Hey, North Korea has the bomb!
Kim Jong Il: It will be 911 times 2356.
Chris: My God, that’s… I don’t even know what that is!
Kim Jong Il: Nobody does!
Meanwhile back in Teheran…………..the mullahs must be pretty pissed off.
I guess considering how innefectual all previous attempts to change Pyongyangs mind were, this pretty well guarantees the military option to prevent Iran from joining a club that does not want to have them as a member.
Elsewhere: Electron Soup has the seismic data.
Right where they said it was. Oh, and while we’re on the topic of total nuclear annihilation, go and pick up the demo of Defcon, the recently-released online game that puts your finger on the Big Red Button. Simply put, it’s one of the most tense and exhilarating games of strategy I’ve played in a long time, with a superb graphic style that belies the megadeath-toll slowly mounting on the scoreboard. An extraordinarily well-timed release.
Heh!
Elsewhere [dk.au]: Radwaste comments from Vienna.
I hope it pushes China into finally doing something about its mad neighbour. I think the Both Korean people would be better off under oretty much any government – even a puppet Chiese one – than the current lunatics
The USA conducting a nuclear test in downtown Pyongyang would now be a really good idea.
PIMF
BothNorthRubbish, Phil, sorry. The bizarre paradox of proliferation post-1991 is that the more Bombs there are, the less likely they are to cause themselves to go off. And the far, far, far less likely they are to result in a simultaneous apocalyptic earth’s-crust-lifting götterdammerung.
May all of the Earth’s nukes corrode fantastically expensively in peace, I say.
That’s a bit broad brush isn’t it SATP? There must be thousands of out of work “operatives” in x/Iron Curtain countries who could be re-focussed from organised crime into something more productive on behalf of the Chinese
I’d remembered the lines differently:
But I must have just made that up in my mind!
No need to say sorry Liam, it’s fair to say that the paradoxical history of prolif as you describe it is true. However this time it may be different because we don’t really know who the rational actors are in a world where pre-emptive wars are an actual and real policy option.
And the timing is just so neat for those who may need to wag the dog.
“timing neat”?
Opportunistic I’d say. NK sees the Mad Mullahs in Iran acting up, and guesses that the UN/US can’t or won’t be able to handle two simultaneous crises. Likely outcome will be nukes in both places, and on the open market.
Unless China acts.
I’m there with you Peter, China is key, and we know they are absolutely practical, Pyongyang may have tested but may never be able to launch if China leans on them. But then again, who knows how nutty Kim is? Hopefully the Chinese do.
The Chinese government has a somewhat realistic manner of handling recalcitrants.
Good thinking PeterTB, no need for the USA to risk all sorts of outcry at home by nuking Pyongyang.
If China does it, none of the usual suspects will say a thing, heh heh!
I reckon one of the tricks of being a successful world leader is don’t write cheques your mouth can’t cash.
OK, Winnie sort pulled it off. But he’d been a serious player for decades, knew how it all worked, knew who to call and how, and then rose to the time.
But Dubya…nah! He got up in front of the world in 2002 and named an Axis of Evil – Iraq, Iran and North Korea – and yeah, at least two of three were run by very nasty people.
Four years later – all the Axis of Evil members have all got a hell of lot nastier while the Dubya junta tries to polarise their own country in order to deflect attention from how their “All hat and no cattle” rhetoric has left the US a stretched thin, toothless and despised laughing stock on the world stage. With their armed forces racked apart in “a foreign country of which we know nothing” for no discernable purpose anymore.
Personally, I do not like this. I want the yanks to protect their freckled-faced, cheeky young cousin, Australia, against big trouble.
But they can’t anymore. The Bush Junta has shot the US’ wad on a very expensive one-night neo-con stand. This is not about ideology anymore. It’s a dangerous world out there and our big buddy just shat in his pants and is trying to pretend it’s licorice.
If Truman was still alive, he’d have tonguelashed Bush out of the Oval Office, Ike would have commissioned him into the Armed Forces just so he could strip off his epaulettes, FDR would have had Dubya posted to the Aleutians on a leaky Coast Guard cutter, TDR would have horsewipped the prat, Lincoln would have pretended he never existed, Old Hickory would have just shot him, Jefferson would have sent him off to explore the Louisiana Terrority with not enough supplies and Ronnie Reagan would have taken him to one side and said “Son, you blew it.”
And even the second rate Presidents wouldn’t let Dubya into their poker games.
I mean, aside from James Buchanan, can you name any other POTUS who has so manifestly failed to acheived any kind of destiny?
I want the real USA back.
I guess considering how innefectual all previous attempts to change Pyongyangs mind were,
A little on the simplistic side there Phill, there was a particularly subtle game going on in the 90’s replaced by a lot of tough talk which ended up being huff and puff and did achieve nothing. Meanwhile in the North Korean corner for starters:
I suggest for these future problems to be handled with a modicum of efficacy the Axis of Evil be retitled the Axis of Extremely Difficult Foreign Policy Problems (I know, I know, boring).
Ooh great, I’ve got an on-topic gravatar.
PeterTB:
Are you assuming, on the basis of rhetoric alone, that DPRK’s nuclear weapon test would not be in the long-term interest of China …. or Japan?
Herro … innefectual…
I fink not you masy say jasdj abowt our Deer Lidder,.
cerjhiil and hiilter blah.
So for these reasons I think everything will work out OK.
Well, nuke or no nuke, North Korea is completely isolated: politically, geographically and strategically. They are impoverished, cut off from the rest of the world, live in a delusional twilit non-reality, and have no interesting resources nor anything else to sell but threats and tantrums. Being in thrall to a mad ideology, they also have no vector of influence towards the rest of the world, as say the Islamists do. They can cause nothing to happen of note save for mischief, and if that gets bad enough then they will simply be dealt with, summarily and probably irreversibly.
They are the Daffy Duck of the international stage: no matter what they do, they are going to wind up with their bill on backwards and an arse full of buckshot. Of course, the real problem is that Bush has turned the US into Elmer Fudd, whereas we used to be the protean and unflappable Bugs. Hey, this is kind of fun, actually. Let’s see, the Arabs are Sylvester the Cat, and Israel is Tweety, and the UN is Granny; the EU is Porky Pig, obviously; AQ and the Salafists I think are Yosemite Sam; Iran is Marvin the Martian, and France I guess is Foghorn Leghorn. What does that make the UK? And Oz? Help me out, here!
This is the real world, not a cartoon jpz.
USA is the guarantor of our freedom.
Oz is a pragmatic quasi-vassal of USA.
North Korea is a bunch of lunatics.
“…whereas we used to be the protean and unflappable Bugs.”
Shit yeah. The US used to be cheeky, sexy, glamorous and endlessly inventive in a way that defined all those terms for the rest of the whole bloody planet.
Everybody, even young angry islamic men, want that US back.
What the fuck happened to the land of Louis and Neil Armstrong, Beale St and Broadway, “Big Daddy” Roth and Philip Roth, NASA and the TVA, The Thomas’ Pynchon and Edison, Neal Cassady and Barry Goldwater, Elvis and the internet, Mad magazine and Nina Simone, Bob Dylan and Kelly Johnson, John Wayne and Andy Warhol, James Brown and Harley Earl, polio vaccines and The Simpsons, Hunter S Thompson and Emily Dickinson, Fred Astaire and the P-51 Mustang, Duke Ellington and the Wright Brothers, Thomas Jefferson and William Jefferson Clinton both screwing around, Hemingway and the hamburger, Film Noir and Busby Berkeley, “Louie, Louie” and “Rhapsody in Blue”, Ben Franklin and Hugh Hefner, Motown and Johnny Cash, the 1960 Chevrolet Corvette and the 1968 Boeing 747, Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair, Billy the Kid and Susan B. Anthony, TDR, FDR, JFK and LBJ, Frank Lloyd Wright and Martin Luther King, genial gum chewing GIs and an unflappable Peace Corps, the martini and the bikini, Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, Thelonious Monk and the OSS, cowboys and indians, Tom and Jerry, Lewis and Martin, the Beach Boys and Aaron Copeland, Sinatra, Sinatra, Sinatra and Blondie, the Muppets and Lenny Bruce, Muhammad Ali and Eleanor Roosevelt, microchips and the movies and the magic of a big brash country where there are no limits.
A country where “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” and “Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas and how he got in my pajamas I’ll never know.”
Come back America. The whole world misses you.
Wot Nabs said.
This is not just another cold war, one where I was on the side of those fighting communism, many of whom are still having coffee with GWB, in those days I was always on th side of imperialism light, why? Because of al the things Nabs mentioned in two coments – and I want those guys back. I liked them but somewhere along the line they got really stupid.
I don’t disagree that a kind of containment of Nth Korea has worked, but they still managed to get what they wanted isolated or not, influenced by the Chinese or not, however given the long march or time in this case it’s obvious that the agenda they pursue is theirs and theirs alone, that’s a problem. For everybody. And does change realities in a whole range of places and instances.
“Oz is a pragmatic quasi-vassal of USA.”
We’re in full accord here Fern Bar Steve
“North Korea is a bunch of lunatics.”
Well yes. It’s a lunatic way to run a country. But their dictator is crazy like a fox.
And I note here that four years after being called “an axis of evil” by the Western Emperor, NoKo is still subject to less control conditions (Free fly zones, regular inspections, etc) than Iraq was pre-invasion.
NoKo is the TV meal in the US’ geo-political freezer. If they fuck up in the Great Game, the US can always go back and try to slam dunk NoKo – from the air natch…just to show they’ve still got the moves, and to burn off the humilation of fucking up in yet another Asian land war. But an air war won’t work. Again.
And no one really wants to fight Koreans on the ground anyway. Not even Koreans. They are fucking tough bastards who often scared the kimonoes off the Nipponese over the past thousand years.
But the thing of it is, you could collapse the NoKo regime in about a month, without firing a shot. You just use that all purpose tool and magic bullet – money. Dear Leader Kim could be bought out for around $US50 billion I reckon – which is pretty much the cost of a bad month in Iraq.
Bribery, bullshitting and suckin’ ‘em into the system. How else do you think 10,000 Brits got to run India on the ground for 200 years, the odd Mutiny aside?
OK, not much glory in bribing a dictator to fuck off. But not many bodies either.
Graham Bell
“…that DPRK’s nuclear weapon test would not be in the long-term interest of China …. or Japan?
That would be my assumption – yes. Japan is obvious – no love lost there. China less so, they may feel that they have an accord with NK, and that they can therefore influence them – not realising that they are “hearding cats” as they say.
Shorter RWDB:
Dearie me, left wing nostalgia for their familiar US hegemon. Trouble is now they’ve got what they wished for with their new kid on the block in China and guess what? Their notorious international fence-sitter is doing just that with its NK love child. Oh well there’s always their UN security blanket to cuddle up to, if the demos and flag burnings outside Chinese embassies fail to get China off its arse.
All this makes interesting dinner talk for the Iranian mullahs of course.
That’s right observa.
In Iran at the moment, the very rational and non-lunatic lesson is being learned that the United States Does Not Invade Countries With Nukes.
Pepe Le Pew.
We think we’re hot, but we smell like a Rodent.
“All this makes interesting dinner talk for the Iranian mullahs of course.”
True. I can certainly see them passing around printouts of your comments obby and chuckling into their sinister islamobeards.
The Russians have more than a bit of the Yosemite Sam about them.
And I can definitely see a Wile E. Coyote—Roadrunner relationship between the CIA and Osama bin Laden. What’s Arabic for ‘beep beep’?
The truth is that NoKo’s popping The Big One is a huge challenge to China.
China would have much preferred NoKo playing cute with its nuclear capacity, neither confirming nor denying that hey had a nuclear capability.
In that scenario, Chine could continue to play the “honest broker”, loosening the leash and reeling NoKo in according to the contingencies of its relationship with the US and Japan.
NoKo’s popping The Big One forces China to commit one way or another on the question: Do we go for regime change in NoKo, or do we prop the regime up with concessions and bribes?
But one thing is almost certain: the Chinese would have told the US to take any military option off the table. The linkage would be that the Chinese would not rule out making life very difficult for the US and its clients in Central Asia, were the US to become bellicose in regard to NoKo.
An interesting question is whether Abe uses this as a pretext to begin (or threaten to begin) the process of Japanese re-armament. This has the potential to make things really difficult for NoKo. The downsides of intervention in NoKo pale in comparison to China’s ultimate foreign policy nightmare – a militarised Japan.
BBB
Nabakov — a very gracious lament, and it’s good (in a sad way) to hear that *somebody* appreciates what we’ve been up to all these years. I think the issues you’ve raised could be (at least partially) examined or explained, which is to say I believe I know some of the structural answers to “what the fuck happened to…?” but it’d take something on the scale of Anthony Powell, or “The Man Without Qualities.” Or a blog on that exact topic, which frankly I’ve been contemplating; if I ever get around to setting it up, I shall both invite and demand your insights.
But I could probably craft a sort of thumbnail response, maybe later on in this thread. Trouble is, in order to tell the truth, it’d probably be not a little bilious, to say nothing of downright mean. I’ll have to ponder the diplomacy of that.
All the same, I don’t think that spirit is vanished and never to return; just in a bit of a spot at the moment, sort of like Jackson Pollock whenever he needed to be helped home.
Meantime, for all the latest blighted shenanigans, this is still the country of Cartman, Steve Jobs, Doc Watson, Shawn Carter, Elizabeth LeCompte, Ellen “La MaMa” Stewart, Makers Mark, Bill Irwin, The Sisters of the Road, The Kings of Leon, Harvey Birdman, The Knitting Factory, the late great Sam Fucking Kinison, the late great Kathy Acker, the late great Ron Vawter, the late great Bill Hicks, a lot of people who are not yet “late” whom we don’t yet know are “great,” The Losers’ Lounge, The Continental Club, Smith Street, Chris Ware, and “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” Oh, and plus Aqua Teen Hunger Force. (Come on, I dare you to tell me the Mooninites don’t crack you up!) As we say in Brooklyn, “that ain’t nothin’.”
Still, I do take your point. Rather to heart, as it were. Would that our politicians could find the drawer where they seem to have lost both their brains and their balls.
“Would to God all the Lords people were prophets” — Mistah Blake
Timed perfectly to affect the congressional outcome.
Seems if China cannot impose its influence, there will be war.
I don’t think war’s likely, just a longer period in power for KJI and co. China’s not going to start anything, the U.S. isn’t going to, and neither is North Korea. They don’t have to, in the latter case, the U.S. would need China’s buy-in to manage it, even if they did focus on aerial assaults (leaving aside carpet-bombing the place with ICBM’s, which is also unworkable, not to mention probably immoral), and China’s not going in unless it’s to take over some nice seaports and destablise the U.S. economy as a result of its enhanced export capacities. Meanwhile, North Korea just bought itself years of foreign aid, once the furour dies down.
steve at the pub: “…This is the real world, not a cartoon jpz.”
Yes, but cartoons (when they’re good) still have a funny power to draw out the truth.
“USA is the guarantor of our freedom.”
Agree, but still, I wouldn’t say that this particular development will wreck that particular train, any time soon.
“Oz is a pragmatic quasi-vassal of USA.”
I don’t think this is quite true (or maybe, ce n’est pas exact, would be a better sense of what I think); Oz is not a ‘vassal’ — youse guys are family, in a sort of way; you’re kinfolk. [and, Please try to exclude what you suspect are the crypto-fascist overtones from that]; on a plain level, ya know it’s kinda true, and the reverse directionality holds as well.
All folks have certain rights; and some folks are admirable, and plenty folks are nice, and so on; but *not* all folks are kinfolks. That’s just a human fact. (You could look it up in, say, Levi-Strauss!) The multiculturalists would do well to get this simple idea through their thick non-planetary skulls.
Liam: “…I can definitely see a Wile E. Coyote—Roadrunner relationship between the CIA and Osama bin Laden.”
Despite being one of the funniest writers on this blog, somehow your sense of comedy theory deserts you here. The similarity is enticingly superficial, but ultimately insupportable on further reflection. Write to the Acme Company for a FREE copy of the manual that explains why your analysis is exactly right.
(And therefore doomed, for those of you who need shoe #2 to drop.)
Well, JPZ, I’m still waiting for the anvil to fall on the feathered fiend. I’m not sure it ever will.
Oh, if only Fritz Freleng had had the concept of a hellfire missile-firing Predator drone to play with—the comic possibilities are obvious, if not exactly endless.
The bottom line is, this is the moment China has to stand up and be counted to discipline its errant offspring and if it squibs the issue, or is not up to the task, it is just a paper tiger in the eyes of the world.
Liam — That’s FRIZ Freleng to *you*, bucko!
(–j_p_z, quite a stickler, who also insists that E.C. Segar be called “Elzie” Segar)
observa — interesting point w/r/t China…
Speaking of becoming damp squibs and not being up to the task, I’ll relegate them down here with the murderous girliemen and their cats
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,20542352-1246,00.html?from=public_rss
That’s about as low as you can get Chinese tigers.
Actually, JPZ, I’ve always thought the CIA’s preferred method of incursion into hostile territory—dumping suitcases full of money out of planes and hoping they squash the bad guys under the sheer weight of $100 notes—is straight out of Warner Brothers territory. Our own ASIO are made to look like second-rate nogoodniks out of Roger Ramjet by comparison.
Foxnews is the best plae to get information about this. The administration leaks to Fox first.
Nothing tumesces the Right as surely as the mention of “discipline”.
China wants NoKo in a box. China doesn’t want to kill the KJI regime, or any successor regime. KJI is too useful to China. KJI keeps Japan in a state of uncertainty. KJI is a source of constant irritation to the US. Now KJI has 30,000 US hostages in South Korea.
China can offer to act as honest broker. Invite KJI to agree to abjure nukes in return for a treaty with the US and Japan, guaranteeing peace, providing aid, loosening sanctions, etc.
The toughest task would be to get KJI to agree to such a proposal. However, KJI is now negotiating from a position of strength. People will now listen to him.
If China comes up with such a formula, then the ball will be back in the US and Japan court.
No discipline needed here.
Liam — well, getting into the territory of pure theory (meaning putting all decent human values, for the moment, into “brackets” as so much good comedy has got to do — cf. Mistah B. Keaton), I guess one of the ‘funniest’ things in recent memory is the USAF dropping packages of tinned “food” on Afghanistan from 35,000 feet, pretending that the non-halal cans would be helpful, rather than just bonking people on their heads. What did the Stones say?
“If you try some time,
You might find
Ya get what ya need!”
I don’t know, JPZ, I think the idea of ruthless, anti-Western Al Qaeda terrorists, ordered to attack the Ashes series but refusing to knock off Shane Warne and Brett Lee, because one of the liked cricket, takes the century’s cake for Killer Komedy.
Today’s headline in the L.A. Times…
WORLD CONDEMNS NORTH KOREA
What a relief! So nice to have a day when the world is busy condemning somebody else fer a change…
Hey, maybe we could slip the NoKos an Ebola bomb, just so the world’ll condemn them again next week, in case we have like a bad hangover or something and need the day free…