My aching head

I don't usually wade into this stuff because I always feel so overwhelmed by conflicting views that I fear I have no hope of understanding how international relations work, especially when they involve Asia. I've spent a sum total of something like 23 days in Asia, most of them in Beijing and all of them in PRC. Astonishing as it might seem to say so, I feel as though I've only visited a part of the continent that is most accessible to the Western mind (though, for the life of me, I still can't wrap my mind around the massive crowds of people in the Beijing KFC, wolfing down fare that looked even worse than what we serve up in North America, while being regaled with a 110 dB version of the song "Happy Birthday" blasting out of the muzak system to the monosyllabic chant of 'la la LA la LA LA'. ).

Anyway.

Like much of the rest of the world, I've been trying to understand what's happening in North Korea. I spent a couple of hours reading this morning, fully aware that this was a luxury that can be afforded by only the smallest fraction of the 300 million Americans who stand to be the most affected Westerners by whatever decisions are made eventually.

I really haven't a clue what's going on in this part of the world, but some near certainties shine through all the media muck.

1. Kim Jong Il is not a good man.
2. North Korea has a legitimate fear of invasion.
3. North Korea poses essentially no offensive threat to anyone.
4. The UN is being used as a tool to divest North Korea of sovereign independence and the nuclear test, though it may have been seen locally as a last ditch defensive effort (to raise uncertainty about how N Korea might respond to invasion) was exactly what was needed to help this process along.
5. If you really don't want a state to develop nukes, it's generally a bad idea to point nuclear weapons at them (which the US has been doing to North Korea since the 1950s it seems and has done more intensely over the last 10-20 years). This seems like a no-brainer. It's really the same principle that underpins my belief that the way to teach my children non-violence is probably not to beat them into submission.

I'm not sure what conclusions to make from all of this. It's a horrible situation that, like so many others, seems to have gotten nicely underway when, at the end of WWII, Western powers tinkered with cultures and civilizations that they didn't understand. Thanks to a good dose of insane totalitarian leadership, things have moved relatively swiftly to what will certainly be a brutal, bloody and tragic ending. Some nukes may explode at some point, but you can bet they won't be in California. Many more millions of people will die, but the fraction of white faces among them will be infinitesimally small.

My shame is that when I understood how pitifully weak the North Korean threat was (a small handful of fissionable material with no way to deliver it and a million starving 'soldiers' with no weapons), I breathed a small sigh of relief, even though I had already heard about the big fence that China had erected to stem the flood of refugees when the inevitable collapse takes place.

My confusion is this: not too long ago, South Korea paid handsomely for a beautiful satellite that could take high resolution pictures of the Korean peninsula. Even though North Korea announced an impending test on October 3, that satellite collected no images in North Korea over the period from October 3 to October 9. Would I be crazy to wonder about this? Was that so that nobody would know what a pathetic failure this test was? Or is there something else the world is not supposed to know about?