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Ho Hum, North Korea Violates 2 More U.N. Resolutions, World Yawns

launchpad.jpgRemember that fancy new North Korean missile test site that was in the news the other day? 

North Korea has reportedly conducted an engine ignition test for a long-range missile, presumably the Taepodong-2 missile with a range of 6,700 km, at a new long-range missile test site under construction in Dongchang-li, North Pyongan Province. For the test, the rocket engine of a missile is laid out horizontally at the test site and ignited to test its performance.

The test confirms that part of the Dongchang-li test site, which is expected to be completed by 2009, is already operational, and that North Korea has been continuing development of long-range missiles.

The engine is presumably for a Taepodong-2 missile, whose test firing failed in July 2006, or an improved version with a range of longer than 10,000 km. A government source said after the failed test in 2006, North Korea has intermittently conducted engine ignition tests and continued development of long-range missiles.

The Dongchang-li test site is said to be much larger and better than the one in Musudan-ni. Its existence was first reported in the foreign press last Thursday.  [Chosun Ilbo]

Let us consult the Book of Meaningless Prohibitions, Resolution 1718, Paragraph 5 (right after the ones about wearing white after Labor Day and snacking after 10 p.m.):

[T]he DPRK shall suspend all activities related to its ballistic missile programme and in this context re-establish its pre-existing commitments to a moratorium on missile launching;  

And here’s Paragraph 2 of Resolution 1695:

[T]he DPRK suspend all activities related to its ballistic missile programme, and in this context re-establish its pre-existing commitments to a moratorium on missile launching;  

I feel the occasional compulsion to point these things out not because they are consequential but because they are not.  Still, the dwindling ranks (opens in a Vista-clogging  pdf)  of the UN-topians  deserve to  be browbeaten with these things.  I’m actually hoping that this time, the U.N. will underperform its most famous parody by not even managing to  send Kim Jong Il  “a very angry letter.”  Our crack State Department did manage to meekly acknowledge the violation of one of these resolutions (one out of two?).  Safe to say that not one of a wide range of possible consequences for this will be considered, much less imposed.

I should also note that they — the North Koreans, I mean — are  blathering about their “war deterrent” again  (that’s code talk for the nuclear arsenal they had supposedly promised to give up).  Try to reassure yourself  that nothing the  North Koreans say should be taken  at face value … except their promises to disarm, of course, because you’d have to hate peace not to believe those.  Hey, you don’t hate peace, do you?

7 Responses

  2. “Let us consult the Book of Meaningless Prohibitions…”

    LOL! I love to read your analysis because your wit is second only to your grasp of the issues.

    What do you think of the opinion that these activities are aimed more at placating KJI’s generals rather than intimidating regional powers to extort more concessions from affected states?

    I read where KJI had appointed 2,400 generals since 1994. Either he’s killing them off, they are dying off, or there are a very uncozy amount of GOs in the KPA that require care and feeding.

  5. In response to KCJ’s question, I’m very skeptical of these theories that Kim Jong Il has to placate hard-liners in his regime to either accept aid, disarm, or allow in normal foreign investment. I’ve never seen the slightest evidentiary basis for any such theory, and it’s hard for me to imagine any such evidence that I wouldn’t discount as convenient disinformation. The North Koreans obviously want us to think there’s something in it for us to provide them regime-sustaining aid. It’s convenient for them that some of us believe that this aid would validate some purported reformist faction. U.S. and South Korean advocates of such an approach also find those theories to be convenient validation, but they can’t cite any evidence to support them. I can cite some evidence to the contrary, however:

    It is the imperialist’s old trick to carry out ideological and cultural infiltration prior to their launching of an aggression openly. Their bourgeois ideology and culture are reactionary toxins to paralyze people’s ideological consciousness. Through such infiltration, they try to paralyze the independent consciousness of other nations and make them spineless. At the same time, they work to create illusions about capitalism and promote lifestyles among them based on the law of the jungle, in an attempt to induce the collapse of socialist and progressive nations. The ideological and cultural infiltration is their silent, crafty and villainous method of aggression, intervention and domination. . . .

    Through “economic exchange” and personnel interchange programs too, the imperialists are pushing their infiltration. . . . Exchange and cooperation activities in the economic and cultural fields have been on the rise since the beginning of the new century. The imperialists are making use of these activities as an important lever to push the infiltration of bourgeois ideology and culture. . . .

    The imperialists’ ideological and cultural infiltration, if tolerated, will lead to the collapse and degeneration of society, to disorder and chaos, and even to the loss of the gains of the revolution. The collapse of socialism in the 20th Century–and the revival of capitalism in its place–in some countries gave us the serious lesson that social deterioration begins with ideological degeneration and confusion on the ideological front throws every other front of society into chaos and, consequently, all the gains of the revolution go down the drain eventually.

    [….]

    The capitalist’s ideological and cultural infiltration will never cease, and the struggle against it will continue, as long as the imperialists continue to exist in the world. . . .

    The great leader, Kim Jong Il, pointed out the following: “Today, the imperialists and reactionaries are tenaciously scheming to blow the wind of bourgeois liberalism into us” . . . .

    Under these circumstances, if we turn away from reality and we regard it as someone else’s problem, what will happen?

    People will ideologically degenerate and weaken; cracks will develop in our socialist ideological position; and, in the end, our socialism will helplessly collapse. A case in point is the bitter lesson drawn from the miserable situations of the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries. [Nicholas Eberstadt, The Persistence of North Korea]

    The NK regime maintains multiple intelligence agencies and armed security bureaus that it plays off against one another, so the existence of some degree of factionalism is plausible. It’s particularly plausible that those groups, which own various business enterprises, compete like mob families for protection and skim money. It’s probably true that officials in the provinces take the interests of the common people more to heart than do officials in the central government in Pyongyang. It’s much less plausible that any individual or faction in the security apparatus would dare to oppose or diverge from what’s viewed as the “hard line” in the slightest. We’ve seen no official statements from anyone in the government or any other evidence to suggest otherwise. It’s completely speculative.

    Furthermore, the passage of so much time since Kim Jong Il consolidated his own power in the mid-1990’s suggests that, in the unlikely event there is a reform faction, it’s not His Porcine Majesty. The catastrophic toll of the famine, and the regime’s unyielding statist doctrine in the face of it, doesn’t suggest that the hardship of the people slowed KJI’s rise, hard line notwithstanding. Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard — hardly neocon hard-liners by any reasonable definition — tell us that the purported “reforms” from 2002 to 2004 or so were merely a reflection of popular survival strategies that moved from the bottom up. By 2004, the government had started cracking down on private trade and has only cracked down harder since then.

    So if there’s a reform movement in North Korea, it probably goes no higher than the traders in the markets. There’s no evidence that such a movement has any but a clandestine presence within the regime itself. Of course, I ardently hope that there is such a presence, but am unwilling to trade objective analysis for wishful thinking.

  6. I should think that this excellent commentary is better suited for your main page, Joshua, as it deserves a wide audience (not that I think your readers neglect the reader’s comments section altogether!). In fact, I hope you will do a post on North Korean “maskirovka,” as strategic deception is such an essential component of NK’s foreign policy. “The generals made me do it” is a time-old communist tactic, one favored by Chairman Mao as well. Funny how outsiders fail to get it, as willingly as they understand playing “good cop-bad cop.”

    Another widespread myth that outsiders (SK included) take for granted is some kind of “collective leadership” to emerge after the Dear Leader lies with the vilest worms to dwell. A junta is what you have after a coup d’etat, but where is the evidence that the military will seize power after Kim is gone? The National Defense Commission is an organization in name only. The multi-medal-wearing generals all answer to Kim and the party. As militarized a society as NK is, “civilians” (including the General who never served a day in the military) still rule supreme.

  7. Joshua, thanks for the comprehensive and thought-provoking answer. I feel like I am a student here – and that’s a good thing from my foxhole.

    After the Japanese were forced to surrender in 1945, as I understand it, part of the post-hostilities narrative was that the Generals and Admirals had made emperor worship obligatory, coerced, and had militarized the cultural iconography. Hirohito was ‘saved’ when MacArthur rehabbed his image with the radio broadcast to the Japanese people that featured Hirohito’s repudiation of his status as a divine ruler. So in the end, the narrative was that the Generals and Admirals were at fault, and the emperor was taken advantage of.

    How much of that is fact and how much is fiction is beyond me. The comparison between Japan and nKorea breaks down very quickly for a number of reasons, but I brought the point up to enquire about these 2,400 General officers – if that number is even close to be accurate.

    While there is no scenario – nada, none – where KJI is rehabbed as the non-divine ruler of nKorea, the question of the power and influence of the Generals remains in play. I say that because the military is probably despised by the hungry masses who see them get all the benefits first, especially when it coms to the basic staples of life. The military leadership are the most vulnerable to a popular uprising (I know, that is a fantasy at this point in history) should the dynamics ever ripen for a revolt. Thus, the military is the largest stakeholder in preserving internal order, and also in maintaining the facade of power in the region as a saber-rattling, bellicose and ever present threat.

    The quotes you provided from Eberstadt validate the paranoia with which all cultural incursions into the nKorean gulag state are viewed. The insistence on ideological purity (I read religious application) demonstrates the neccessity of the cult to maintain the socialist revolution’s goals – seeing externally applied, coercive mechanisims may already be threatened by said cultural incursions. I believe the newest version of Juche has “Army First” annexed to it somewhere – meaning the narrative now must include the military as the top priority in the practice of Juche. I’m not sure what that means (does the military needs more moral support or does Juche need more bayonet thrusts to keep the facade going?) but I’m convinced it means something.