BLINKING KOREANS

Fred Kaplan says that North Korean negotiations are now a bigger deal than anything having to do with Iraq.

Agreed, but he's missing a fairly big point: The Korean crisis has always been a bigger deal than anything having to do with Iraq. Kaplan himself states why at the end of his piece:

...North Korea has several thousand artillery tubes stationed near the South Korean border, 500 of them a mere five minutes' flight time from downtown Seoul.

Add to that a million-strong army, which is well-fed and reasonably well-organized, that's also mostly placed within striking distance of the DMZ, and you have a problem. And don't forget the likelihood that Kim has thousands of infiltrators at his disposal, schooled in blending in to the South Korean and Japanese populace and able to cause massive havoc away from the batte fronts, and that he might be able to count on Chinese assistance across the border if a hot war broke out. To some extent, the Bush team went ahead with the invasion of Iraq to get it out of the way, clearing the decks to finally take on Kim Jong-Il without Saddam constantly popping up and causing distractive trouble. Iraq also got bumped to the head of the axis-of-evil takeout line precisely because it wasn't as big a threat--yet--as North Korea, yet showed none of the signs of self-correction that attend Iran. And a decade of international case law against Iraq supposedly made its invasion easier to justify. France and Co. obviously complicated matters more than the administration expected. Additionally, North Korea probably has at least one or two rudimentary, untested nukes; Saddam, the rationale goes, would have been in that position in a few years or less if left to his own schemes. North Korea hasn't met the US military option yet precisely because it just doesn't lend itself easily to that option; neither does Iran. Iraq did.

North Korea is the big crisis facing the Bush administration now, but that's been true since before 9-11; Syria and the rest of the Middle East (including Iraq) are second-tier problems until the Korean crisis is abated. It's a problem inherited from Bush's predecessor, who mucked it up with the '94 deal that set the precedent of payoffs for Kim's bad, belligerent behavior.

Having said all of this, I'm not sure that the talks set to begin shortly between the US, North Korea and China will do much to alleviate the situation. Both sides compromised to get to this point--the US, in allowing talks to resume without the South Koreans and Japanese present; North Korea, in allowing China to host and play whatever murky role it ends up playing. The only thing I can see that will really work to end the standoff is direct confrontation between China and North Korea, with China either reigning Kim in or bringing about regime change. But regime change is a thorny issue, even for China to tackle. The Kim cult has built its entire rationale for rule, its juche philosophy, its militarization, its demonization of the ROK and the US, on the notion that it is the only legitimate ruler of Korea. No one outside the Kim family is even eligible to rule, so it's likely that should China even decide that regime change is necessary it will have a difficult time finding anyone within North Korea who is capable of establishing enough credibility or authority with the people to rule. So what does China do then? If it follows history, it would either choose or be forced by events to occupy North Korea and install a puppet regime answering to Beijing. Such an outcome might temporarily solve the nuclear crisis, but it would bring unification no closer to reality than it is now. It might even make unification less likely, and for a very long time. Which, come to think of it, if it keeps the entire Korean peninsula from falling into America-friendly hands, occupation might be exactly what the Chinese want.