North Korea, 0-for-2 in missile launches

As expected, on Sunday North Korea fired the Taepodong-2 missile they've been preparing for the past two months, but like the first Taepodong-2 launch in 2006, this one also was a failure. According to tracking data gathered by the United States and Japan, the rocket’s second stage seems to have malfunctioned and the third stage never ignited, dropping the Taepodong-2 into the Pacific about 2,000 miles from North Korea, well short of it’s projected 5,000 mile range.

Of course this didn’t stop North Korea from claiming that the launch was a total success and for alleging that even now the satellite Kwangmyongsong-2 is circling the Earth, broadcasting patriotic hymns to North Korea’s Kim Jong Il and his father Kim Il Sung. Nor did it stop Dear Leader Kim from hailing the rocket’s “successful” launch, while, according to the North Korean state news agency, saying he “felt regret for not being able to spend more money on the people’s livelihoods and was choked with sobs.”

Uh-huh…I mean Kim could have spent money on feeding his nation’s starving citizenry, but why do that when there are dud rockets to launch?

Of course the whole reason Kim had the State sink untold billions into the Taepodong-2 project was to provoke exactly the type of response that he got from the world community. The launch was roundly condemned as a provocation by just about everyone, while the United Nations met in an emergency session to discuss what to do next about North Korea and the troublesome Kim. And, of course, right wing pundits and politicians in the United States took President Obama to task for not doing enough to stop Kim and for leaving the United States “at-risk” of North Korean nuclear attacks.

This, frankly, is a wild overstatement of North Korea’s abilities. So far North Korea’s nuclear ICBM program has consisted of two failed rocket launches and one dud nuclear weapons test, hardly a fearsome program. But this doesn’t stop some from presenting North Korea as an existential threat to the existence of the United States (including this gem from Neo-conservative spokesman Frank Gaffney, who takes a turn into science fiction by insisting that North Korea will not only develop a working ICBM, but also an electro-magnetic pulse [EMP] weapon that will destroy all of America’s electronics, plunging us back into the Stone Age).

So what to do about North Korea? My idea – nothing. Talk of more sanctions on North Korea were scuttled by China and Russia at the UN, mostly by China which fears that if the government in North Korea collapses, they’d have millions of starving refugees showing up on their border. Knowing this Kim has in the past used weapons test to scare the world community into concessions to North Korea on foreign aid to prevent him from developing more weapons (which he’s usually just gone ahead with anyway).

Knowing this, then perhaps the best move would be to do nothing, to basically ignore the Taepodong-2 test, realizing that as a weapon of war the Taepodong-2 is useless. Not only does it take months to get ready to launch (more than enough time to destroy one on the ground), it doesn’t work once it is fired. Maybe if we move away from the fear-based negotiations scheme with North Korea, it will open a path for a new kind of relations with the world’s most reclusive nation.