WHOOPS, apocalypse! Or perhaps not. The latest Taepodong-2 missile fired by that irrepressible prankster Kim Jong-il, the Dear Leader of North Korea, failed to fulfil its promise, petering out like a West Coast Line train around Carnforth. Or so the embattled PR men in the Pentagon and White House insist.
Technically, they are right. The missile did not complete its flight, nor did it launch its alleged "satellite" payload into space. So, that is all right. Or is it? At the risk of appearing to echo the triumphalist rhetoric of the North Korean news a
gency declaring the missile launch "not a mere fruition of wisdom and talent but a fierce confrontation with those who disliked it", the fact is, this was a significant success for the lunatic regime in Pyongyang.
The rocket's 2,000-mile flight was twice as long as any previous North Korean effort, giving the regime crucial credibility with its custom base in Iran and elsewhere. Pyongyang is the main supplier of ballistic missiles to the geopolitical demi-monde, including Iran and Syria. The news that Kim has a new line this season will draw the customers. Washington, for all its forced laughter at the rocket "fizzling out into the Pacific", knows perfectly well it took a heavy hit last week.
The Taepodong-2 may have dived into the Pacific geographically, but strategically it landed slam in the middle of the United Nations Security Council. The launch was in defiance of UN resolutions 1695 and 1718; but that is fine by permanent Security Council members Russia and China, who responded to Kim's provocation with an indulgent "boys will be boys" reaction.
So, effectively, did Barack Obama. Wakened in the middle of the night in Prague – the iconic symbol of appeasement and so the perfect venue – to be informed of the North Korean launch, the messiah retaliated with a deadly burst of Obamaguff. "Rules must be binding"… Uh-huh? "Violations must be punished"… "Words must mean something"… Now you're talking, Mr President. As you have been doing for a very long time; as you show every likelihood of doing for the next four years.
They are loving it – in Pyongyang, in Tehran, in Moscow, in Beijing, in Damascus, in every lair where the ungodly watch, hawk-like, for the least sign of weakness in their opponents. President Pantywaist is everything they have longed for: Jimmy Carter reborn, without the cynical realpolitik and steely core. The dismay infecting the media across the Far East was not provoked by the technical advance achieved by the bandits in Pyongyang but by recognition of the fatal failure of will in Washington. America can no longer be relied on to defend its allies.
America made all the moves that suggested it intended to play hardball. Two destroyers, USS McCain and USS Chafee, with missile-killing capabilities, were cruising Japanese waters. If they had shot down the North Korean missile, the ailing Kim's loss of face would have been terminal. The rhetoric deployed to deplore the launch would instead have been directed against American "aggression". Big deal. How far could Security Council members Russia and China react against the interdiction of a military breach of two UN resolutions?
But, insist the nay-sayers, what if North Korea had responded by invading the South? Well, that is where Obama's envoy to Pyongyang, Stephen W Bosworth, should have been deployed to explain that, while their 5.8 million-strong army and stockpiles of chemical weapons look fearsome on parade, they might look less impressive after vaporisation by a cruise missile with a nuclear payload.
Instead, Bosworth echoed President Pantywaist with the aphorism that "pressure is not the most productive line of approach" to North Korea. One wonders what more productive line of approach there is to a regime that has already sacrificed 1.3 million men in an aggressive war, murdered 1.5 million citizens in concentration camps, executed 90,000 party members in 10 successive purges and killed a further two million people by famine due to its deranged socialist creed. Even classic Marxist texts are forbidden in North Korea, being regarded as fascist-revisionist heresy.
Last week, Barack Obama blinked first, in confrontation with the heir of a man whose myth was almost as extravagant as his own: the late Kim Il-sung, founder of North Korea, invented modern physics, the automobile and the electric toaster, besides walking on the moon, and created the dawn of each new day. No wonder the Chicago chancer backed down. Just 80 days into his administration President Pantywaist is a busted flush.
