North Korea ate some bad Kimchi

Monday, July 03, 2006

From the AP: "North Korea would respond to a pre-emptive U.S. military attack with an "annihilating strike and a nuclear war," the state-run media said Monday, heightening anti-U.S. rhetoric amid close scrutiny of its missile program. The Korean Central News Agency, citing an unidentified Rodong Sinmun newspaper "analyst," accused the United States of increasing military pressure on the isolated communist state and basing new spy planes on the Korean Peninsula."

Big talk from a country that has this article from the AP in 2004: "North Korea's isolated Stalinist regime has relied on foreign aid to feed its people since revealing in the mid-1990s that its state-run farming industry had collapsed following decades of mismanagement and the loss of Soviet subsidies. WFP plans this year to feed a total of 6.2 million of the North's 20 million people — "core beneficiaries" plus people who are paid with food for doing farming and other work. That amounts to 40,000 tons of food aid a month — mostly rice, wheat, corn, sugar and high-protein wheat biscuits."

The U.S. and other food donor nations to the World Food Program (WFP) are feeding North Korea. The WFP donations to North Korea (NK) are actions that I have always had grave misgivings about. The WFP policy seems to have to assumptions:

1. Sending food to NK helps the innocent and hungry.
2. If the WFP doesn't feed NK, the NK government will have no choice but to invade South Korea to avoid mass starvation.

My response:

1. The NK takes that food and diverts it to their army and lets the innocent and hungry starve. Further, because it is a totalitarian state, no one on the outside can confirm the distribution of the food donations or death counts.
2. NK has been bunkered into the mountains for 50 years. You can't invade NK, but its military is not trained and equipped for an invasion and occupation of South Korea. True, many North and South Koreans will die - as well as U.S. troops along the DMZ - but you are not going to lose South Korea to Pyongyang. Hell, one Hyundai plant in the South has more manufacturing capacity than all of NK.

So, we are now at the point where we have fed NK long enough so that they could develop and deploy nuclear weapons. Time to shut off the food.