How does a country like North Korea pull back from the brink of war - or maybe more accurate to ask can a country like North Korea pull back from the warlike hysteria it has conjured up? If I'm to assign something that resembles logic and coherent thought to the vile and villainous creatures who run that madhouse, I'd have to guess that that is their calculation here - namely, that in the end we'll have no choice but to recognize that with outlandish rhetoric and absurd martial theatrics they have marched themselves so close to the precipice of war that the only way they can now back away is if we give them what they want. I suppose it's clever of them in a completely insane sort of way - but it does force one to assume they actually have a 'coherent' plan they're working here - what if they're just riding a wave of craziness at this point, just making it up as they go along and consequently have no idea what they're gonna do if we call their bluff?
This is why it was always my opinion that constantly giving into North Korea's demands and provocations was creating a dynamic of escalation that would inevitably lead to a no win scenario - that these actions were acquiring a logic and momentum of their own and leading us to a place where all the answers left to us would be nothing but ugly. I thought the best [and by best it's understood one means least bad] solution was interceding before it got to that point, interrupt the goose stepping bastards in mid to lateish crazy as it were before they could mature that crazy into a full blown psychotic episode, by either shooting down the rockets they were testing or possibly by giving an ultimatum to China to fix the problem otherwise watch us shoot the things down - I thought the rocket tests were presenting us with an opportunity to change the math on N Korea [and China too for that matter when ya think about it] and that practicing caution, which certainly has its appeal as the putatively wise and reasonable thing to do, could very well just lead us to the dire pass we were imagining ourselves avoiding by not shooting the bloody things down in the first place.
[and let's remember, as I've argued before, that there was another very good reason to terminate Lil' Kim's rockets with extreme prejudice - as the country is now clearly demonstrating, you don't want these people perfecting this kind of technology - and if they can't test the rockets 'cause you're shooting them down, they can't perfect the technology]
[Lil' Kim is now saying that his nukes are off the table viz negotiations - the Hermit Kingdom is now a nuclear power according to the pudgy polemicist - and since they're a client of Iran's budding nuclear dreams that means... well, that means I think that maybe we've arrived at the no win scenario I was talking about. If this is Kim's bottom line position, a postion which we of course cannot accept for a whole bunch of reasons but especially if we intend to be taken seriously viz Iran's etc etc's - and if Kim has stuck his neck out so far here that he can't afford to come back empty handed, even if only relatively, and hope to stay alive - then this sounds 'no winish' to me - we call his bluff, which as far as I'm concerned we pretty much have to, then he really has no option left but to start a war of some sort in order to manufacture leverage - barring something 'major' going on in the background this kind of seems like the direction we're heading in - if China has been holding something back as a 'worst case' play, now I think would be the time to play it]
