Face Painting

...Or Why North Korea Is Not Going To Nuke L.A.

Kim Jong-il looks kind of crazy. Those teeth, that suit, and of course, the Elvis coiffe now dried up and flipping out. The guy looks like a bad-acid refugee from Haight-Ashbury.

He's not crazy, as in, insane, as easy as it may be to label him so. No, the leader of North Korea is playing a face-saving game with the United States, with all of his pieces spread out on a Cold War map with the new Axis Of Evil overlays courtesy of the Shrub administration. It isn't a game he much cares to play at this late stage of his dying country but he is compelled to do so, in order to get *out* of the game completely.

Many folks have forgotten that both Koreas sent a unified athletic delegation to the last Olympics, an enormous leap of faith, especially for the north. South Korea exists solely for the purpose of reunification, much the way West Germany did for forty years, and Ireland does still today. But North Korea was to be a new Communist paradise with an open option to reconquer the south, an option cut off by standing US policy for half a century now, an option no one in the north even considers any longer.

Because the north's leadership is looking for a viable endgame strategy here, a way to bring North Korea out of the Cold War stone ages and into the light of the 21st century, however murky that light be. As a regime, it is not willing to go down to defeat, to come unglued and have celebrations in the street, to have its ideology repudiated in blunt and unyielding terms. Looking across the border North Korea can see what is happening in China, where a new breed of hyper-capitalism is on the loose, transforming the economy of that nation without fundamentally altering the underlying political structure, despite all of the confident predictions of those who say that where capitalist theory leads, democracy shall always follow. That model is still too unruly for North Korea, but something similar to it may allow them to remian as they are politically while changing their economy and providing the country with the income it so desperately needs to buy the things it must have - like food, better farming equipment, medical supplies, etc.

Thus, the weapons programs. Oh, they weren't hatched with all of this in mind - the strategy has certainly changed since the programs inception - a new goal has been assigned to the outcome. Otherwise, why would the North Koreans conduct the construction of their nuclear weapons program in so public a manner? Each step is announced to the world, and all of this began shortly after Shrub misused the word "axis" and included their country in it. North Korea has no intention of going to war with anyone if it can help it, though it must surely doubt the peaceful intentions of the US. Unlike other countries that scoff at the pre-emption doctrine, the North takes Shrub at his word, and choose the holocaust deterrent to keep US forces at bay.

The question then becomes: what do they want?

First, not to be attacked by the US. Stealth fighters and more bombers have been moved into the pacific theater since the back and forth began. N. Korea wants a guarantee.

They also want guidance without anyone calling it that. Loan guarantees, international aid and investment, and modernization. All of this must be gained through power negotiations, where North Korea is seen and treated as an equal partner, hence the missile tests, public pronouncements about the future of their weapons program, yesterday's announcement about fuel rod reprocessing, and so on. Only a few people within the US government seem to fully comprehend this idea of face saving - most want to raise the stakes, turn up the heat, perhaps even fight that war on the battlefield. They are fucking nuts, cause North Korea ain't fucking Iraq.

An example is the North Koreans calling the proposed talks between their own officials and those of the US and China "bilateral," again to show that they are equals in the world, and in this matter. All the chickenhawks in Washington got their dainty little feathers all ruffled up by that statement, enough that they wanted to cancel the talks. How typical...image over reality. The reality is quite simple. North Korea will eventually have viable nuclear weapons, and absent help and respect from the US, will have little choice but to find a way to make that program profitable for them, geometrically increasing the likelihood that you or I will one day be vaporized by one of those weapons.

These talks need to happen. For once, the Shrubs need to use their brains, not their guns.