Bad Deal With North Korea

According to John Podhoretz, the deal negotiated with North Korea is a putrid payoff. Of course, we have reason to be skeptical, because you cannot take the North Koreans seriously when it comes to believing anything they say.

FOR decades, intelligence agencies have assured the world that Kim Jong Il, the dictator of North Korea, is a psychopathic lunatic with a massive collection of pornography and a habit of kidnapping people from Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea to serve his whims.

He has made decisions about where to spend his government's money in a time of government-made famine that has caused the deaths of at least 1 million of his countrymen and women. He has built giant skyscrapers that are so structurally unsound they cannot be inhabited.

Psychopathic monster he almost certainly is. Almost everyone who has spent time in North Korea reports that it is, without question, the most horrifying place on this planet - a world in which the totalitarian fantasy imagined by Madeline L'Engle in the great 1962 children's book "A Wrinkle in Time" has been made flesh and bone.

But a lunatic Kim is not. He is a master geopolitician. Though we don't yet know the terms of the tentative deal announced yesterday under which North Korea has supposedly agreed to end its nuclear program, chances are very good that once again Kim has forced the world's powers - including the United States - to pay him a massive bribe that will help him maintain his stranglehold on power.

Since 1985, North Korea has used its reputation for insanity to manipulate not only the United States, but even the Evil Empire to its West. In that year, the Soviet Union agreed to provide the North Koreans with light nuclear reactors if the Norks agreed to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Showing stunning sangfroid against the ruthless bunch in Moscow, Kim's father signed the treaty and then simply refused to abide by any of its provisions. He spent five years refusing to allow a single inspector into the country, and when he did finally allow their entry in 1990, he deceived them and lied to them.

Read the rest. Also check out Claudia Rosett's Creepy Kim's Criminal Cash.

For years, the North Korean state has been raking in money from the illicit, international sale of drugs, ranging from heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines to fake Viagra. A North Korean defector testified to Congress in 2003 that the mass production and sale of narcotics was official state policy. In the tightly controlled North Korean state, factories turning out fake pharmaceuticals are part of Kim's plan. Some of these drugs have been peddled out of North Korean embassies by official staff.

According to congressional research reports, this has resulted in more than 50 verifiable drug busts in more than 20 countries, most of them since Kim Jong Il took over from his late father in 1994. North Korea's illicit activities also include gun-running, illegal fishing, a dash of alleged insurance fraud and the counterfeiting of cigarettes and U.S. currency.