Dear Leader's Rocket

North Korea's Space Launch Vehicle soared toward space today.  That is what the Washington Post reported this morning. The big surprise is that the world did not come to an end.  On the other hand, it appears the effort to insert a communications satellite into orbit failed.

There is one school of thought that says that since we are not going to go in and destroy the Space Launch Vehicle on the launch pad or at some other point before launch, the best thing to do is to ignore the subject altogether.  The reason is that Leader Kim Jong Il gets a lot of internal mileage out of all the opposition being generated outside that isolated nation.  I think that is a good point.

But, even so, we are going to have an Emergency Meeting of the UN Security Council this afternoon.  And, this is why I am very angry with North Korea for having conducted this latest provocative action.  It has forced me to double check on the various spellings of the word council, so I don't get it wrong in this post.  I never was very good at spelling.

UPDATE

Here is a commentary by Professor Andrei Lankov, associate professor of history at Kookmin University in Seoul.  Dr. Lankov, is a Soviet defector (a success story for Voice of America/Radio Free Europe) who emigrated to Australia and is now an Australian citizen.  While a Soviet citizen he spent time studying in Pyongyang and now teaches north Korean studies (in South Korea).  He might know what he is talking about.

For decades, North Korea's inefficient economy has been kept afloat by international aid.  At the beginning, this aid -- mainly food and energy -- flowed from the Soviet Union and China.  Since the mid-1990s, South Korea, China and, surprisingly, the United States provided it.  (Throughout the last decade there were years when the U.S. was the major provider of food aid to the North.)  Pyongyang ensured this flow continued by creating international crises and then demanding payment for solving them.

This approach works very well, mainly because Mr. Kim and his lackeys do not care about obedience to the international law, nor about the survival of their country's own population.  Sunday's missile launch is simply the reapplication of this old tactic.

And we seem to be headed down that road one more time.

Regards  —  Cliff