A peek at Manpo: in which our correspondent almost visits North Korea

National Review, Sept 25, 2006 by Rob Long

The North Korean situation--millions of hungry people, living in a paranoid socialist nightmare led by a despotic, rat-in-a-coffee-can leader--has no solution. No good solution, anyway. The trouble is, we Americans are solution oriented. "What's the plan?" we ask ourselves. One of the more bitterly enjoyable tropes of the anti-Iraq War crowd has been their childish--and classically American--insistence that a lack of "planning" contributed to the difficulty of securing a peaceful Iraq, as if "planning" could somehow soothe the toxic brew of Shiite, Sunni, and Kurd. Some things are just disastrous messes, which doesn't mean they're not worth doing.

North Korea is a knot that cannot be untied by diplomacy or force or anything, really, without a lot of chaos and bloodshed and expense. It's anyone's guess how much blood and exactly whose expense, but it's a sad inevitability that before the Hermit Kingdom goes the way of the Soviet Union, or Mao's China, a lot of things are going to get fired into the air.