Selig Harrison: Obama Shouldn’t Say Mean Things to North Korea

Sometimes, a news organization’s selection of guests tells you almost everything you need to know about its biases.  In one corner, we have Balbina Hwang, formerly of the Heritage Foundation before she sold out and went to work for Christopher “Kim Jong” Hill.  In the other, Selig Harrison presents that valuable “from beneath contempt” perspective.  This interview is a little old — from just after the toothless U.N. presidential statement that served as North Korea’s perfectly suitable excuse to walk away from six-party talks.  Naturally, PBS mistakes this brief pause in futility for a newsworthy event:

GWEN IFILL: Was this a surprising step that they took today, Mr. Harrison?

SELIG HARRISON, Center for International Policy: Not at all. You know that on March 26th they said very explicitly that if even one word of criticism of their missile launch came out of the United Nations, they would discontinue the six-party negotiating process on nuclear weapons, which it started in 2005.

Now, that doesn’t rule out bilateral negotiations starting with the United States. So I think this is a very significant development, a regrettable development.

I think, really, in retrospect, we’re going to look back on it as one of the first big foreign policy mistakes of the Obama administration, because we knew this was coming. The North Koreans made it very clear. And they…

GWEN IFILL: Were they looking for an excuse to walk away?

SELIG HARRISON: No, I don’t think so. Well, you can say that the North Koreans feel very beleaguered now. After all, Kim Jong-il, the leader, did have a stroke in August. He’s had diabetes in the past, so his life expectancy is a big question mark.

They are nervous about the — they’re fearful that the outside world will take advantage of the situation in North Korea to try to bring down the regime. After all, they went through the whole Bush period with regime change as the avowed aim for the first half of the Bush administration.

And so I think that they’re in a very beleaguered state of mind. They’re hunkering down, as it were. The hardliners have gained in strength since Kim Jong-il’s illness in the relative power balance between hardliners and the pragmatists.

And later, this:

North Korea is a poor, struggling, pathetic country, a country to be pitied much more than to be feared, with tremendous economic problems. They’ve got to normalize relations with us. They’ve got to get things from the outside world. But they’re afraid we’re going to do them in first with a nuclear pre-emptive strike.

I’m still finding neither track nor spoor of those elusive North Korean pragmatists, but hey, Selig is always welcome in Pyongyang, which means he obviously knows more than the rest of us.  The obvious exceptions would be the things he wouldn’t mention if you waterboarded him.  Selig Harrison is to North Korea what Charles Lindberg, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein were in another age.

Hat tip to a reader.