Kim Jong il's funeral Magnified foreign commentary, over the top rumours

As North Korea conducts a two day elaborate ceremony before entombing Kim Jong il, the uninvited foreign press continues to magnify over the top coverage and perpetuate rumours that may or may not have any ties to reality.

Since the announcement of the 'Dear Leaders' death, the western media and South Korea's have mutilated his corpse and his country as though they had lopped, scrapped, and tied the operation by a blunt knife.

The media coverage has been incomplete: it has dropped many stitches in a loose fitting garment that barely clothes the body of North Korea's history.

Consider the zeroing in on the misery and starvation of North Koreans. Barely mentioned is the ill luck global warming has visited on the DPRK: sudden flooding wiping out the rice harvest, or the unwelcome affliction of unexpected frost. Furthermore, there is the willful sanctions by the US, the European Union, Australia, and South Korea cutting off food aid and fertilisers, especially since 2008 when Obama and the revanchist Lee Myung bak came into office.

Now these countries, lecture North Korea verbosely and windily on the virtues of democracy and reform that from their bully pulpit they enact policies which not only contradict the high moral tone they have adopted but expose to the world the heartlessness and truly lack of concern for the very people of North Korea they are wanting to rescue from starvation and general misery.

This sleight of hand is cloaked in the false language of promoting human welfare and philanthropy. At the bottom of all this claptrap is a paramount political aim of 'rolling back' North Korea to the point of collapse, internal revolt; in plainer terms: regime change.

As GuamDiary has commented, intelligence agencies in the US and South Korea have a sorry record when it comes to North Korea. Like a Diogenes with a candle burning down to its end, they search in the dark for any hint of what's really going on in the DPRK.

It is a guessing game, and this is no more evident than in resurrecting of the old game of poring over photographs as to who is standing a Kim Jong eun's side or who is absent. We are 'rolled back' to the days of primitive of Kremlinology. And still, the kernel of truth is elusive and even if it is there, you can bloody well count on the US and South Korea to either miss or misinterpret it.

An easier way out of their predicament is to open talks with North Korea. One thing you can say about Kim Jong il is that he never tired in making overtures for talks without preconditions with the US. And each time he made them, the US rebuffed him and heaped on 'preconditions', which when examined were really terms of surrender of national sovereignty, something Kim Jong il would never accept for his country. Not only are the US and ROK insistence on their talking points but they are so framed that the North could not in all good conscience accept them.

As GuamDiary has already pointed out, the US and ROK have a garbled understanding of North Korean history going back 80 years to the day Kim Il Sung began his guerrilla war against the Japanese colonisers. These two countries and allies who have rigorously coordinated their policies towards the DPRK have deliberately pushed the envelop to the extremes: they have revived the Korean War in Cold War techniques in the hope that North Korea will collapse on its own fragility and weight. Wrong!

The pendulum does swing back, and in the end, the US and the ROK, especially the ROK after the 2012 presidential elections, will have to revive in some form or the other the 'Sunshine Policy' which the revanchist Lee Myung bak scuppered within the first few hours he occupied the Blue House. It is not for nothing that the 'unofficial delegation from the South' to pay respect to Kim Jong il had Kim Dae Jung's widow as well as the widow Hyun of the man who founded Hyundai and funded projects in North Korea.

The US still has the chance to release us$900m in food aid and begin thinking of calling a conference on a peace treaty ending the Korean War, a conference which will result in mutual diplomatic recognition as well as modalities to denuclearise the divided Korean peninsula. Is the Obama administration savvy to do this or will it remain prisoner to the Korean War already in its seventh decade?

Occupy Wall Street: the New York Times rewrites history

As is it wont at year's end, 'The New York Times' its 'Sunday Review' featured a photo essay on the major events of 2011. In featuring 'Occupy Wall Street', the reader's eye got a jolt at the way not only of the way 'the Grey Old Lady' fudged the historical record but chose to rewrite history.

Here's how the 'NYT' saw the end of OWS' occupation of Liberty Plaza [Zuccotti Park]: when the cold weather came, the tents folded, and like caravans of old, moved on. Now, at that a kick in the head?

The newspaper of note in a few words repudiated its own stories and photographs of what was happening on the ground; it simply massaged the record by spinning out a Disney cartoon.

The editors simply came down on the side of the 'one percent', which is not surprising since the 'NYT', a multimillion corporation, listed on the New York Stock Exchange backed up the plutocracy of Wall Street that saw in OWS a direct challenge to its crimes of precipitating the global economic recession of 2008, the widening of economic inequality, and the spread of the sybartic and decadent life style of the coupon clippers, the buying of elections, and ultimately the subversion of American democracy by the rise of a police state at the beckon and call of the corporatisation of the economy and the decadent rule of finance capital.

As every school child know, OWS was uprooted violently by an early morning assault by New York Police at the orders of the billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg who acted on behalf of his class. The tents were uprooted and trashed by the Sanitation department; heads broken by police batons or the raw fists of a police with little respect for the law it is supposed to obey and respect. There were arrests, occupiers roused from sleep in tents, so reminiscent of Nazi storm troopers, the trashing of a 5000 volume lending library, destruction of a medical unit, so on. In sum, the mayor and his thugs acted as though they were in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, and saw in the peaceful OWS as 'terrorists' cut from the same wood as the Taliban or the Vietcong.

And what happened in New York in November 2011 has happened again and again at Occupy protests through out the land smashed by the steel fist of a militarised police force.

Realty has a way of unmasking the 'NYT's' big! lie [shades of Josef Goebbel]. Did Corporate 'NYT' think that it could through sand in the historical eye? Apparently, yes!

GuamDiary cannot leave it at that. It is time to protest and demand that the 'NYT' admit its fudging of history and offer an apology for its primative, crude sleight of hand of 'correcting history' [an old totalitarian trick!]

US North Korea Policy: reckless and ill discipled!

The death of Kim Jong il has shown to the world and to North Korea the superficial nature of America's DPRK policy, a policy founded in the confidence of shop worn cliches and the certainty of platitudes that have the skirt the real nature of dealing with North Korea.

The danger in the US attitude, as it often happens, is its swing to the extreme, and the Obama administration's embrace and reenforcement of the George Bush tack towards Kim Jong il. As a result, Obama & co. have taken no chance by closing hewing to the holy writ of keeping the door slammed shut to dealing with the DPRK.

Before considering two flat footed and tone deaf responses to the demise of Kim Jong il, let's set out once more the policy that the Obama administration, in coordination with the revanchist South Korean Lee Myung bak regime, as it pertains to North Korea. One the message to the people of North Korea as a by your way excuse of condolence and the pounding of the war drums when it comes to the North's 'songun' or military first policy with an odd touch of 'Chicken Little...the sky is falling'.

As Guamdiary long commented on the Council on Foreign Relations' special report on Korea, unanimously adopted by the leading US North Korean clerisy from the government, military, universities, think tanks, and the like. Its conclusions have staked out the narrow limits of US North Korea policy. Briefly, they called for 'rolled back of the DPRK', a Cold War term which failed during the Korean War. Furthermore, if anyone was then 'rolled back', it was the US UN led troops by the North Korean army and the Chinese Volunteers. So, the policy of 'roll back' is an indication of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy among the US elite influencing North Korean policy.

Saying this, let's look at the diplomatic gaffe in the US message of condolence, addressed not to the North Korean government but to the North Korean people. How flat footed can that approach be. Obviously, some wag might have thought that it would bolster internal discontent. Wrong. If anything, the Obama administration has never followed the red thread that has run through North Korean history for the last 80 years: the DPRK is an extremely proud and highly nationalistic people and nation. A slight to its leadership is an insult to the North Korean people, no matter how they feel towards their leaders.

Once again, GuamDiary sees proof of the manner of low esteem it holds North Korea, as though it were not an equal in the comity of nations, but as though it were a child whose complaints and desires you listen to with half an ear. Not only is the US tone deaf, it is immured in its own prison of impossible dreams.

How insulting is the Obama administration's gesture in 'dissing' North Korea's leaders, people, and the new head of state Kim Jong eun? The American president's 'bevue' is of the same order as George W Bush calling Kim Jong il a 'pygmy', a remark hardly worthy of a leader of the so called Free World. And then the 'fearless' Bush had to scramble to eat his words when the very same Kim Jong il's country tested a nuclear device! Which all goes to show how anachronistic is US thinking when it comes to North Korea: like a big power trying to make a satellite of an unwilling, proud people, confident in its culture and destiny, in spite of the US' plans of regime change and forcing North Korea to collapse!

We segue now to the endless rhythmic rapping and riffing on the DPRK's reliance on 'songun' or military first policy, which, from the US perspective, endangers of the stability, serenity, and peace of northeast Asia. Nowhere in this scenario of the Goliath that the US, seconded by South Korea, sees in North Korea, menacing its neighbours and pushing the region towards war, do we get the slightest hint that the US is and has been at war with the DPRK since 1950.

Historical memory has faded on the extent of America's bombing of North Korea which flattened the North to the Stone Age. [In fact, visitors to Pyongyang are constantly shown a single building that survived the aerial assault on the North Korean capital, the fire power of which was greater than the destruction of Rotterdam and Dresden!]

So, it is not unreasonable that the DPRK should have ready a large standing army against a hostile US and revanchist South Korea, the more especially in the light of US policy of provoking Pyongyang to trip the wire of war. We saw that in the joint exercises of the US and South Korea along the Northern Limit Line in November 2010 when South Korean shells fell in North Korea's territorial waters and surprise, surprise, the North riposted.

The reactionary Lee Myung bak regime wanted to push the envelope but the US panicked lest it have a third war in Asia on its hands, and stayed the South from further military adventurism.

'Songun' offers internal stability to a regime that has suffered badly economically and that the US and the ROK have sworn to starve to death to hasten its downfall.

So much for sophisticated US North Korean policy: it is bathed in willful ignorance and malice and is stick in the mire of its own narrow ideology and prejudices which keeps the past out of hearing and 'bonne intelligence' out of the ken of its own rationality

Obama the grinch who at Christmas time is denying North Koreans food aid

There is little to say about president Obama's decision to rethink the long promised us$900m in food aid to starving North Koreans on the heels of the death of Kim Jong il.
The role of a Grinch does not suit the US president, but it seems that he gladly welcomes it at this Christmastide.
For a leader of the 'free' world, who at the drop of the hat, extols the virtues and benefits of democracy, tying food aid to political gains is hardly worthy of the man.
He exhibits more the 'bah, humbug' posturing of Ebernezer Scrooge in Dicken's 'Christmas Carol'.
GuamDiary does not expect a last minute reversal of Grinch Obama's decision to withhold much needed food aid. It won't worry one whit his conscience as he luxuriates in his Christmas holidays on the beaches of Hawaii.
He is in league with the purveyors of want and ignorance at this time of giving. And you can bet it won't disturb his good Christian conscience!

If we remember: the Grinch's heart grows five times touched as it is by Christmas tide; Grinch Obama's, on the contrary, has shriveled five times to the size of hard lump of coal.

Can we really trust US & South Korean intelligence on North Korea?

Both the US and South Korea spend millions on intelligence, especially following North Korea.
In the wake of much breast beating about how the two countries intelligence failure on having the finger on the pulse of what's going on in the DPRK, we truly have to wonder about and put under a laser beam the information put out by the two governments, acolytes in the press, the universities and think tanks, business circles & the like. On a cost benefit analysis, neither country is get a big bang for its dollar or won spent.
Yeh, we know the intelligence community has a job to do: we question its quality and output for the results are often sloppy, of inferior analyses, and wandering into the celestial stars.
The death of Kim Jong il proved that the whole ball of intelligence wax had more to do with lunar green cheese than realty. The media and the White House and Blue House keep banging the drums of fear and instability in northeast Asia, if not implying that an outbreak of war is on the horizon owing to a power struggle within North Korea's senior military leaders.
What GuamDiary sees is that the US and ROK intelligence network is being payed to mouth the hoary propaganda of the governments that pay them. You get what you pay for, the saying goes, and forced timelines and hothouse nuturing of bankrupt ideologies are what the US and South Korean people are being asked to swallow.
If instability is on the horizon, look to Washington and Seoul for military adventurism and kick 'em in the stomach when it comes to North Korea. The Obama administration and the revanchist Lee Myung bak government in Seoul have bet on the collapse of the DPRK with the death of Kim Jong il. And, surprise, surprise, that ain't going to happen. GuamDiary scratches its head and wonders aloud 'haven't the US and ROK spooks have the slightest klew as to the motor which has driven and continues to drive North Korean history and behavior, yea, these past 80 years?'
The only logic answer is that they are obvious to anything but their own fears, projections, and scenarios which Freud would 'wish fulfillment'.
So, in the end, can we truly trust US and South Korean intelligence on North Korea? We do not deny that the end product of their work has a pinch of salt of versimilitude, but on the whole, we have to read more widely and weigh their conjectives with a cold, critical eye. So we have more reason to distruct US and ROK intelligence, in the final analysis.

Does the DPRK deserve US contempt?

GuamDiary, observing the US North Korean clerisy's response to the death of Kim Jong il, holds its nose at the noxious odour of scorn that the demise of the North Korean leader has set off.

More to the point, the US & co.'s attitude considers the DPRK not only a failed state, but an inferior nation worthy of its contempt.

It is then little wonder that American scholars, diplomats, intelligence, lawmakers, journalists & the like's haughtiness put them at a disadvantage. Seeing only the tree, they miss the dense growth of trees, plants, and underbrush that make North Korea the country that it is.

As GuamDiary observed, the US and its allies feel threatened by North Korea more out of self styled fear than on actuality. They quake at the thought of having been outmanoeuved in negotiations or hoodwinked by a 'Wizard of Oz', who has humiliated them time after time, which may not be the case.

The incessant tattoo, America's North Korean clerisy beat that 'the DPRK should not be rewarded for bad behaviour' has more to do with their own ideological shortsightedness, if not blindness. They whittle their opinions to a prevailing code of ideas which has not changed much in the last 65 years.

Such intellectual rigidity is its own worst enemy. To these clerics on whom so much money has been wasted in educating them for service to the US government, the return on the US dollar invested is quite meagre.

If you regard North Korea as a wayward child who only understand punishment, to correct its way, well, you've only yourself to blame. Furthermore, the DPRK is not an infant; its leaders do not suggest, by far, a lack of maturity, but rational and calculated thought.

In dealing, say, with the US, it weighs America's undue confidence and smugness, which North Koreans have learnt to exploit to their own advantage, sanctions and saber rattling notwithstanding. It is not for nothing that the US and the present revanchist government of Lee Myung bak in Seoul quiver and quake in formulating policy to North Korea. Their offensive self righteousness lulls them into positions so that they are blind to the danger of failure.

And fail they must for the plain and simple truth they do not view North Korea as a worthy equal in the comity of nations. As such, the DPRK uses the arms of the despised and the wretched of the earth in America's eye, to not only to elude, frustrate, thwart, and ultimately outsmart the US' high handed and the ghetto of diplomatic inaction, to its own advantage.

Consider North Korea's explosion of a nuclear device: in dealing with, for the lack of a better description, the inarticulate and blustery Bush administration, Kim Jong il had put forth a reasonable set of ideas to deal with the North's nuclear programme. But the Bush administration had other ideas: it sought to humiliate North Korea and blew Kim & co. away by dissing them. Well, the next thing you knew, North Korea had the bomb, and that sent Bush's emissaries scurrying back to paper over the damages. And like all the kings men, the couldn't put the Humpty Dumpty of the 'status quo ante' back together again.

And thus it was and thus it is under the Obama administration, which like Bush's before it, with a gaggle of experts and intelligence know next to nothing about North Korea. Is it a lack of trying? Maybe. More likely, the US is led by its nose by its own arrogance, pious belief in the sanctity that it is God's gift to the universe, and dubious moralism.

In other words, the fault lay not in the stars and even less with North Korea, but in the exhibition of contempt it has for the DPRK and its leadership.

US analyses on North Korea: the pits!

You have to wonder where the arrogant, cock of the walk, shameless claims of US intelligence on the DPRK is going. GuamDiary already commented on the banner headlines that America's wide network of technical gadgets and reliance on inhouse and out analysts, scholars, journalists, and debriefing almost anyone who has gone to North Korea, including friendly foreign diplomats, has compounded the feeling that North Korea is the US' greatest intelligence failure.

Don't take our word for it: listen to what Donald Gregg--senior CIA officer, national security advisor, former ambassador to Seoul, and past president and CEO of the New York based Korea Society--has been saying for the last 15 years or perhaps more. In any number of the KS' public gathering, he never shied away from saying the wide net of US intelligence has come up with next to nothing on what's going on in the DPRK.

And in spite of Gregg's step by step approach of building 'confidence measures' to the North, his work is more or less scraped by the Society, yet he labours on through a programme at Cornell's Maxwell School in keeping a toe in the almost closed door of US DPRK 'private' contacts.

Gregg, however, is the exception. A more cautious approach to intelligence failure got some relief on the PBS News Hour: Margaret Warner interviewed former CIA analyst Robert Carlin, now of Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute. No stranger to North Korea--30 visits, Warner mentioned, he, let's say, was more modest in answering her 'vanilla' questions on why the US knows next to nothing about the DPRK. 'I don't know' or 'I cannot say'.

Carlin thought technically speaking in the field of spookery, the US is quite on top, but it suffers from a poverty of good analyses, even when what's going on in the DPRK, at times, is as plain as the nose on your face. An example, Carlin along with Siegfried Hecker, eminent nuclear scientist, visited North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear complex in 2010. To the US visitors surprise, they found an up to date, state of art reactors in an advanced state.

Hecker's findings has to give one to pause since, surely, wot, a panoply of spy satellites, drones with cameras, & the like, the US should have detected fieverish activity at Yongbyon. Maybe they did bring home the bacon, maybe they didn't. Still, you cannot hide behind national security, to tar and feather the DPRK without proof.

Let's now consider the very below level of analyses, beginning with Victor Cha's opinion piece in the 'New York Times' [20 December 2011], 'China's newest province?' The Georgetown scholar and former Bush White House advisor on Asian Affairs postulates, and repeats the buzz that has been making the rounds in the black rooms of northeast and southeast intelligence, that by the next Lunar or Chinese New York, that is, within the fortnight of the auspicious year of the Dragon [23 January to 6 February 2012] that high ranking, senior DPRK cadre will dump Kim Jong eun, institue a trioka of leadership, and turn to China for support and guidance.

Cha's 'analysis' contradicts what's happening in North Korea: Kim Jong il laboured long and hard to assure his succession by his youngest son, Kim Jong eun; he knitted together a consensus of the military, the core cadre, and the party faithful to this end, long before his death. The matter of succession and from the ground up education of Kim Jong eun had been assured. Notwithstanding, Cha and his ilk's disbelief in anything North Korea says, report after report from Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore, etc. outline the modality of succession and the regency of the young Kim, about whom little is known.

As for China, strategically speaking, it always supported North Korea, and no better proof of this is the sending in of Chinese volunteer fighters to struggle alongside North Korea troops to 'rollback' the US UN led troops to the 38 parallel during the Korean War, which, technically never ended, found a 'pis aller' solution in an armistice agreement which is entering its 60 year.

Even China, who patiently and at times grows stays moments of short temper with its neigbour and ally, even China was kept in the darkness of Kim Jong il's death until it was annouced on DPRK television. So, to say, as Cha asserts, Cha has great influence over North Korea, is an exaggeration; China has influence for sure but not as wide and as deep as Cha and other Pyongyangologists like to think.

As to why China backs up North Korea, GuamDiary suggest a reading of Alan Whiting's 1960 Rand Corporation study, 'China crosses the Yalu'. Whiting's analysis is spot on, and in spite of China's improved relations with the US and South Korea, it solidly remains cogent and meaningful today. Russia, too, has revised its assessment of North Korea, and argues for the West's accomodation with Pyongyang, to little success.

You have to wonder, too, how the US and South Korea can shake in their boots at the death of Kim Jong il. Is their fear real? or feigned? It is more or less predicated on self fulfilling claims that North Korea is irrational, and what's more armed with advanced rocketry and primative nuclear devices will set the region on fire and reignite war in the divided Korean peninsula. Hence the endless flow of ink by the US North Korean clerisy's setting off bells and whistles of warming. Give us a break! The image intelligence analyses comes up with, based on the heavily subsidised industry of scholars, spooks, journalists, so on, is one of what the former US senator William Fulbright labelled, 'the US as a cripple giant'.

The fear may be real but unfounded. And any good Freudian would simply say it 'projection' of what the US and the ROK would like to do to North Korea. And there is truth in that: the riposte of North Korea in November 2010 to live fire, joint US South Korea military exercises along the Northern Limit Line within spitting distance of the DPRK's territorial water. Despite a stern warning from Pyongyang that it would answer any violation of its sovereignty, Washington and Seoul dismissed the claim without a by your leave. And what happened: the North replied in kind shelling the military outpost on Yeongpyong island. And quickly did the US stay South Korea's aggressive hand, lest a war broke out.

And therein lies a tale. So distrustful are the US and its ally South Korea, they are unwilling to take, say, Kim Jong il at his word. Like his father, Kim Il Sung, before him, he pushed for negotiations with the US without preconditions, only to be rebuffed. Moreover, North Korea with a hand of low cards, is better at playing poker on the 'tapis vert' of the bargaining table. So unsure is the US of its abilities to negotiate skilfully, they prefer to threaten to the point of opening hostilites with the North.

And this attitude is no more better reflected in the opinion and editorial pages of the right wing 'Wall Street Journal'. They brought out two heavy hitters: Melanie Kirkpatrick, former deputy editor of Murdock's WSJ and now senior fellow at the very conservative Hudson Institute, and John Bolton, whom Newt Gingrich would nominate as his secretary of state were he elected president. These two dance on the grave of Kim Jong il. Doomsday scenario play in their minds, as they descend into belittling a man they disliked if not hated. The language borders on the cartoonish, and does little else but not advance a policy other than fire and brimstone.

Kirkpatrick and Bolton are not so extreme as you might think, they simply say what others do in milder language, but the message remains the same: throw brickbats and vituperate in the comfort of policies that do not and cannot work, or change. And taking a new tack is out of the question for now.

Then there's Lee Sung yoon, research fellow of the National Asia Program, at Princeton and Sue Terry, a senior research scholar at Columbia's Weather East Asian Institute, calling for 'containing the young Kim'. Hidding behind the ready excuse of 'not rewarding North Korea for bad behaviour', you wonder how more successful they in their reading of the innards of US metaphysics of North Korea, could be than in those who long trod this hoary road of failure when they faced Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong il.

You don't reward North Korea. The death of Kim Jong il allows the Obama administration to deny food aid to relieve starvation in North Korea. Why? It's a new ballgame. Is it really?

Or the tin marshal approach of George W. Bush which resulted in allowing the DPRK to test a nuclear devise, solely on the pig headed analyses and mule headed insistance that only the terms the US poses are acceptable, to put it crudely.

Where is the understanding of North Korean history? or the fiercely, proud ulta nationalism that keeps the country alive and behind the Kims & co.?

And what do American taxpayers get for the billions squandered on intelligence services when it comes to North Korea? A mess of potage coloured to a cul de sac ideology. And ain't that the pits?