Diplomacy hits Kim.(on the right)(Kim Jong-Il)

NEW YORK, OCTOBER 13

KIM JONG IL never lets us down. When President Bush announced that he would seek further sanctions against North Korea, Kim replied that he would interpret any such move as an act of belligerency warranting a declaration of war against the U.S. This would be opera bouffe, the equivalent of Monaco announcing that it would bring down the Federal Reserve--except for the item that calls Kim to the world's attention, namely the possibility that he has a nuclear warhead gestating or even actualized.

Understandably, curiosity about this man has been renewed. We have been told for many years that Kim is obsessively vain. But I had not remembered the September 1997 article from the official government news agency. Reproduced here are the last few sentences of the paean, which serve our purposes. The document concluded: "The general is the mental pillar and the eternal sun to the Korean people. As they are in harmonious whole with him, they are enjoying a true life based on pure conscience and obligation. They are upholding him as their great father and teacher, united around him in ideology, morality, and obligation. So their life is a true, fruitful and precious life without an equal in history."

In North Korea such tributes as these substitute for food, which does not exist, at least not enough to feed the country's 21 million people, ten percent of whom died of starvation in Kim's first half decade in power. It is widely noted that for all that he thinks of himself as a leader with a divine afflatus to bring to his people and the world the fruits of Juche (the North Korean variant of Leninism, with a little Ayn Rand mixed in), he is himself a man of total self-indulgence, devoted to porn, Scotch, and Daffy Duck cartoons. The recounting of details of this kind serves no purpose except as it is helpful in illuminating his special madness. It is that, but observers note that he is expert in the single discipline that matters, which is his ability to stay in absolute command of his country.