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Norks pick wrong bones for Japan

Captain's Quarters:

The North Korean regime of Kim Jong-Il resumed its sabre-rattling today, threatening to go to war with Japan if the latter imposed economic sanctions against the DPRK. Earlier, Japan protested that the bones released by the DPRK that supposedly belonged to Japanese citizens kidnapped by the DPRK turned out to be a hoax, enraging Japanese citizens and inspiring suggestions of retaliatory sanctions:

Calls are growing from the Japanese public and politicians for the government to impose sanctions on North Korea after Tokyo said bones Pyongyang had identified as those of Japanese it had kidnapped were from other people.

"If sanctions are applied against the DPRK (North Korea) due to the moves of the ultra-right forces (in Japan), we will regard it as a declaration of war against our country and promptly react to the action by an effective physical method," a spokesman for North Korea's Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, monitored in Tokyo.

Kim now wants Japan excluded from the six-nation multilateral talks designed to strip North Korea of its nuclear-weapons capability and stabilize the security situation in the Asia-Pacific rim. This demand intends on unraveling the entire process, since Japan and South Korea are the two most interested parties in the result. North Korea has routinely threatened Japan with attack, and few doubt that a DPRK missile launch would target anywhere else but Tokyo for its first salvo.

This latest wild threat clearly shows that Kim has become desperate to control the outcome of the talks. He needs outside capital to feed his starving nation and to build some kind of economic momentum, but the only way to make that work is either by nuclear blackmail or opening DPRK up to Western influences, since that's where the capital originates. Kim so far has chosen nuclear blackmail and sees it as a winning strategy, at least in the near term.

Impotent belligerance as a negotiating strategy appears to be the North Korean plan. If the Norks declare war on Japan, the US will join the Japanese in destroying the Nork regime.