World In Brief (10/17/06)

North Korea spawns new fears as member of nuclear club

Tim Johnson, (MCT)

It’s… North Korea spawns new fears as member of nuclear club

Tim Johnson, (MCT)

It’s been called an “evil state,” a “psycho state” and even a “Soprano state” that survives on crime, like the fictional television mob family.

Its leader, Kim Jong Il, once a movie director, has come up with an extraordinary plot line: Steer a totalitarian, bankrupt regime to develop nuclear weapons, then use cunning to ride out international sanctions and keep a firm grip on the nukes.

The final episodes have yet to unfold: Will the protagonist dare to put a bomb atop a missile and fire it? Will he try “nuclear blackmail” to extort billions from his neighbors?

North Korea’s missile sales and illicit activity, its involvement in terrorism and its ability to seal off its people from the outside world and to hide the doings of its leaders all make it a nuclear nation worth fearing.

But the whispers in the West that the secretive Kim is crazy are simply wrong, experts say.

“Here’s a guy who is leader of a failed state with a failed ideology having survived with his father for the last 50 years pitting the major powers against each other,” Ralph Cossa said, head of the Honolulu-based Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Pacific Forum.

“For a crazy man, he’s pretty successful.”

His latest triumph came at 10:36 a.m. Monday in a shaft about 1,180 feet under a mountain at the Hwadaeri testing facility near North Korea’s northeastern border with Russia. There, North Korea set off an explosion that experts say was probably a nuclear test.

Regardless of the test’s success, the shock value unnerved Western policymakers.

After all, North Korean intelligence agents killed 18 South Korean officials in Burma in 1983, and bombed an airliner out of the sky in 1987, killing 115 people.

In more recent years, the cash-strapped regime has turned to moneymaking endeavors such as peddling narcotics and fake Viagra, smuggling bogus Marlboro cigarettes and printing fake American $100 bills. It sells missile and weapon technology abroad, largely in the Middle East.

A profound mistrust between North Korea and the United States adds a hair-trigger feel to the crisis. North Korea believes that Washington is bent on its destruction.

“We are under extreme threat (from the) United States of nuclear war,” North Korea’s ambassador to Australia, Chon Jae Hong, said after the nuclear test. North Korean propaganda routinely is laden with threats against the United States.

North Korea is more isolated than any other nation on Earth. For half a century, its million citizens have lived in a cocoon, sealed off from the world, knowing only “juche,” or self-reliance, first under the leadership of Kim Il Sung, the “Great Leader,” then under his son, Kim Jong Il, the “Dear Leader.”

When Kim took over power from his father, who died in 1994, North Korea was mired in crisis, struggling with the collapse of its benefactor, the Soviet Union. Kim steered the nation into criminal endeavors, allowing regime agents to ply the seams of global lawlessness.

U.S. officials say they’ve documented 50 incidents in 20 countries linking North Koreans, often diplomats, to drug trafficking.

More troubling, North Korea turned itself into a global “Missiles ‘R’ Us,” shipping entire advanced missiles or technology to anyone with a fat wallet.

Iran, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Pakistan were beneficiaries, and U.S. officials labeled North Korea the world’s No. 1 missile proliferator.

Some of the earnings went into North Korea’s nuclear program, which it agreed with Washington to suspend in 1994 in exchange for vast energy assistance. North Korea stopped its plutonium production and put it under the watch of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, and halted work on two larger reactors. It resumed reprocessing plutonium in 2003, shortly after U.S. officials said North Korea had admitted that it had a secret program to create highly enriched uranium, another fuel for nuclear weapons.

Attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq up sharply

Jay Price, MCT

Armed attacks on U.S. soldiers and Iraqis in Baghdad have increased by 43 percent since midsummer, despite an ongoing American-led campaign to secure individual neighborhoods, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq said Thursday.

Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV said violence was down by 11 percent in neighborhoods where the sweeps had been focused, but that decline was more than offset by more attacks elsewhere. Caldwell said the military was expecting the level of violence to keep rising during the remaining weeks of the Muslim month of Ramadan.

“Historical trends tell us that the attacks will generally increase by 20 percent during this holy month of Ramadan,” Caldwell said. “We assume it will still get worse before it gets better.”

In Washington, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that the American strategy of training tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and police hasn’t curbed violence and that senior military commanders were puzzled by its failure. “We do need to take a look” at other factors that might be driving violence, he said.

Pace said a berm designed to encircle Baghdad and restrict the movement of death squad members and insurgents in and out of the city had been completed recently and that 28 checkpoints manned by Iraqis now controlled the entrances to the city.

But he said death squads continued to operate in the capital after dark even in neighborhoods that U.S. and Iraqi forces had swept. He said that he saw no way for American troops to stop the violence until Iraqis tired of the slaughter.

“You cannot have enough men under arms 24-7 to stop the hatred killings,” he said.

In Baghdad, Caldwell said the increase in attacks on U.S. troops as well as Iraqi soldiers, police officers and civilians might be the result of the campaign to root out armed insurgents and death-squad supporters in the capital. He said the operation, which involves as many as 15,000 American troops and more than 40,000 Iraqi police officers, was exposing more troops and police to attacks.

Caldwell didn’t tie the attack statistics directly to casualties, but the number of Iraqis killed in Baghdad has also risen. Nearly 2,700 Iraqi civilians were killed in the city in September, according to the Iraqi Health Ministry, 400 more than in August and nearly as many as died in July, when deaths reached a record high.

At least 40 U.S. troops have been killed in combat so far this month, according to iCasualties.org, a Web site that tracks the numbers of dead and wounded coalition troops in Iraq from defense department releases.

Caldwell cited some signs that he called positive, including a more welcoming attitude among Sunni Muslims in some Baghdad neighborhoods.