Crazy act does not mean North Korea is suicidal
Amazing. A bomb goes off in Boston, a fertiliser plant explodes in Texas and miraculously, the "simmering tensions" on the Korean Peninsula don't seem to matter anymore. In fact, they have evaporated.
But were they really “simmering”? While the media may have decided they were, how many times are we going to take Pyongyang’s rhetoric seriously when any precipitative action with nuclear weapons would turn the country into a carpark?
North Koreans aren’t suicidal – even if they have done some crazy things in the past. The South Koreans, surely the best barometer, heard most of it before and simply got on with life.
A long-time friend, who has lived in Seoul for 30 years and even dined with Kim Il-sung back in the mid-1990s, took to shaking his head when I asked him what he thought of the latest theatrical go-around.
“It causes me a lot of soul-searching,” he said. “It makes me wonder what else the media gets wrong. I notice that while they seem to get their facts right most of the time, their interpretation is way off.”
Nothing unusual there. Many Western news-gathering organisations like to have things in black and white on a peninsula where the sort of clarity for which most of their viewers crave is simply not there.
Perhaps because I covered those regular armistice haranguing matches in the late 1980s, I became inured to North Korea’s bellicose language, some of it tabloid-colourful, and its habit of blowing hot and cold whenever it wanted.
It was no real surprise that instead of acting meekly when the world, including China, condemned last February’s nuclear test and strengthened already tough sanctions, the North Koreans lashed out.
Admittedly, some of the language was extraordinary, even by Pyongyang’s standards. They included threats of unleashing nuclear-tipped missiles on South Korea and on US military bases across Asia – a capability it doesn’t have, at least not yet. But does a lot of shouting constitute a crisis, or a reason for the media and its talking heads to describe the peninsula as being gripped by “heightened tensions”? No one in Seoul seemed to think so. After all, doesn’t tension have to be mutual?
For South Koreans, the only real concern centred on a possible limited military strike, which North Korea is capable of. In that context, what was different was the stern pre-emptive warning issued by new South Korean President Park Geun-hye, whose father was no shrinking violet. It was underlined by the US swiftly dispatching B-2 stealth bombers.
While it obviously possesses an effective air-defence shield, the one thing the North will never have at the outbreak of any conventional hostilities is air superiority. Its pilots don’t have the training.
Pyongyang kept up the invective longer than usual this time because the US and South Korea were conducting their annual military exercises. If they had backed off when those were still going on, they would have looked weak.
In these situations, it may be difficult for outsiders to understand whether North Korea is saying: “Be careful, world, we might go nuts”, or if their leaders are simply demonstrating, for whatever strange reason, how tough they are.
For all his appearances on state television, reviewing massed military parades, peering through binoculars, anyone who believes the Boy Leader Kim Jong-un is actually in charge needs to do a rethink. He is surely only a necessary dynastic figurehead to keep the regime’s legitimacy alive.
Some believe it may well have been his idea to warn foreign residents to flee Seoul. Who knows? The real power in Pyongyang clearly lives on through an elite military structure that defines North Korea as one of the strangest places on earth.
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