Kim Jong Il

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From Investor's Business Daily

 

Kim Jong Il, Prince Of Darkness

 

 

 

Axis Of Evil: Democrats say we should talk to a thug who sips fine wine while sacrificing millions of his own people to build nukes. But what do you say to someone responsible for more deaths than at Darfur?

 

 

 

 

As North Korea prepares to detonate another nuclear device, Democrats, who sometimes act like they get their foreign policy advice from the Dixie Chicks, are blaming it all on President Bush. He broke the “agreed framework,” and he won’t talk one-on-one with Kim Jong Il (an odd criticism coming from those who used to accuse Bush of unilateralism).

Cowboy diplomacy is apparently OK if it’s of the “Brokeback Mountain” variety — constantly kissing up to the thugs of the world. The Democratic position on North Korea is essentially that of William Borah. On hearing of Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939, the longtime senator from Idaho infamously lamented: “Lord, if only I could have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided.”

Roosevelt and Churchill were such cowboys. If only they hadn’t broken the “agreed framework” that Neville Chamberlain negotiated with Hitler. Is Kim any more trustworthy than Der Fuhrer? Is the man currently imposing another holocaust on his own people capable of negotiation, something that’s been tried and that demonstrably failed?

As we’ve said, North Korea is Rwanda with nukes. It’s as if Sudan were enriching uranium while committing genocide in Darfur. North Korea isn’t building nukes because Bush ticked it off. It’s building nukes because it’s a depraved regime led by a tyrant who drinks cognac while his people literally eat the bark off trees.

Nero had nothing on Kim Jong Il. According to Heritage Foundation senior fellow Ralph Peters, Dear Leader’s cognac bill is $500,000 a month. Meanwhile, according to Freedom House, in addition to the millions already dead, 7% of North Koreans are believed to be starving and 37% chronically malnourished.

Estimates vary, but even the lowest place the number of North Koreans who’ve been starved to death over the past decade at 2 million and 3 million out of a population of 23 million. Despite one of the longest and costliest emergency food efforts in history, North Korea’s artificial famine has a proportionately higher death toll than any in history — worse than Stalin’s Russia.

In remote locations not far from the borders with China and Russia, a gulag not unlike the worst labor camps built by Mao and Stalin holds 200,000 men, women and children accused of various crimes against the state. The North Korean Freedom Coalition reckons 400,000 to 1 million have perished in these death camps.

Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, who held hearings on these camps in 2002, says, “There are very few places that could compete with the level of depravity, the harshness of this regime in North Korea toward its own people.”

At least 300,000 North Koreans have managed to flee to China over time. China, worried that real sanctions might bring about the final implosion of the North Korean dictatorship, is building a fence to keep undocumented North Koreans from crossing its border en masse in that event.

Suzanne Scholte, secretary of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, estimates that Kim is “directly murdering 42 North Koreans every day in his political prisoner camps and indirectly murdering 391 North Koreans every day by starving them to death.”

The accompanying satellite photo vividly illustrates the fruits of the regime we’re supposed to be talking to. The country that can produce a nuclear weapon can’t produce electricity: The whole country is literally switched off at 9 p.m. — except for the capital, where Kim and his sycophants enjoy the best food and the finest Western liquor.

North Korea’s real WMD is its mad leader, to whom Democrats want to say, “Come, let us reason together.” Who knows? The man who should be on trial for crimes against humanity might offer our negotiators some of his imported cognac.

 

 

 

This Defense Department satellite image shows the contrast between South Korea’s lights and North Korea’s darkness. Reuters

 

 

 

 

If Kim sipped less fine wine and choice cognac, he could