Recently in North Korea Category

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.

Another public service announcement from the Hard Starboard Radio Network:

A sword of Damocles hangs over our heads. It is a real threat that has been all but ignored.

On February 3, Iran launched a “communications satellite” into orbit. At this very moment, North Korea is threatening to do the same. The ability to launch an alleged communications satellite belies a far more frightening truth. A rocket that can carry a satellite into orbit also can drop a nuclear warhead over any location on the planet in less than forty-five minutes.

Far too many timid or uninformed sources maintain that a single launch of a missile poses no true threat to the United States, given our retaliatory power.

A reality check is in order and must be discussed in response to such an absurd claim: In fact, one small nuclear weapon, delivered by an ICBM can destroy the United States by maximizing the effect of the resultant electromagnetic pulse upon detonation.

An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is a byproduct of detonating an atomic bomb above the Earth’s atmosphere. When a nuclear weapon is detonated in space, the gamma rays emitted trigger a massive electrical disturbance in the upper atmosphere. Moving at the speed of light, this overload will short out all electrical equipment, power grids and delicate electronics on the Earth’s surface. In fact, it would take only one to three weapons exploding above the continental United States to wipe out our entire grid and transportation network.....

Within weeks after such an attack, tens of millions of Americans would perish. The impact has been likened to a nationwide Hurricane Katrina. Some studies estimate that 90% of all Americans might very well die in the year after such an attack as our transportation, food distribution, communications, public safety, law enforcement, and medical infrastructures collapse.

We most likely would never recover from the blow. [emphasis added]

And to think that when I argued for an Iraq-style, regime-changing pre-emptive invasion of Iran six years ago, commenters and emailers called it "madness".  Instead, the Bushies went the weak-assed diplomacy route, and now Red Barry is not only doubling down on it, but seeks to mothball our anti-missile defenses as well.

THAT is the true madness.  And the most frightening part is, there's not a damn thing we can do about it.

Hey, nobody ever said PSAs can't be buzz-killers.

Three months ago, someone who should have known better declared a landmark diplomatic victory for the Bush Adminstration over the communist regime of Kim jong-IL's North Korea and its supposed agreement to give up its nuclear weapons program.  Somebody who DID know better bellowingly dissented, and made a prediction:

We gain nothing of any substance from this twenty-sixth agreement with the Kim regime, which will be riven by them just like all twenty-five of its predecessors, and the NoKos and Red Chinese gain breathing room for the rogue regime's next round of nuclearization and consequence sabre-rattling and mischief-making.

Three weeks ago the NoKos announced to the world that they were going to reverse course and rebuild their Yongbyon nuclear fuel facility right in front of ourselves, the Japanese, and the South Koreans, all of to whose faces Pyongyang had agreed to dismantle it in the first place.  Ourselves, the Japs, and the SoKos didn't so much as yawn.  The only thing the Kim regime hadn't done was formally throw out Ourselves, the Japs, the SoKos, and the Internatonal Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and monitors.

You can check that detail off the list:

North Korea has expelled U.N. monitors from its plutonium-making nuclear plant and plans to start reactivating it next week, rowing back from a 2007 deal to scrap its atomic bomb program, officials said on Wednesday.

The Stalinist state said on Friday it was working to restart the Yongbyon atomic complex it had been dismantling since last November under a disarmament-for-aid agreement with five powers.

Olli Heinonen, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s head of non-proliferation safeguards, told a closed meeting of the IAEA’s 35-nation board of governors that monitors were forced to leave the plutonium facility this week.

“There are no more seals and surveillance equipment in place at the (plutonium) reprocessing facility,” IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said, referring to the most proliferation-sensitive installation at Yongbyon.

So...doesn't that put us right back to square one?  Yongbyon reassembled and back on-line by the end of the year?  Fresh, and perchance successful, nuclear tests next year?  Japan, South Korea, and the U.S. west coast under threat of North Korean nuclear attack just as Europe and the U.S. eastern seaboard will be under threat of Iranian nuclear attack?  And terrorist network customers lining up to buy warheads like harried mothers at Toys-R-Us the week before Christmas?

No, Ed, it's not a "negotiating ploy."  We'll still give 'em the economic aid we promised, because we don't break OUR word to lying, meglomaniacal, murderous dictators.  And you know damn well that President Hussein will tear up the "terror-supporting-nations" list altogether.  And no, Ed, the NoKo military doesn't fear a war with Ourselves, the Japs, and the SoKos, because they know that (1) they could and would clean the latter two's clocks and (2) they know we have utterly no stomach for an(other) armed conflict in Northeast Asia when we're still pacifying Iraq AND have Iran to deal with AND have to worry about a revival of the Cold War AND have to worry about a ChiComm grab for Taiwan AND keep an eye on Hugo Chavez's Latin American ambitions, etc., etc., etc.

All of that is wishful thinking, Ed.  Remember your Occam's Razor.  The truth is a lot simpler: the NoKos, just like the Iranians, want nukes, and they're going to get them, and then they're going to use them against us and our allies.  And President Hussein will let them do it.

Sad to say, but George W. Bush completely wasted his time with this six-party-talks five-knuckle-shuffling.  The only thing left to do now is deliver an ultimatum: honor the agreement or else.  Starting with cutting them off completely from any and all aid until they let the inspectors back in and put Yongbyon back in mothballs - even better, destroy the plant equipment outright so it can't be reassembled. 

Diplomacy is fine, diplomacy is great, but without a commitment to national interest and the hard-headed, realistic mettle that goes with it, it's nothing more than a suicidal fetish.  If we let North Korea so openly and brazenly renege on an agreement they've already signed, there is utterly no point in saying another word to them - any more than there ever was in the first place.

We gain nothing of any substance from this twenty-sixth agreement with the Kim regime, which will be riven by them just like all twenty-five of its predecessors, and the NoKos and Red Chinese gain breathing room for the rogue regime's next round of nuclearization and consequent sabre-rattling and mischief-making. Only next time their nukes won't fizzle - and won't be tested inside a cave, but on Tokyo or Seattle.

-Me, 6/27/08

It's barely taken two months for the NoKos to start reneging on this latest "historic breakthrough for peace and triumph of multilateral diplomacy." My only question is, what took 'em so long?:

Before workers began moving mothballed equipment back into place, North Korea informed U.S. personnel at its Yongbyon nuclear plant it would start reassembling its nuclear facilities, a South Korean official said Thursday.

Pyongyang gave the notification Tuesday to U.S. personnel stationed at the North's Yongbyon nuclear plant and started moving some equipment, taken apart from plutonium-producing facilities, out of storage Wednesday, said a Foreign Ministry official.

"They were moving some equipment" to the original sites, said the official, citing information provided by the United States. But he did not say what the equipment was. The official spoke on condition of anonymity citing the issue's sensitivity.

Well, now, THAT's brazen, isn't it? They're deep-sixing the "disarmament agreement" and moving to restore Yongbyon to fully operational status right in front of us - oh, sorry, the FIVE of "us" (US, Japan, South Korea, Red [haha] China, and Russia [hahahaha]) - and all but smirkingly flipping us the bird while they do it.

And "our" reaction? Do you have to ask?:

"This is a clear violation of a six-party agreement," he said, referring to a disarmament pact that the North reached with the U.S. and four other nations last year. The official said Seoul would try to persuade Pyongyang to reverse its action.

In Tokyo, Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said Japan is in close contact with the U.S. and South Korea on the development.

"We are aware that (North Korea) is engaged in an activity to remove some of the key equipment out of the storage, and we are concerned about the situation," he said.

OOOOH. The Japanese are "concerned". The SoKos will "try to persuade" their northern counterparts to "reverse their action." Well, THAT ought to put the fear of God into Kim jong-iL. Heaven knows we won't:

The U.S. played down Pyongyang's latest step. "Based on what we know from the reports on the ground, you don't have an effort to reconstruct, reintegrate this equipment back into the facility," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

Foggy Bottom's spin is that this latest move is only a negotiating tactic meant to pressure Washington to keep its promise to take Pyongyang off the terror list. They cite in support of this "hopeful" conclusion that the NoKos have not - yet - ousted U.S. and U.N. on-site monitors overseeing the nuclear fuel facility's alleged dismantling.

Mayhap that is a reason and mayhap it isn't. But another most definitely is an indefatiguible determination to poke, prod, and otherwise test Western resolve. Recall that the biggest factor in North Korea strategically retreating from its nuclear weapons development was that their first full-fledged test fizzled. Communists know better than anyone that you don't back up blustering threats like the ones they were issuing two years ago if you can't back them up with more than blanks. The nuke they set off underground in the far northeast corner of their territory was, by modern nuclear weapons standards, a dud (not even a kiloton). Having lost face - for the moment - Kim backed off.

Now he's reassembling his nuclear weapons facility right in front of us, and what is the response of ourselves and our equally feckless allies? "Concern," "(diplomatic) persuasion," and another wallowing indulgence in rationalizing and wishful-thinking.

Sex isn't the only thing in which there's always a morning after. Making deals with communist regimes is pointless because they cannot be trusted to abide by their obligations. How much more pointless are such "accords" when there are no practical enforcement provisions or pre-defined, imposable sanctions for non-compliance, and less than no willingness on the part of the "three-nation united anti-NoKo nukes front and their two ill-disguised enablers" to do whatever it takes to force Pyongyang to keep their word?

What will we do if the ChiComms and Russkies don't lean on their client to backtrack from their backtrack? If they do kick out the international monitors and fire up Yongbyon again? Was the point of this four-year diplomatic cluster to disarm the NoKos or buy time for Round #27?