Christopher Hitchens: We are Kim Jong-il's Willing Accomplices
[Christopher Hitchens is a British journalist. He writes for Slate, among other publications.]
The military flags displayed at both ends of the Panmunjom strip are testimony to the fact of a cease-fire line, because the Korean War never ended. This is at best an armistice. And we are regularly reminded that the Korean peninsula could explode into a full-scale war or, rather, resumption of war, at any moment. The most recent reminder was the sinking of the Cheonan, a South Korean frigate, in March. After a very detailed and protracted investigation of this incident, it was announced last week that the warship had been hit by a North Korean torpedo. Everybody already knew this, so the only real question was why the unavoidable finding had taken so long.
The answer is not hard to discover. So volatile and unpredictable and hysterical has the North Korean regime become that it was believed in some quarters that even the finding might trigger a fresh escalation—an escalation that might pass the nuclear threshold before anyone could draw breath. Richard Nixon used to ask his sick and compliant operative Henry Kissinger to imply to the Russians and Chinese that he might be such a touchy president that he was capable of anything—this loopy strategy became known in policy circles as "the madman theory of war." In the case of Kim Jong-il, nobody has any difficulty believing that he is delusional and worse, so the blackmail keeps on working....
The evil and the irrationality of the system are also directly related. American intelligence has apparently reported to President Barack Obama that the murder of 46 South Korean sailors was a premeditated action on the part of Kim Jong-il himself, in order to gratify the morale of his military elite and to advance the cause of one of his sons as his impending dynastic replacement. It seems that in April the Dear Leader personally visited and congratulated the naval unit that carried out the torpedo attack. This kind of lethal irresponsibility may seem demented, but I don't know of anyone who studies North Korea professionally who doesn't regard it as at least a plausible explanation. And it seems that the provisional response from Washington has been to urge restraint on the elected government in Seoul, which indeed has little choice but to confine itself to diplomatic initiatives and the dropping of such economic incentives for good behavior as Seoul can still claim to exert. This may well serve to fend off the latest crisis and prevent it from ballooning into full-out madness, but it doesn't excuse us from the realization that we become accomplices in evil every time we seek to soothe the unslakable appetites of the crime family that sits in Pyongyang.
Read entire article at Slate
The military flags displayed at both ends of the Panmunjom strip are testimony to the fact of a cease-fire line, because the Korean War never ended. This is at best an armistice. And we are regularly reminded that the Korean peninsula could explode into a full-scale war or, rather, resumption of war, at any moment. The most recent reminder was the sinking of the Cheonan, a South Korean frigate, in March. After a very detailed and protracted investigation of this incident, it was announced last week that the warship had been hit by a North Korean torpedo. Everybody already knew this, so the only real question was why the unavoidable finding had taken so long.
The answer is not hard to discover. So volatile and unpredictable and hysterical has the North Korean regime become that it was believed in some quarters that even the finding might trigger a fresh escalation—an escalation that might pass the nuclear threshold before anyone could draw breath. Richard Nixon used to ask his sick and compliant operative Henry Kissinger to imply to the Russians and Chinese that he might be such a touchy president that he was capable of anything—this loopy strategy became known in policy circles as "the madman theory of war." In the case of Kim Jong-il, nobody has any difficulty believing that he is delusional and worse, so the blackmail keeps on working....
The evil and the irrationality of the system are also directly related. American intelligence has apparently reported to President Barack Obama that the murder of 46 South Korean sailors was a premeditated action on the part of Kim Jong-il himself, in order to gratify the morale of his military elite and to advance the cause of one of his sons as his impending dynastic replacement. It seems that in April the Dear Leader personally visited and congratulated the naval unit that carried out the torpedo attack. This kind of lethal irresponsibility may seem demented, but I don't know of anyone who studies North Korea professionally who doesn't regard it as at least a plausible explanation. And it seems that the provisional response from Washington has been to urge restraint on the elected government in Seoul, which indeed has little choice but to confine itself to diplomatic initiatives and the dropping of such economic incentives for good behavior as Seoul can still claim to exert. This may well serve to fend off the latest crisis and prevent it from ballooning into full-out madness, but it doesn't excuse us from the realization that we become accomplices in evil every time we seek to soothe the unslakable appetites of the crime family that sits in Pyongyang.