Sep 1, 2010

More useful pressure on North Korea.

When it comes to sanctioning rogue entities in the North Korean government, the question arises: Does one go after “Office 99,” which oversees the regime’s illicit arms smuggling? Or is “Office 39,” which handles Kim Jong Il’s sales of hard drugs and purchases of luxury goods, the better target?

This week the Obama Administration got the answer right when it sanctioned both Orwellian departments as part of a broader effort to punish Pyongyang for torpedoing a South Korean warship in March and killing 46 sailors. Those sanctions, along with this summer’s joint U.S.-South Korean naval exercises, send “a signal to the North that provocative behavior will not go unpunished,” as the State Department’s Robert Einhorn put it on Monday.

Now let’s hope the Administration’s signal-sending isn’t a prelude to another round of diplomacy with Pyongyang, in which the U.S. drops sanctions in exchange for the regime’s invariably empty promises and bogus concessions. That’s what the Bush Administration did late in its tenure, when it took North Korea off the list of terrorism sponsors and returned $25 million in frozen North Korean assets in the hope that the North would submit to a vague de-nuclearization process. Instead, Kim conducted his second nuclear test in May 2009.

Read more at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467004575463934062014778.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

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