It's been a while since I have posted, but what I read in today's FT (Financial Times) has put me in an alarmed state...

It seems that our North Korean friends have been using political prisoners to test chem/bio weapon's effects on humans of various ages. The BBC reported this story on Sunday's TV news program Access to Evil and after the Hutton debacle I am assuming that the BBC isn’t “kidding” on this one… if they want to retain their television charter with the gov’t that is.

The report sourced information from witnesses inside prison camps. One witnesses story I found profoundly moving, he said, “I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save [their] kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing” (FT, 2/2/04).

This account is alarming at the very least, and justification for international intervention I would argue. How does everyone feel about this account and N. Korea overall? Is it plausible to ask our administration and the international community to put their differences aside and come together to take action to stop Kim Jong-il? Everyone knows he has WMD, chem./bio weapons, and human rights abuses have been overwhelmingly substantiated.

I know that the phraseology of “regime change” has been tainted by the Iraq war, but if ever there was a legitimate argument to be made for regime change, I think N. Korea is it. I also realize that mobilizing support for another conflict will be hard at best and absolutely required to legitimize any armed intervention against the sovereignty of yet another rouge nation in a pre-emptive nature. Is it right to attack N. Korea?

If the Iraq war has been any guideline, yes. Simply, if the administration wants to shy away from WMD claims in favor of the known human rights abuses committed by Saddam Hussein, then the administration must commit to a resolution over N. Korea. The same moral code should apply to the peninsula of Korea; they are people just as much as Iraqis are. The persecuted Korean people, however, have the apparent disadvantage of not being in the center of the Middle East, nor do they sit atop rivers of oil. Perhaps that is too cynical, but the facts remain, the only variables that separate an imprisoned Korean from an imprisoned Iraqi are geographic location and oil.

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Jonathan
1998 S600
2001 E430
1994 E320
1991 560SEL
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