Perhaps The Strategy Was To Bore Us Into Submission

I don't have an informed opinion on exactly the right way to help keep millions--I do mean millions--of North Koreans from starving to death, an issue addressed in this Op-Ed today by  Stephen Haggard and Marcus Nolan.

But think how nice it would have been if the Washington Post and other MSM outlets had informed the public that organizers of last weekend's protest , the Workers World Party and its front group ANSWER, are enthusiastic supporters of a regime that has recently presided over mass starvation.

Haggard and Nolan today:

The recent diplomatic attention to North Korea's nuclear ambitions should not distract us from a second, equally grim, problem posed by that country: its chronic food emergency.

In the 1990s as many as 1 million North Koreans died in one of the worst famines of the century. This catastrophe would be the equivalent of roughly 15 million dead in the United States. Now, once again, North Korea's citizens are facing man-made food shortages that pose difficult challenges to other nations.

In the mid-'90s, North Korea was battered by severe weather, including floods. But the country's agricultural decline had begun well before those events. Rather than purchasing food on the world market or seeking multilateral assistance, the regime dithered. The government blocked humanitarian aid to the hardest-hit parts of the country and curtailed commercial imports of food as assistance was ramped up. Pyongyang in essence used humanitarian aid as balance-of-payments support, enabling dubious military white elephants such as the purchase of fighter jets from the Kazakh air force and centrifuges from Pakistan.

Grain production today remains below its 1990 level. With North Korea into the second decade of the food emergency, it is implausible to blame natural disasters. Failed economic policies and a misguided emphasis on food self-sufficiency remain problems, but underneath these proximate causes is a more fundamental political fact: the absence of human, civil and political rights. With no channels for redress, the large urban non-elite -- accounting for roughly 40 percent of the population -- faces a chronic food emergency....

What has been the international response so far?

The world community has responded to this tragedy with considerable generosity, committing more than $2 billion in food aid over the past decade. The United States alone has contributed more than $600 million, equivalent to 2 million metric tons of grain, and continues to provide assistance despite diplomatic tensions....

Don't let that fool you, though. ANSWER has the goods, as shown in this thumbnail sketch:

A decade before the U.S. debacle in Vietnam began, the Pentagon received its first defeat when U.S. and allied military forces were driven out of North Korea by the combined efforts of the People's Republic of China and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea)....

President Bush and his administration have menaced all of Korea by including North Korea as part of an "axis of evil" and warning North Korea publicly that it must learn the lessons of Iraq.

ANSWER being a little mysterious about how all those U.S. and allied troops ended up in North Korea. And of course WWP is filled with entirely reasonable skepticism over recent progress in nuclear demilitarization talks:

It is no longer personally insulting DRPK leader Kim Jong Il or using terms like “axis of evil” to describe the governments of North Korea, Iraq and Iran. Bush coined that belligerent phrase in his 2002 State of the Union address, back in the days when Washington neo-cons thought they were on a roll and would soon be able to subjugate the DPRK after successfully imposing their will on oil-rich Iraq and Iran....

The DPRK did not buckle before this attempted intimidation. It soon announced to the world that it possessed nuclear weapons and would not yield to Washington’s threats.

Then came the resistance in Iraq and worldwide condemnation of the U.S. war and occupation there. And now the Bush administration’s problems over its racist handling of the disaster after Hurricane Katrina.

Their hands full for the moment, the beleaguered but still aggressive imperialist strategists in Washington undoubtedly wish that Korea would go away for a while.

Reading these WWP diatribes is actually kind of entertaining--they remind me of Communist Chinese short-wave radio broadcasts I used to hear thirty years ago. And today, I expect WWP is more belligerent towards the U.S. than China itself. All of which would have made for some riveting stories in the Post.