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10 questions about North Korea

1. Under what circumstances would the UN Security council sanction “strong action" against a state that has belligerently attacked another UN member state? The flip side of this is when has a "strong statement" ever changed anything?

2. For those who say that now that North Korea has acted outside all legal and international standards of law by firing weapons at the civilian population of the west, that the US should now talk diplomatically to North Korea, I ask only this - What exactly would you tell all the other countries of the world who, rather than resort to extortion and other "acts of war" as part of their diplomatic missions, have instead followed the rules and behaved in what is recognized as a civilized manner? What would you tell them to convince them that they are not “suckers”? What do you tell our allies? What do you tell future generations when they ask how the worlds diplomatic systems completely broke down in the early part of this century because this country allowed itself to be held open to extortion, and that the method of extortion rather than that of elemental cooperation became the norm of behavior between nations?

3. Why is the left now fully invested in a policy of “go it alone” cowboy unilateralism in response to North Korean warlike belligerency?

4. As it is with all things involving engineering, accidents happen. Let’s say that one of the inevitable engineering accidents is a North Korean TD-2 Missile that falls on an elementary school on Japan or Guam. Given the nature of the inflammatory language used by the North Koreans, would this act fall into the category of an “act of war”? If not, why not?

5. If you launch one missile and it doesn’t work, no one is surprised. Two and they don’t work, again not surprised. But launch seven and they all fail? Either you have to believe that they have the worst QA in all of Asia, or perhaps, just perhaps we should entertain the idea that we are actually shooting them down. So why wouldn’t we say anything about shooting them down? Because if we say to the world that we are shooting them down, they can play the aggrieved victim that’s been victimized by the big bully imperialist United States. If they just “fall down and go boom”, well that brings doubt on the whole missile program and everyone who works in it, thus causing even more damage than our interceptors appear to have done.

6. Let’s say we go all Albright/Feinstein and sit down for ‘one on one’ talks with the North Koreans. What should our ambassador say to the North Koreans? Well, how about this “Hey jackass, stop firing missiles at us, or were going to start firing back and well see who runs out of missiles first” Just what exactly do you have to talk about when the other side has decided to get your attention by firing at you? What would Albright have said after Ft. Sumter? “Mr. Lincolns failed policies that lead to this disaster in diplomacy. Here’s an opportunity for Mr. Lincoln to talk to the aggrieved President Davis over the issues that are so heartily felt in the south.” Or Pearl Harbor? Or the Alamo?

7. Where does this go from here? Let’s say they keep launching and we keep shooting them down and that gets the North Koreans nowhere in their big extortion scheme. What next? What’s to stop the North Koreans from having an “industrial accident” that leaves nuclear fallout radiation streaming out, to be caught on the winds and deposited in the US and Japan?

8. Whatever happened to “fear of US military retribution”? That has worked pretty well as a deterrent in the past so why did we allow that to be taken it off the table? We used to think nothing of bombing people for being insolent and rude. I’m not saying we should do it in this case, I’m just asking why it is that before we start, it’s already off the table.

9. Let’s say Hugo Chavez goes to North Korea and buys TD-2 missiles. How is that different from Fidel having Soviet Missiles and would our response not be just a severe?

10. What does North Korea value above all other things and how can we keep it from them?

Posted @ July 07, 2006 02:24 PM | Current Affairs

Comments

I think your last question is off the mark.

It's not what North Korea wants, it's what Mr. Poofy Hair wants.

And I'm guessing that what he wants is the slavish obediance and (apparent) worshipful devotion of an entire country.

He's got that, and the only way to take it away from him is to shoot him.

When you negotiate with the US, Britain, or even France, you are in some sense negotiating with the entire nation, through the freely elected representatives of the citizens. If you negotiate with Saudi Arabia you negotiate with the House of Saud, which seems to be guided and constrained, at least in it's public acts and utterances, by the delusions and superstitions of Whabist Islam, to say nothing of the internal power balances of the House itself. However, when you negotiate with North Korea, you are negotiating with Kim Il Sung and his personal delusions. I don't think there are many countries in the world, with any degree of influence, that that can be said for. Even Saddam himself was constrained to some degree by tribal affiliations.

But North Korea? As far as I can tell, the whim of Sung is the will of North Korea.

Posted by: refugee at July 7, 2006 03:14 PM