It's so easy to become frustrated with North Korean tactics. Still, I noticed three aspects of this latest episode, when DPRK objected to the Bush administration's failure to remove it from the list of terrorist states and threatened to restore its plutonium-producing capabilities. Firstly, Pyongyang can play the tedious legalism card as well as American neocons.

In no agreement among the six parties or between the DPRK and the United States does an article stipulate the issue of verifying our nuclear declaration as a conditionality for the removal from the list.

Secondly, American neoconservatives think East Asia is a nuisance that can just go away and leave America to more enjoyable diplomatic pursuits, like abolishing the State Department.

"Just when we thought the six-party talks where dead ... they keep coming back to life," Klingner said of the talks between the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.

Lastly, Pyongyang is really intent not to have a kimchi revolution.

Disabling the complex does not meet Washington’s ultimate goal of dismantling it. The United States wants full access by inspectors to all locations it suspects of being nuclear sites to ensure that there are no hidden nuclear assets. The North bristled at this demand. "The U.S. is gravely mistaken if it thinks it can make a house search in our country as it pleases, just as it did in Iraq," the North Korean spokesman said. He said North Korea was still technically at war with the United States because the 1950-53 Korean War had ended only in a cease-fire. He added that asking the North to give up its nuclear programs while it was not allowed similar inspections in South Korea, to make sure that there are no American nuclear weapons there, amounted to "a gangster’s demand."

How much of this is perspectival, a matter of looking for a conclusion when the process is the solution, is an American problem. Pyongyang can play this game indefinitely.

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