avoid the emergence of a nuclear-armed North Korea and Iran.”

Among the steps the statesmen suggest are “continuing to reduce substantially the size of nuclear forces in all states that possess them.”

That is precisely what Obama and Medvedev discussed in London. In a statement released after their meeting, the two leaders announced talks aimed at replacing the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which is set to expire in December.

Obama accepted Medvedev’s invitation to visit Moscow in July to assess negotiators’ progress on arms reduction, which would give the U.S. Senate enough time to debate and approve a new treaty before the December expiration date.

Get that?  The only way to keep North Korea and Iran and al Qaeda from going nuclear (or, rather, amassing more nukes than they have already) is for the United States to...shrink its nuclear deterrent - which, of course, Red Barry is already doing unilaterally by attrition - and hope our "partner in peace," Czar Vlad, will follow suit.

That's the same neoRussian Empire that is "completing the process of making Iran a nuclear power, and protecting North Korea's nuclear armaments as well as rebuilding their former empire by subterfuge and force," as well as militarizing the Western Hemisphere, "repeatedly blocking] and threaten[ing to block gas supplies to the West, often in the middle of winter, [and]pressur[ing] Kyrgyzstan into closing a U.S. base vital to supplying U.S. troops in Afghanistan," forcing our supply routes to that theater of the War on Terror to go through....Russia.  Meaning that they can, if they so choose, hold our very war effort hostage to extort God only knows what appalling magnitude of concessions from a Hussein White House that is proving itself all too happy to offer them up without being coerced in the slightest.

And, of course, Putin is moving toward the very rebuilding and modernizing his strategic nuclear forces that B.O. has specifically and publicly rejected, all the while mouthing the empty bromides of "detente" and "arms control" as well or better than his Soviet-era predecessors ever did.

If I wasn't convinced that Kissinger and Schultz were lost in the throes of senile dementia, I'd wander if they were pulling a rib on King Hussein akin to sticking a "kick me" sign on the back of the new kid at school.

And speaking of North Korea, they just took another giant step toward nuclear big-stick-dom:

North Korea fired a long-range rocket on Sunday, provoking international outrage and prompting the U.N. Security Council to call an emergency meeting.

The reclusive communist state said a satellite was launched into orbit and circled Earth transmitting revolutionary songs. But both the U.S. military and South Korea said it had failed to enter orbit.

Analysts say the launch was effectively a test of a ballistic missile designed to carry a warhead potentially as far as Alaska.

It was the first big challenge for U.S. President Barack Obama in dealing with the North, whose efforts to build a nuclear arsenal have long plagued ties with Washington.

“With this provocative act, North Korea has ignored its international obligations, rejected unequivocal calls for restraint, and further isolated itself from the community of nations,” Obama said, speaking on a European tour.

I don't know what's more pathetic, the NoKo's alibi or False Messiah's bland bromide diplobatory response.  No, I take that back, I do know which was the more pathetic - Pyongyang was sneering its contempt for the West in general and Barack Obama in particular.  Generalissimo Hopeandchange thinks his pumping of words into the ether actually matters.  As if Kim jong-IL gives a frog's fat leg about "international obligations, unequivocal calls for restraint, and international isolation."  Ooooooh, THAT'll intimidate him - until he remembers that he can bombard Hawaii, Alaska, and the U.S. West Coast (all within range of the Taepodong-2) with nuclear weapons.  Then he'll feel MUCH better.

Well, that and the fact that he can blackmail us into submission with his capability of flattening South Korea with conventional artillery alone, and he's under the protection of the combined Sino-Russian strategic nuclear arsenals.  The perqs of being the ChiComms' "bad cop," and all that.

For those who value, if not obsess over, multilateral alliances, this particular crisis makes Japan a vitally important strategic cog in any "containment" scheme (for geostrategic as well as cultural reasons, a far more realistic option than with the apocalyptic theocrats in Iran).  So it comes as utterly no surprise that the Li'l President's witless pacifism flipped the bird at our erstwhile allies in Tokyo:

But Tokyo harbored doubts about how Washington would react. While the U.S. also readied warships and missile-defense systems, it made clear that it would not intercept the missile. The Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Timothy J. Keating, asserted that Washington has the capability to shoot down the missile. But before the launch, Secretary of Defense Gates stated the U.S. would not shoot it down unless it was headed towards U.S. territory. The message to Japan was clear: We will protect our territory but not yours.

Nor, alas, can the whole of this abominable state of affairs be laid entirely at the Chosen One's cowardly feet:

This is just a further indication of a growing split in the American-Japanese perception of the threat from North Korea. During the latest round of multilateral North Korean disarmament negotiations, termed the Six Party Talks, in 2007, the U.S. broke from Japan by removing Pyongyang from the list of state sponsors of terror, never made North Korean missiles an issue for negotiation, and appeared ready to settle for a freeze of plutonium production at one known nuclear site, Yongbyon. Japan is still very concerned about other nuclear production sites and the highly-enriched-uranium program North Korea claimed it had in 2003. Essentially Washington’s policy amounts to accepting North Korea as a nuclear state, trying to deter it from proliferating, and defending the American homeland. This is not an altogether acceptable policy for a Japan that sits within range of North Korea’s short- and medium-range missile force and is usually the main recipient of North Korea’s rhetorical bellicosity.

Not unlike the callous backhandings we keep giving Israel, really.  Like the Jews, the Japanese are a lot closer to a dire national security threat than we are, and do not have the luxury of indulging in criminally negligent fantasism.  They can't afford to dally in delusions when the consequences of being wrong are quite literally lethal.  It's easy for the Obamunists - and the Bushies before them - to settle for half-measures that are no-measures, and sit meekly by while the NoKos flagrantly renege on the Six Party Agreement to shutdown Yongbyon right in front of us.  This "you're on your own" under-the-bus-throwing tells Japan, right along with Dear Leader, that they cannot trust the Obamericans to stand by them when it matters the most.

Likely end result?  A nuclear and missile arms race in Northeast Asia.  The Japanese will have no choice what with Barry O shutting down anti-ICBM development, dismantling our existing anti-missile defenses, and canceling "fifth-generation" weapons platforms like the F-22 Raptor with which NoKo missile sites, launching platforms, and nuclear facilities could be effectively targeted and attacked.  And betraying Tokyo into charting an independent foreign policy course away from our orbit could produce new alignments with adverse consequences easily avoided by showing a modicum of loyalty now.

The irony is that with the demonstrated NoKo ability to hit American territory, we really are in the same boat as the Japanese, just as we are in the same crosshairs with Israel vis-a-vie Iran.  Yet even during a time of war Barack Obama carries on as if the conflict with Islamic Fundamentalism, and the growing strategic encirclement of the U.S. from Red China and North Korea through Venezuela to Syria and Iran, with Putinical Russia linking them all together, did not exist.  Or at the very least, like the only enemies we have are those that he hasn't had a chance to grovel into becoming our friends yet.  I find myself seriously wondering if any of us are even going to live long enough to oust Red Barry once and for all in 2012.

Hence, the death row lede above.

But perhaps it is this passage of Dan Blumenthal's & Leslie Forgach's in the Corner at NRO that most directly captures the terrible predicament in which we find ourselves:

The U.S.-Japanese alliance is the cornerstone of peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region, grounded in the joint promotion of democratic values and free-market principles. [emphasis added] 

If Barack Obama's first ten weeks in office has taught us anything, it is that he himself does not believe in either one.  Indeed, his worldview is far closer to that of our enemies - the ones that he can't wait to extend the hand of friendship.

Maybe that NoKo "satellite" was playing B.O.'s Greatest Hits.

That'd be almost as deadly as the warheads earmarked for an American city near you.