So, Korea is getting more and more crazed daily, and doing everything from ratcheting up the rhetoric to targetting a US spy plane over international waters, in an apparent bid to force a real confrontation and crisis with the US. They are certainly doing everything possible to appear to be a bigger threat to world peace than Iraq (and perhaps they are - I certainly think something is going to have to be done). The question is - why? Certainly they have provided an argument to the anti-war group that, rather than focusing on Iraq, we need to turn our attention to North Korea. As if you can just pick up 250,000 troops and move them from 1 region to the other. The covert ops part of the war plan in Iraq has probably been going on for months, do you just abandon all of that to turn to North Korea now?

So I keep coming back to why North Korea is doing this NOW? Why are they intentionally trying to make themselves public enemy number 1, just as American forces are poised to take out Saddam? What possible benefit to the DPRK is ther in this action? The only thing I can come up with that makes sense is: money. Is it possible that Korea is being payed off by someone, in the form of "foreign aid", to try and divert attention from Iraq, to force the US hand in the pacific rim rather than the middle east? Certainly the DPRK needs money, her people are starving in the "Marxist Utopia" run by a lunatic. So, would the government of Kim Jong Il take the role of world agitator to protect Iraq if the price was right. And who could make the price right - Iraq herself, Saudi Arabia, other OPEC members who want to be sure there is no way the US has a hand in the transition government of Iraq?

The only other possibility I can come up with is that Kim Jong Il wants to try and get a little appeasement money himself. Perhaps things are so desperate that he hopes to get paid off if he promises to be a good boy. He's seen how the anti-war group has done everything possible to protect Saddam, and figures he's just as cute and cuddly, so might as well go for it.