It’s as though the North Korean regime is forever pushing the envelope of their brinksmanship, as if saying to the world community: “If you thought last week was crazy, well, you haven’t seen nothing yet.”

In just the space of a week they displayed a rash of military bluster, taunting the nations of the region with their nuclear and missle threats and swinging recklessly toward possible war.   And this week, they are about to take things up a notch with the sham trial of two American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee in Pyongyang.

While diplomats are working through solutions that  might result in an airplane flight home for these two journalists, both employed by Al Gore’s Current.TV, it’s quite clear that the outcome of the trial will be the nexus of further or reduced tensions on the peninsula.

For the North, Ling and Lee are valuable bargaining chips, or alternately human shields, for as long as the pressure of military humiliation from South Korea, the U.S., and/or Japan exists.  While the recent freedom of the U.S. journalist Roxana Saberi after being arrested for espionage in Iran is informative, it is not as instructive when adding the dimension of a truly insane leadership.

Shortly after the trial we may even see a scenario reminiscent of the Kuwait hotel scene of 1990 when a five-year old British boy named Stuart Lockwood and other hapless Britons appeared at a new conference alongside Saddam Hussein.   The dapper dictator explained to the media how in Arabic people often confused the word for hospitality with the word for shield.  Will it be long before Kim Jong-il tells us how easily we can confuse the Korean words graduate school  and  re-education camp?

[Youtube]

The good news is that the U.S. may be able to deploy their secret weapon, the U.S. civil rights campaigner Reverend Jesse Jackson, who has helped free a number of American and Western citizens from harms way.  The guy couldn’t get Americans to vote for him, and yet somehow through his magic of persuasion, he has been able to turn the likes of Milosevic, Hafez al-Assad, Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, and quite nearly, Ahmadinejad.

The bad news is that, separate from the show trial that this is certainly going to be, the U.S. also has a history of bombing regardless of Americans in captivity (see Vietnam) and just may be on an entirely different agenda (i.e. political) to send in the Raptors, Patriot missles, Aegis-based anti-ballistic missle missles, and other classified anti-weapon weapons as a demonstration of fortitude. 

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