So, it might have been “the game of their lives” after all.

Several of you have e-mailed me (thank you) about the announcement that FIFA will open an investigation into reports that North Korea has ordered “harsh ideological criticism” sessions and hard labor for the players and coaches of its unsuccessful World Cup team.

“We sent a letter to the football federation to tell us about their election of a new president and to find out if the allegations made by the media that the coach and some players were condemned and punished are true,” FIFA President Sepp Blatter told reporters on Wednesday. “We are doing this as a first step and we will see how they answer.”

Just pray they don’t get sent to one of those Peace Forests.

Most of the reports source cite a Radio Free Asia report, which in turn cites “unidentified sources in North Korea and a Chinese businessman described as knowledgeable about North Korea affairs.” This AFP story hints at an another, unlikely source of damning information:

It followed new, unspecified, evidence brought to its attention by Chung Mong-Joon, the powerful South Korean former chairman of Hyundai, who is also the president of the South Korean Football Association.

The tradition of the Chung family and the Hyundai Group has been one of strong support for more-or-less unrestricted aid to, and accommodation of, North Korea.

In any event, I still couldn’t say (and don’t care) who won the World Cup, though I think we all now know who the big loser was. Let this be a lesson to all of the “expert” analysts out there who like to credit Kim Jong Il as a diplomatic genius, mostly as a way of explaining away how badly the State Department played a much better hand — admittedly, one that’s gotten steadily worse in the last 20 years.

If Kim Jong Il is really the Machiavellian supremo some would have us think he is, then I suppose we can agree that a few soccer matches don’t really mean a thing to him, and that game performance was merely incidental to the propaganda performance. If so, Kim Jong Il played his hand disastrously for foreign and domestic audiences alike. Only a self-deluded cretin would have been so certain of his team’s odds against the likes of Spain and Brazil to have dispensed with the simple precaution of a taped delay. Instead, the population of Pyongyang witnessed a Jesse Owens moment on live television.

Kim Jong Il’s greater unforced error was the diplomacy of imagery for a global audience. There was nowhere to go but up; North Korea has set the bar pretty low for its international image. Had the regime behaved according to minimal standards of sportsmanship, and had its players and coaches been directed to show just a bit of openness and humor with the press, this World Cup could have been a spectacular P.R. success, something defeat on the field would not have changed (you remember the Jamaican bobsled team, don’t you?). It was a perfect missed opportunity to prove people like me wrong — one that, if played more skillfully, would have paid off in the form of sponsorships, investments, and public opinion among nations where half of the voting public is, after all, of below average intelligence. Shouldn’t I question the media narrative of a ruthless totalitarian dictatorship? Isn’t the very normality and decency of these misunderstood people reason enough to doubt that their government really sank a South Korean warship without any provocation whatsoever? Might there could be some hope for reform, openness, and a negotiated disarmament after all? Well, no, actually, you say, but you’re not utterly ignorant of North Korea’s history and Kim Jong Il’s character — which places you in a statistically insignificant minority of World Cup viewers and of humanity in general.

My working theory is that, contrary to the best efforts of its useful idiot squad, North Korea doesn’t really want to be “demystified.” That’s not the brand image it sells to desperate diplomats, gullible investors, or even to those same inadequate social misfits from Barcelona to Oakland to Seoul, for whom its projections of brutal power have such a powerful psychological appeal.

But then, all of this is beside the point of the real question, which is just what happened to these players. We really don’t know, and based on , I strongly doubt we ever will during this regime’s duration:

The head of the Asian Football Confederation, Mohammad bin Hammam, said Wednesday that he had spoken with four players last month, but that they had not reported mistreatment.

I’m glad FIFA opened an investigation — I called for one, after all — but this doesn’t mean I’m optimistic that it will enlighten us much. For example, asking North Korean players whether they’ve been mistreated, presumably while the minders are taking careful notes, foreshadows what we can expect from this investigation. You simply can’t get the truth from North Korea if you don’t understand how the regime works. These guys clearly don’t understand how this regime works.

More broadly, I can’t name a single occasion when an international institution did demand and get transparent cooperation from North Korea in getting to the truth of any matter (which reminds me that China is presumably a member of FIFA, too). Failing that, what international institution has ever held North Korea accountable for not giving its transparent cooperation, such as by denying it the benefits of membership in that institution? As a reader put it, FIFA will probably pull a Maggie Chan, but I suppose I should keep an open mind until my worst fears are eventually confirmed.