Jimmy Goes on Vacation (Again)

I would have enjoyed writing about how Jimmy Carter is highly unlikely to help anyone by going to North Korea, how he will be used by the Kim Jong-il regime for its own propaganda purposes, about how, since he has little to no chance of extracting a message of remorse from the North for the killing of innocent civilians on Yeonpyeong Island, he is only likely to burnish his own reputation as a man of peace but without any tangible results”¦ but then the man who sits behind me got there first.

But that does at least free up some time to talk about Park Jie Won, who has conveniently dispensed with any semblance of anger at North Korea’s killing of 50 of his own people in the last year to say that anti-Kim Jong Il leafleting should stop because it will “only cause harm to the economy of northern Gyeonggi Province and the Gangwon area.

And, finally, here is something else I am having trouble computing;

LP: We have to remember that the Korean War, which began in 1950, was never concluded with a proper peace agreement. Since then, both halves of Korea live in constant fear of resuming hostilities. National military service in the DPRK is mandatory and very long (up to 10 years in the Army and Air Force and even longer in the Navy). More than 1.1 million young men and women serve in the KPA without salary or wages and rely on the daily rations of free food, uniform and regiment accommodation. Many more millions are ready to be conscripted and work at government-assigned projects according to national needs. In North Korea, the Army and the People are inseparable, and by feeding the Army, the North Korean regime simply maintains the traditional food distribution system. The KPA receives, stores, protects and consumes a certain proportion of international humanitarian aid. There is no other government agency in North Korea that could do this better or more efficiently than the Army.

To which the only remaining sentence is surely, “So if the Army takes the aid and feeds soldiers, that’s alright with me.

Which is surely going to quite hard to justify the next time those soldiers are used to shell civilians on a South Korean island or some such. Or perhaps that will turn out to be acceptable too, because “the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island was clearly provoked by the South Korean side”¦”

Oh yeah, and I say to you that Kim Jong Eun was never supposed to play a part in the Supreme People’s Assembly, for the following reasons.