The Ghoulish Regime In Pyongyang

You can’t have missed the fiendish photograph of a North Korean soldier 
hovering through a window over Hillary Clinton as she stands in a hut 
at the “truce village” at Panmunjom in no-man’s land just below what 
her husband had called after a trip “the scariest place on earth.”

  

The conflict between North Korea and South Korea was the hottest 
encounter in the Cold War. Nobody really won that war. But the long 
ideological struggle between the two countries and the alliances for 
which they stood ended as a clear victory for the democracies, one of 
which Seoul edged itself into becoming over time.

The diplomacy with which the democracies have kept North Korea at bay 
is blackmail. South Korea has paid this ransom regularly. But so 
have other countries, including the United States. Yet the economic 
straits of the Pyongyang regime get tighter and tighter while its 
military grows larger and stronger...now into a fragmentary or at 
least symbolic nuclear power. However fragmentary and however 
symbolic, its nuclear capacities are not only destabilizing but 
dangerous.

It was only with the confidence given it by its nukes did the 
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea sink a South Korean ship, the 
Cheonan, killing 46 sailors from its crew.

And so it was brought by Seoul to the Security Council. There China 
protected its ally. The result was a condemnation of the attack. But 
nothing was mentioned about the attacker. The North Koreans continue 
to deny their role in the sinking.

Of course, Ambassador Susan Rice is treating this as a victory for 
American diplomacy.

The truth is that it was probably Israel that took out the hapless 
South Korean ship, don’t you think? Maybe Rice can arrange to bring 
the issue before the U.N. Human Rights Council where she will assure a 
fair hearing.

A very informative article by Richard Lloyd Parry in Thursday’s 
The Times of London reports that James Clapper, the person nominated 
to head U.S. intelligence operations “warned that North Korea could 
launch a further attack.” In a submission to a hearing to confirm his 
nomination, Clapper wrote:

We may be entering a dangerous new period when North Korea will once 
again attempt to advance its internal and external political goals 
through direct attacks on our allies in the Republic of Korea.

Tomorrow the U.S. and Korea will begin joint military exercises. They 
are, of course, show exercises. China says they are 
“confrontational.” Pyongyang’s Central News Agency denounced them as a 
“preparation for war.”