In the Feb. 5, 2005 edition of
New York Review of Books, Nicholas D. Kristoff
reviews two booklength takes on North Korea.
Quick summary: (a) lotsa bad trouble, and (b) Bush is making it much, much worse.
But Kristoff offers an authentic, accountable view of North Korea, its Great Leader, and why so many starving North Korean peasants welcome war, even nuclear war that will annihilate them.
North Korea is the most secretive country in the world today, with its main railway lined with walls so high that its foreign passengers can't see the countryside. It is also, as Bradley Martin's book makes clear, the most repressive and brutal country in the world, with entire families sometimes executed if one member gets drunk and slights the Dear Leader.
There's more. Kristoff alleges that Bush administration fumbles in North Korea wiped out limiting agreements the Clinton administration had implemented and substantially increased the proliferation of nuclear weaponry in North Korea.
In fact, Kristoff asserts, North Korea's nuclear weapons "emergency" began while Poppy Bush was the president:
It seems that North Korea first achieved a nuclear capacity during the administration of George H.W. Bush, probably building one or two nuclear warheads. Then in 1994 Clinton almost went to war with North Korea, threatening to take action against its nuclear program, but at the last minute North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear activities if the US lifted sanctions and helped to build it a couple of nuclear reactors that could not easily be used to make nuclear weapons.
Clinton convinced North Korea to stop development of plutonium technology, but they continued to develop uranium enrichment programs secretly. Uranium is fuel for nuclear bombs, but uranium enrichment is a much slower path to nuclear proliferation than plutonium enrichment.
Kristoff drives home the point. Bush blows it:
If it weren't for the 1994 agreement, North Korea would now have at least one hundred nuclear weapons, perhaps two hundred.
The secret uranium program posed a real threat of proliferation, but the Bush administration's response to it led the North Koreans not only to continue with it but also to revive their plutonium program.
Kim Il-Sung, dictator in North Korea from he end of World War II until 1994, was always the dictator but not always a revered deity. Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty, by Bradley K. Martin (the book Kristoff reviews) points out that the deifying cult might have been a more recent invention, and not necessarily one Kim Il-Sung created:
If Kim Il Sung worked hard to preside over a brutal dictatorship, then his son Kim Jong Il simply inherited it. There were other potential successors, but Kim Jong Il managed to elbow them aside--mostly by flattering his father and amplifying the cult of personality that honored his father as a deity.
Kristoff provides an intimate look at why North Koreans embrace and adore their ruthless dictator.
The worship of Kim Il Sung may seem absurd to Westerners, but it was effective in North Korea. Martin quotes a European who served as a diplomat in Pyongyang for many years as estimating that about 90 percent of the population genuinely believed in the regime, while 10 percent simply pretended to.
Two of the best quotes (and the last I'll provide here) come from recent North Korean defectors, peasants:
So while it doesn't seem likely that North Korea would attack the South, it doesn't seem impossible, either. Martin quotes one defector after another who says that ordinary North Koreans would welcome war.
Pak Su Hyon says: "The problem is, people want war. They believe they are living this hard life because there's going to be a war. If there's going to be a war, why not just get it over with? They believe they'll die either way, from hunger or war. So the only solution is war."
Another, Ko Chung Song, said: "Everybody believes a war will break out sooner or later. A hundred percent want war to occur. The food shortage is terrible. Distribution is halted, so people figure they will die of hunger or die in war. They're even prepared to die in a nuclear war. A hundred percent believe that North Korea would win, so they support war. They were brought up to worship Kim Il Sung. No matter what changes occur, they always worship Kim Il Sung. They've been so brainwashed since birth that they're willing to die for the country."
It's pretty apparent too few people in Washington understand North or South Korea, and the result - given severe troop demands elsewhere - might well be that "efficient" sort of warfare we Americans have used before, like, at Hiroshima.
If North Korea interests you, three dKos contributors have posted worthwhile diaries here (pyrrho), here (ECH), and here (rentogen), and there are several others, equally informative, to be found in search.
(With thanks for the link to Denis Dutton at Arts & Literature Daily.)