An occasion of North Korea acting in an audacious, mendacious, and all-around infantile way is not really shocking. But this is particularly nuts: The South Koreans have come out with evidence that conclusively links North Korea to the sinking of a South Korean warship back on March 26. The North’s torpedo killed 46 sailors. South Korea has taken its time with the official investigation; while everyone always assumed the North was responsible, nobody was really in a rush to reach that conclusion because then we’d be stuck with the harder question of what the hell to do about it.
The South has hinted that it will push for increased international sanctions against the North, as well as further curtail inter-Korean trade. The South Korean president said his country "will take resolute countermeasures against North Korea and make it admit its wrongdoing through strong international cooperation." Pretty reasonable, right? After all, this is the South’s worst military disaster since the Korean War. But the North isn’t exactly cooperating:
North Korea immediately denounced the investigation as a "sheer fabrication" and accused the South of "pointing a dirty finger at us like a thief." It added that if there is any retaliation or punishment of the North, it will respond with "various forms of tough measures including all-out war."
Well all-out war would indeed be a "tough measure." That’s obviously highly unlikely, but I’m just amazed at the North’s admirable fidelity and steadfast adherence to the scandal-management classic, "Lie, Deny, Counter Accuse." It is really masterfully done here.
This seems like a very big deal. There is no plausible motive for the North’s attack, and I don’t know how else to interpret it other than as an abrogation of the 1953 truce and a resumption of hostilities. Obviously no one wants to interpret it that way, and no one will. But lobbing missiles over Japan into the ocean is one thing. Murdering 46 Korean sailors is quite another. The South Korean foreign minister had an interesting point about the impact of the incident. He said it will serve as a "major formative experience" for a whole new generation of South Koreans. I think that’s right. How many South Koreans, with no memory of the war, have become inured over the years to Kim Jong-il’s clownish bellicosity? I know that sophisticated opinion says that the North acts out in times of heightened internal turmoil and to deflect blame for the astonishing suffering of its citizens. And another sophisticated consensus is that we are basically impotent in our ability to change North Korean behavior. But in the wake of a national tragedy I don’t think such rationalizations have much force among the citizenry. As Americans know all too well, national tragedies engender bloodlust and militate for outsized punitive responses. I don’t want to be alarmist on this, but I don’t see the North apologizing and I don’t see more sanctions assuaging South Koreans’ anger. This is a disaster. And I would normally end by saying that I can’t wait for the day when the nightmare that is the North Korean regime collapses and its leaders are in the dock, but unfortunately that’ll just be a different sort of nightmare. So, my contribution to the sophisticated consensus: What a complete shit-show this whole thing is.
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