G.W. Bush’s Double-Dog Dare

Little Joshua’s illness started to crowd out my blogging time when I first noticed this link (HT: The Marmot). It’s just too good not to reproduce some choice, succulent portions. Aside from having a solid grasp of what the regional players are thinking, Mac Johnson writes so well he gives me acute writer’s envy:

In its latest major accomplishment as an industrial power, North Korea has dug a really big hole. Usually such a hole would be filled with the bodies of starved peasants or of schoolchildren convicted of being distantly related to someone caught listening to the Bee Gees.

But in this case, the hole is only metaphorically filled with such bodies, as it is thought to actually contain the infrastructure for a test detonation of one of the atomic bombs on which North Korean God-King Kim Jong-Il has spent his people’s stolen resources — while allowing as many as 1,000,000 people to die of hunger.

A parenthetical comment on the death toll may be appropriate here, since I started a post on this and other subjects on Friday (normally, an off day for me) and ended up with 18 pages. I’m not going to post it all, but will post some excerpts, which will quote Andrew Natsios, now Administrator of USAID, as putting the death toll at 2-3 million. Fiona Terry of Medicins Sans Frontieres estimates up to 3.5 million. The lowest estimate that cites actual refugee surveys and reliable statistics is that of Marcus Noland, whose fine book I’m currently reading; he estimates 600,000 to 1 million. Congress, of course, put the figure at 2 million, which appears to be the best mid-range estimate available at present.

Johnson continues:

Unfortunately, I don’t have [Kim Jong-Il’s] phone number, or I might call him and in a very diplomatic tone communicate to him thusly:

“Do it already, you morally malformed runt. You’re nothing without a bomb test! This is your chance to finally be a man. You look much taller (almost five-foot-five) when standing in front of a mushroom cloud. Make that hole call you ‘Daddy,’ dear Leader!”

Johnson questions those who are afraid of a test, and instead wonders:

For me, the only question is how do we goad the imbeciles into testing two bombs? After the first test, perhaps we should issue statements along the lines of “probably just seismic activity,” “people that short can’t possibly have made more than one bomb,” or “Whoops! Wasn’t looking. Can you do it again?”

His conclusion is that all of the other countries in the region that are trading with the North Korean regime would rather pretend that all of this nuclear unpleasantness simply didn’t exist, and that a test might be just the thing to dam the River Denial once and for all. But for his suggestion–one that ingores legitimate humanitarian concerns and the political history of starving peoples–that everyone summarily cut off food aid, Johnson has nailed just what’s wrong with our “multilateral” diplomacy with North Korea.

In other words, with the possible exception of Japan, we’re the only ones who give a shit. This would be a good operational definition of an “ally.”

Mac Johnson may well have been channeling G.W. Bush this week. Have a look at what the New York Times is reporting:

The Bush administration on Sunday warned North Korea for the first time that if it conducted a nuclear test, the United States and several Pacific powers would take punitive action, but officials stopped short of saying what kind of sanctions would result. “Action would have to be taken,” Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush’s national security adviser, said on the CNN program “Late Edition.”

. . . .

Mr. Hadley’s warnings represented the first time anyone in the Bush administration had approached drawing a “red line” that North Korea could not cross without prompting a reaction. The term red line was often used during the cold war to set the boundaries in confrontations, with perhaps the most extreme example President Kennedy’s action in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis to curb a nuclear risk.

By this point, are you thinking what I’m thinking? I can’t say, but apparently David Sanger was doing a splendid job of sinister media manipulation, because I’m following right along:

In the case of North Korea, the threat has risen incrementally over 15 years. Mr. Bush’s aides have said in interviews over the past year that if they drew a clear line, they believed that the North Koreans would see it as a challenge and walk right up to it. On Sunday afternoon, senior administration officials said that concerns about baiting North Korea helped to explain why Mr. Hadley did not specify what kind of penalty was possible. Instead, Mr. Hadley noted that “the Japanese are out today already saying that those steps would need to include going to the Security Council and, potentially, sanctions.”

OK, I get it. We’re trying to bait North Korea without appearing to be baiting North Korea. Whatever. If having the KOSPI tank is the price of persuading South Korea that it has a problem, too, then I consider it a small price to pay, the residual value of my wife’s stock options notwithstanding. And in a perfect world, this might even provoke a run on a few Chinese banks. By the way, the article also contains some whispered, unsourced doubletalk about the Chinese privately trying to pressure North Korea, a theory about which I’ve become decidedly skeptical.