Mike Chinoy: Kim Jong Il Sank a South Korean Warship, Ergo We Should Negotiate With Him Now
Mike Chinoy was an absolutely, positively objective CNN reporter until he wrote a book accusing the Bush Administration of sexing up evidence of North Korean uranium enrichment to wriggle out of the first Agreed Framework. Poor Chinoy. Before his book even went to print, samples submitted by North Korea to the State Department began to test positive for highly enriched uranium, and in due course, Meltdown wasn’t just Chinoy’s title, it became .
But because people like Chinoy are even harder to deter than Kim Jong Il, he now argues that the right response to the premeditated sinking of a South Korean warship is to sit down with them, presumably to ask them what it will cost to make them keep quiet for six more months. Because it worked so well before, right? Of course, this assumes that the North Koreans even want to sit down with us, except for their demand for access to the wreck of the Cheonan to do their own “independent” investigation. Chinoy, with his characteristic talent for finding hope in unlikely places, takes this demand seriously.
It is at moments like this that we should all pour out libations to Zeus for a president who, thus far, has not taken the counsel of men like Mike Chinoy. It’s why I feel a need to defend President Obama’s North Korea policy, for all of its flaws, from conservative critics who assume that Obama appeases Kim Jong Il (and that George W. Bush did not). They ought to be more careful in their criticisms. If this President sees no point in pursuing a tough policy anyway, he might just opt for a weak one.
Are CNN reporters more or less absolutely, positively objective than non-CNN reporters?
The NorKs sank Cheonan for Chinese support.
It wasn’t so much an attack on the South as a powerplay to finesse their own puppet master.
Their king is dying, and the succession needs approval of the Master State. Their agriculture is failing, and they need fertilizer — but they can’t get it from the West since it is also an explosive precursor. They tried a currency reform to close their capitalist markets, and that failed abysmally. Their people are starving, really starving in May. Their mines are decrepit, and their future is glum without active infusions of Chinese capital and support. Nothing works and it’s all getting worse.
So they shot out the Cheonan, expecting that the cause, while suspicious, could never be proved, that the South under its rightist leader would explode in righteous indignation, and China would come to their aid by defending them against the forces of intolerance. It’s worked before. And it would all have happened in May.
China would show its support for poor misunderstood DPRK: They would export food and fertilizer: the Chinese would re-open their mines and the Rajin and Pyongyang projects would actually come to fruition. The 2012 project for a Brave New World would actually succeed.
And it might’ve, if the SoKos hadn’t been so darned clever.
No one really expected that so much of a torpedo could be located, that it could be identified as a NorK weapon, that the SoKo government would act so cautiously and responsibly during the investigation, and that such a devastating factual report would issue.
The DPRK Party miscalculated with the markets and the Great Confiscation; they’ve miscalculated with Cheonan — and it appears they are miscalculating with Baby Kim, Kim Jong Eun. They’re on a roll to self-immolation.
And as for us — it looks as if State and Ms Clinton and all are trying for a George HW Bush coalition — but a peaceful one this time — just as was put together for First Desert Storm.
The only small problem — June 25 is, I think, the 60th anniversary of the attack from the North that started the Korean War. Those people like anniversaries.