Tariq Ali in North Korea

Message from Phil Cunliffe with a link to a thought-provoking article by Tariq Ali about North Korea. He relates how he went to Pyongyang in 1970 as a guest of the state and, while making no attempt to mask his distaste for the regime, points out that the US had bombed the place back to the Stone Age during the Korean War. There's  an interesting take on how the Korean issue could have been sorted out once and for all in 2000, but I'm not sure that that's all there is to it.

At one stage it appeared that the United States was going to buy out the North Koreans. Clinton despatched Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang in 2000 to do a deal – loadsamoney for the Kims, denuclearisation of sorts followed by a soft reunification with the South – but it didn’t go through. Bush had no interest at all in contact. Why? I got an answer of sorts after a public debate on the Iraq war in Berlin in 2003. My opponent was Ruth Wedgwood from Yale, an adviser to Donald Rumsfeld. Over lunch I asked her about their plans for North Korea. She was cogent. ‘You haven’t seen the glint in the eyes of the South Korean military,’ she said. ‘They’re desperate to get hold of the North’s nuclear arsenal. That’s unacceptable.’ Why? ‘Because if a unified Korea becomes a nuclear power, it will be impossible to stop Japan from becoming one too and if you have China, Japan and a unified Korea as nuclear states, it shifts the relationship of forces against us.’ Obama seems to agree with this way of thinking. His problem is China. The Chinese once appeared indifferent to Korea’s fate. That’s no longer the case. The areas near the border with China are experiencing a boom and Chinese TV programmes are heaven compared to Kimmist output. How long will Beijing allow this absurd opera to continue?