Left Flank

Garrett DeOrio takes a decidedly un-Boltonian slant on the US decision to de-list DPRK (~00:31:00) from the US State Department terrorism list and the resulting consequences for the Japan-ROK alliance.

After the US removed North Korea from the List of State Sponsors of Terrorism, the predictable melodrama followed, with some saying that Japan had been stabbed in the back by its ally. Garrett describes why the US did Japan a huge favor, and Ken gives his opinion that not only will it have no long-term effect on the alliance, but that the event gave a select group of politicians and commentators their much-savored chance to let off some righteous indignation - even as the public already seems to have forgotten why they were supposed to care in the first place.

The audio version is even better.

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The brinksmanship Pyongyang practices with nukes is far more dangerous than the mini-roar of Seoul's islet stunts.

The South Korean government strongly denounced Japan Friday for describing the islets of Dokdo in the East Sea as its own territory in this year's defense White Paper again, the fourth consecutive time in a row.

The Ministry of National Defense said it would cut high-level ties with Japan's military authorities. It called in a military attache to the Japanese Embassy in Seoul Friday to protest the description.

``We urged Japan to take corrective measures on Dokdo, which is South Korea's territory from the perspectives of geography, history and international laws,'' Song Bong-heon, head of the ministry's international cooperation bureau, said. ``We also assured the Japanese military attache that Japan's claim to Dokdo is a move to justify its colonial act in the past and will hamper the future-oriented development of South Korea-U.S. relations.''

Song said working-level exchanges between the South Korean and Japanese militaries, such as goodwill visits by military personnel and navy ships, would remain intact but reconsider high-level exchanges ``seriously.''

«Seriously»? A South Korean bureaucrat can seriously use that word without falling down in laughter? Washington might be forcing the North Koreans to pay double for de-listing them from the terrorism list, but Seoul has constructed an entire foreign policy out of extortion. And, what is this mention of «international law» now?

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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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