The Syria-North Korea Axis

After watching North Korea get away with shipping anti-aircraft missiles to terrorists and its past chemical and nuclear proliferation to Syria, it’s gratifying to see people catch onto North Korea’s role in the tragedy in Syria.  There are several more op-eds and stories on this today, all of them well worth reading:

• Bruce Bechtol, writing in the Korea Times: “North Korea has designed and built at least two chemical weapons facilities in Syria.  Indeed, despite the lack of statements coming from Washington ? either from the White House or the Pentagon ? regarding North Korea’s role, Pyongyang appears to be Syria’s main provider of chemical weapons.”
• Claudia Rosett finds a North Korean nexus to the atrocities in Syria, and wonders why the White House can be outraged about Syria while it ignores larger-scale abuses in North Korea. (Thanks for the link, Claudia.)
• The Obama Administration is citing the worry that North Korea will use chemical weapons to gain support for a strike on Syria … from China. Good luck with that. It has to be about the most naive diplomatic strategy I’ve heard all year.
• Max Fisher, citing Adrian Hong, worries that Syria will borrow North Korea’s Lucy-with-the-football strategy, make an endless series of promises to disarm, and renege on all of them.
• Isaac Stone Fish examines the cultural, artistic, military, and ideological ties between the two countries.

These weren’t necessarily Korea-related, but did provide useful information:

• Congressional support for a military strike on Syria is collapsing. It’s unfortunate that we seem divided and irresolute, but it’s better that the President steers toward a new strategy, hopefully after he solicits Congress’s views and gets its support. A strike would make us feel like we’ve done something, but the only way it could slow Assad’s use of chemical weapons at this point would be to hit enough artillery to also, incidentally, help Al Qaeda. Better to attack the proliferation network that supplies the weapons to begin with. That network’s source is in Pyongyang, and the best ways to attack it don’t involve the use for military force.
• It’s a pretty rare week when Tom Friedman writes two columns, and I agree with a majority of what he writes in both of them.

[Update: I changed the wording in the first sentence, which previously read “proliferation” to terrorists, to “shipping anti-aircraft missiles to terrorists,” because “proliferation” implies the transfer of WMD, which I don’t know to be the case (not that I’d doubt it, either).]