North Korea Sort-of Admits Cheonan Sinking?
Buried within the latest AP report on Jimmy Carter’s visit to North Korea was this wonderful morsel:
Carter said North Korean officials expressed deep regret for the deaths on the South Korean warship Cheonan and for the civilians killed in the island shelling. But, he said, it was clear that “they will not publicly apologize and admit culpability for the Cheonan incident.” North Korea denies sinking the ship, despite an South Korea-led international investigation that blamed the country. It says it was provoked into the island shelling by South Korean live fire drills.
No, they didn’t intend to apologize … until the awesome global stature of Jimmy Carter and his Superfriends (TM) forced Kim Jong Il to grant them a personal audience-cum-intervention, where Kim tearfully apologized for starving, torturing, or terrorizing virtually everything in reach and agreed to check himself into rehab.
Just kidding! Actually, Kim snubbed Carter again and sent his Foreign Minister and the head of his rubber-stamp parliament to repeat their standard demands — a North-South summit without apologies or preconditions, and “[T]hey won’t give up their nuclear program without some kind of” vague, ill-defined, vanishing “security guarantee from the U.S.” That’s pretty much what the North Koreans said before Agreed Framework II, which of course brought us to the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear program one crumbling cooling tower, plus numerous diplomatic and material gains for North Korea. Really, though, the smothering irony of this entire story has to be that Carter and his admirers hold him out as an expert on dealing with North Korea because of Agreed Framework I, a triumph so smashing that Carter is still begging the North Koreans to disarm 17 years later.
Carter must have been especially disappointed that Kim didn’t even tell his minions to release his newest American hostage, a pity given the perfect convenience of seizing a hostage just in time for Carter’s arrival. There is, of course, the pity of that plea from the man’s family that he’s in ill health. In spite of this, another AP correspondent (here, the unforgivably experienced Foster Klug) calls Carter “well-respected” by the North Koreans, notwithstanding the fact that we now know just what the North Koreans really think of Jimmy Carter. But even the most reasonable inferences that Klug could have drawn from his own report tell us that much.
When asked why the North Koreans didn’t meet with His Most Highly Regarded Excellency, Carter replied that the South Korean President wouldn’t meet with him, either. Could it be that the South Korean government regards Carter just as highly as the North Korean government regards him? Or that Carter’s visit has unwittingly revealed a sliver of common ground between the Koreas?
“We don’t question the decision of a head of state about the priorities they set for their own schedule,” Carter said.
Among other priorities, this particular head of state is known for his world-class collection of Daffy Duck cartoons and the lethality of his prison camp system.
A final fallacy about North Korea is again refuted in this story. The American diplomatic class and its fan-boys would have us believe that North Korea’s diplomatic Lotharios only manage to outmaneuver America’s best and brightest so consistently through their fiendish cleverness. I incline to the view that North Korean diplomacy isn’t fiendishly clever, it’s just usually less incompetent than ours. Conceding guilt for sinking the Cheonan without apologizing for it isn’t clever. For North Korea, it’s the worst of everything. It gets no credit for contrition, and yet it refutes and embarrasses its sympathizers from Seoul to New York. A more clever North Korea would either apologize for a payoff or stick to denial, but one could just as easily say that a more clever North Korea would be South Korea.