Bygones

Striking a conciliatory tone on an issue that has divided Japan and the United States, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said on Thursday that the Obama administration would follow Tokyo’s lead in working to relocate an American air base on Okinawa. NYT

So what the hell was all the fuss about last year?

Thank you, China and North Korea.

Oh, wait a second--- "follow Tokyo's lead" could conceivably be different than Okinawa's would be.

Unpredictable, irrational DPRK

A very short history of the DPRK and some possible rational why the unpredictable country that seems strangely predictable is behaving so irrationally is online at PBS. Some parts may be quibble worthy* (was Kim Il-sung really an anti-Japanese guerrilla or could that be part or all myth?), but it might give some insight:

North Koreans have long felt threatened by American nuclear weapons, and sought protection under the Soviet nuclear umbrella by signing a mutual defense treaty with the USSR in 1961. But North Korea does not have a lot of trust in Russia or China either... ...it is surrounded by enemies or, at best, untrustworthy "friends"...

...This modern state of insecurity is built upon an older history of colonialism and traditional isolation to create an attitude of profound suspicion of the outside world...PBS

*Others may argue that Japanese colonialism of Korea was not really colonialism among other things.

PM Kan's TV

Although it is tough to pull away from the antics of the unpredictable DPRK which for some reason seems to be generally predictable, one can entertain oneself with some good TV. Failing that, one can find PM Kan's TV online. This will help folks try to figure out just what the government is doing since it isn't exactly obvious otherwise. It is available in English and in Japanese. (Unfortunately, it cannot be embedded.)

From the reactions of the people I talked to about the recent shelling of South Korea by the North, a little publicity/spin about Kan's achievements* is both long overdue and too late. Somehow, the shelling of the ROK just emphasized the apparent weakness and incompetence of the Kan government. Although none of these folks knew what any of the other parties could have done better, no one said they would do worse.

Now gotta go back online and read opinions of what to do about Korea from folks--- many or most of---whom you just know have less information about what is going than an observant and minimally informed E-1 who is stationed 100 miles south of the DMZ.

*Don't know if this "TV" would ever work in spite of it being spellbindingly exciting and tremendously informative.

Ol' Duke and the DPRK

When I was in the USAF, I once had a drug dog named Duke.

Now Ol' Duke was a somewhat nutty dog, in fact one of the nuttiest that I ever handled or trained. What made Ol' Duke nutty was not only that he was flaky and hard to train as a drug dog, but the fact that he played bad-ass all the time---especially with me. Rub his stomach and he'd growl and give me the eye like he was ready to chew my arm off. Tell him to get into a vehicle and he'd do the same. Tell him to get out and ditto. Sometimes, he even growled when he peed.

One day, when I was taking him back to the kennels to put him away after a midnight shift, he seemed to sense that I was going on break for 3 days. He was not especially enthusiastic about that. When I reached over to grab the leash and take him out of the car, he grabbed my forearm with his mouth, looked me right in the eye, and put just a little pressure on---not enough to really hurt, but enough that I could feel his big canines pushing into my skin.

Now I had seen all of Duke's tricks before, and although I usually just laughed at him, this was different. Duke may have been a bit of a bluffer, but he had bitten a previous handler and was, of course, attack-trained. I wasn't afraid of the old boy, but I did have respect for what he could do.

Ol' Kim Jung Il et al of North Korea have been making noises again. Just a day or so ago, they changed their stance that any nukes that they produced would only be for defensive purposes and said that they would now use them in a "merciless offensive".

I no longer have any access to any classified information. About all I can do is read media reports and items from various sources on the Internut, and everyone knows how unreliable those often are. But I do think that I "know" enough to guess that the DPRK's latest growls are nothing but growls, for exactly what nukes are they gonna use? I suppose they could have more ready to go than the two that they tested, but I kinda doubt it.*

Ol' Duke had more sense as he had something to back up his growls and it wouldn't have gotten him killed if he did. Is far as I know, the DPRK can only fully back up theirs by killing thousands of South Koreans in Seoul and starting a war which would assure the destruction of the regime.

I felt sorry for Ol' Duke** and stayed late playing with him that morning and later came back during my break to spend more time with him. Who will feel sorry for Ol' Kim?

*24 June: Estimates are that they have enough plutonium for at least 6. I have seen other estimates that they may already have several more. There seems to be few who believe that they have the ability to mount any on missiles yet.

**Alas, poor old Duke is long gone, unlike the should-have-been-history-by-now Stalinist government of North Korea.

More concerns that DPRK will push Japan to nukes

At the same time that the US is considering putting North Korea back on the terrorist list, and placing more financial restrictions on the country, and the UN Security Council seems to be getting a little more serious about tougher sanctions, North Korea has sentenced two US journalists to 12 years in prison:

North Korea on Monday sentenced two American journalists to 12 years of hard labor in a case widely seen as a test of how far the isolated Communist state was willing to take its confrontational stance toward the United States. NYT article

Obama appears to have gotten fed up with DPRK's repeated games and won't offer any new incentives for it to dismantle the nuclear facility, and fears that Kim Jong-il and crowd will start a nuclear arms race in northeast Asia:

...Mrs. Clinton said the United States feared that if the test and other recent actions by North Korea did not lead to “strong action,” there was a risk of “an arms race in Northeast Asia” — an oblique reference to the concern that Japan would reverse its long-held ban against developing nuclear weapons. NYT US Weighs Interecpting North Korean Shipments.

North Korea has threatened war if the UN imposes sanctions or if the US/UN interferes with its vessels. Of course they've threatened war many times since the last war they fought in which they would utterly defeated until China felt threatened enough to intercede. But who really knows what Kim will do?

Relax, the DPRK is not governed by suicidal nuts

I used to listen to Radio Pyongyang on shortwave, and it was always somewhat amusing as it sounded like some bad propaganda film from the 50s. So in a way, it's hard to take the loud threats from North Korea too seriously.

Then again, one has to remember the South Koreans, Japanese, French, Americans and others that the regime has kidnapped or killed over the years. And Ragoon, Burma* where in 1983 North Korean agents blew up and killed a number of ROK government officials in an attempt on the president's life. Or its bombing of a civilian aircraft (CAUTION:Wikipedia link). The USS Pueblo. The attacks on the US Army on the "DMZ" during the Vietnam War which left at least 75 members of the US military and 299 ROK soldiers dead; its ax murder of a US Army major in the mid 1970s, again in the "DMZ;" its attempt to murder the then president of South Korea, Park Chung-hi.

Those things are generally considered purty close to being acts of war. So it's hard to be reassured by those "in the know" that Kim Jung Il and the North Korean leadership are not nuts and wouldn't really risk a suicidal war.

Now the leadership of North Korea has decided to say the Korean War truce is no longer valid and threatened to attack South Korea if its ships are searched as a result of the little nuclear detonation and missile launch games they are playing.

Analysts in Seoul said they regarded North Korea's warnings as serious but doubted the willingness of Kim to provoke a large-scale confrontation.

"The problem is that both sides cannot afford to make a concession," said Dong Yong-seung, a senior fellow at the North Korean division of Samsung Economic Research Institute. "It is like a game of chicken." NYT, non-Onion version (?).

And that's probably true. Trouble is, one of those playing chicken has shown numerous signs in the past of being just a bit unstable in the noggin' by most standards, regardless of its real goals and intentions.

If Japan had the bomb, none of this would be happening of course. There's magic in them thar bombs.

*Some prefer the military dictatorship's "Myanmar."

Nothing has changed in decades

“People who tell you they know what’s going on there don’t know,” said one official, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “What’s undeniable is that there are substantial challenges to all the previous approaches to North Korea.” NYT

I'm guessing that this would be a mistake

Beijing would welcome direct US-North Korean talks, the Chinese foreign minister suggested in an interview published on Friday, amid international efforts to get Pyongyang to end its nuclear programme. AFP

We've been down that road before (before Japan decided that it had interests there too) and did not it turn out well. The other players, the ROK and Japan in particular would be unlikely to accept any agreement coming out of those talks. Japan might, but then the fine folk on the extreme right would be rattling on about another back-stabbing by their true enemy, the US.

Stop the insanity! Done. Next Item?

The world has changed a lot since the days of the Bush administration when it seemed like international diplomacy was run by a group of loony-tunes.

A few weeks ago, Dear Father* Kim Jung Il of North Korea, feeling lonely and neglected, decided to ring a bell by launching a missile---err satellite---while President Obama was in Europe making a speech about (yawn) eliminating nuclear weapons. Like Pavlov puppies , the US and its erstwhile ally Japan immediately began slobbering.

Resisting the urges of the calmer, more rational folks who suggested some military action against North Korea as long as they themselves didn't get their asses shot off, President Obama sprang into action.

Obama rejected the old Bush wimp-out by refusing to merely call Kim and North Korea bad names such as Axis of Evil. No, Obama decided to hit North Korea where it hurts; to do that one thing that all sends the fear of god through the souls of all dictators and tyrants. Obama, with Japan at his side (the Japan that suddenly remembered that the Six Party Talks about North Korean nukes were about more than just hostages/abductees) went to the UN!

Things did not go as planned at the UN, however, for Russia and China stunned the planet by refusing to play along. No problem, says Barack, we'll talk it over. No more pushy USA, we'll get results by drawing upon the natural love and admiration that the international community always had for the US before Bush.

After much deliberation and singing of Kumbaya, the UN issued a fierce statement saying something along the lines that North Korea had done wrong when it committed the heretofore unheard of act of violating a UN sanction or something like that.

Kim Jung Il, upon receiving the UN nasty-gram, immediately went into a panic and began running around in circles screaming "Oh my god, what shall I do now!" After his generals calmed him down, the unpredictable Kim decided to do that which nobody could have predicted: They decided to withdraw from the Six Party Talks and restart the nuclear facility. (clang! clang!)

Meanwhile, back in Japan, the fearless rightwing was shocked and saddened to learn that the US-Japan alliance had failed. That girlie-man Obama had ruled out shooting down the North Korean missile before it reached the Land of the Rising Sun. This was the evidence they needed to do something that they had never done before and start whimpering that the US was an untrustworthy ally. Many had already reluctantly come to the conclusion that had Japan not had Article 9 which prohibits it from having military unless they are called self-defense forces, it would have been able to have defended itself and shot the missile down at launch. It would have been able to have done this even though it was off just a little---about a day---in its detection of the launch.

Had the Japan rightwing had its way, by god, and attacked North Korea it would have ended the problem in a heartbeat. Japan would have been back on track to regaining its rightful position as the much-loved and respected leader of Asia. China would have shown admiration for Japan's new military assertiveness. South Korea, after seeing an attack on its fellow Koreans by their beloved ally Japan, would have been waving the hinomaru and shouting "Go Nippon!"

It's such a relief to have returned to saner times.

*More commonly called Dear Leader nowadays.

Oops! Luckily, Japan isn't considering a retaliatory strike

A false alarm was sounded in Japan Saturday when the government announced North Korea had carried out an expected rocket launch. Japan quickly rescinded the announcement but not before the report had been widely disseminated both in the country and internationally. Full VOA report.

Then, what would be the point?

UNITED NATIONS/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China and Russia are all but certain to stymie a U.S. push for new U.N. sanctions on North Korea if it fires off a rocket, leaving tighter enforcement of existing penalties a likelier outcome.

Wouldn't it be just as effective for the Security Council to threaten to throw spitballs at a photo of Kim Jong Il?

North Korea needs attention

...at least they are not blowing up airliners or half the South Korean government anymore. At least not at present:

Two American journalists on a reporting trip to the border between China and North Korea have been detained by the North Korean military, a human rights activist and another source said Thursday. Laura Ling, a Chinese-American, and Euna Lee, a Korean-American, were believed to have been detained by North Korean border guards Tuesday morning. Their Chinese guide, an ethnic Korean, was also detained. NYT

The North Koreans are said to have crossed the border into China to "arrest" them. Kim Jong Il, the son of a murdering sob, is visiting China.

Oh well, no surprise here.