By Kim Myong Chol

“Kim Jong-il will do whatever he deems necessary for the fatherland and the people by all means. He is doing what he can do to do what I desire and solve what concerns me in a bid to please me.” Kim Il-sung, paramount leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) from its founding in 1948 until his death in 1994.

“Mighty military power is essential in guaranteeing efforts to build a strong economy and improve people’s living standards when enemies are watching for an opportunity.” Kim Jong-il, current DPRK leader.

TOKYO – As 2012 approaches, the supreme leader of the DPRK, Kim Jong-il, has established himself as the most peerless national hero in Korea’s 5,000-year history – a “super” Kim Il-sung.

All indications are that Kim Jong-il, who turns 68 today (February 16), will succeed in catapulting his ancestral Land of the Morning Calm – already a legitimate space and nuclear power – to the long-elusive status of mighty and prosperous country by the target year of 2012 – something it has achieved without outside aid and in the absence of a peace treaty with the United States. The year 2012 marks the centenary of the birth of founding father Kim Il-sung.

Kim Jong-il’s success in leading the country explains why two national leaders, former United States president Bill Clinton and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, flew into Pyongyang in 2009 for meetings with him that practically nullified US-initiated United Nations sanctions on North Korea.

The North Korean leader has full confidence that his people will cross the threshold of economic prosperity through his military-first policy, after for years politely turning down offers of economic assistance and amid post-war austerity that followed the Korean War (1950-1953) and US-crafted UN sanctions.

What distinguishes Kim Jong-il from previous national heroes is the fact that he towers as a “super” Kim Il-sung. The Christian Science Monitor reported in its in its January 2007 article “How Kim Jong Il controls a nation” that some experts believe “Kim, in his own way, may be shrewder than the father who built the nation.”

“Kim was in many ways dealt a weaker hand than his father, but he has played it better,” said Brian Myers, a North Korea specialist at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea, told the Western newspaper.

The primary reason why the DPRK leader has become a peerless national hero is his flawless reconciliation of two conflicting key policies: one is his much-touted military-first policy, which is intended to jealously guard the national security interests of the DPRK, and the other bread-and-butter policies designed to meet the rising aspirations of the DPRK’s hard-working people.

It is hard to imagine anyone who could play the role of national leader with greater success than Kim Jong-il, a leader who doubles as supreme commander and architect of economic prosperity in a decade marked by nuclear blackmail and stringent sanctions by the superpower US.

Five facts qualify Kim Jong-il as the greatest of all Korea’s peerless heroes and as an iron-willed, brilliant commander:

First, Kim Jong-il’s record of successive bloodless victories over a trigger-happy superpower US – the most powerful military power in history. He has kept the ancestral Korean Peninsula safely out of devastating war when everyone believed the Far Eastern land would become a second Afghanistan or Iraq.

America’s repeated cave-ins to Kim Jong-il’s North Korea were discussed in a lengthy op-ed in the Washington Post on April 26, 2008, headlined “Yielding to North Korea too often”. Its authors were Ambassador Winston Lord and Leslie H Gelb, president emeritus and board senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Top nuclear weapons expert Dr Siegfried S Hecker notes that the US has allowed the Kim Jong-il administration to “cross with impunity every red line” the Americans have drawn, to become a major nuclear weapon state.

This reiterates the message of the New York Times’ February 20, 2005, article by David Sanger, “America Loses Bite”, which quotes a senior Bush administration official as saying, “It’s counterproductive to draw a red line for North Korea because they will only view it as a challenge … In North Korea’s case, red lines may be what Kim Jong-il sees in his rear-view mirror.”

Hecker, the former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, writes in the Winter 2010 volume of Daedalus, the quarterly journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: “Not only have we not been able to negotiate effectively, but also we have allowed Pyongyang to cross with impunity every red line we have drawn. The US negotiating position has also been hampered by our inability to sustain consistent policies through transitions in administrations. Pyongyang has taken advantage of our political divisions to play a weak hand with success. Unless we learn from the lessons of North Korea, others may be able to do the same.”

The second factor that has made Kim Jong-il a peerless national leader is his buildup of North Korea into a fortress, the fourth most powerful nuclear power after the US, Russia and China. With more than 300 nuclear warheads in its arsenal, the Korean People’s Army has a crack global strike force and a fleet of thermonuclear-tipped intercontinental-ballistic missiles which can reach the whole of the mainland USA. It is no exaggeration to say that Supreme Commander Kim Jong-il of Fortress DPRK is a click away from a Day-after-tomorrow scenario of torching the Metropolitan USA.

The absence of a peace treaty between North Korea and the US carries every risk that, through design, accident, or miscalculation, an untoward incident in Korea could promptly erupt into a DPRK-US war. The war would be fought on the US mainland with the country’s skyscraper skyline collapsing in towering infernos. There is little doubt that the mainland US is ill-prepared for a nuclear exchange, whereas the well-disciplined entire population of North Korea can be evacuated underground with less than 20 minutes notice. The Americans will realize too late what it is like to be fight a war on their soil.

Two key officials of the Obama administration acknowledge in public that North Korea is a fully fledged nuclear state. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates confirmed in the January/February 2009 edition of Foreign Affairs magazine that “North Korea has built several nuclear bombs”. In her February 7, 2010, interview with CNN, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called North Korea “a nuclear-armed state”.

Kim Jong-il’s third success is his distinguished and dedicated statesmanship, which is credited with turning North Korea around from Korean War-like difficulties of the first half of the 1990s and presiding over its emergence as a nuclear-armed state and increasingly wealthy nation.

The DPRK today is a far cry from what it was in the 1990s. With its economy in much better shape, North Korea joined the elite space club in 1998 and the nuclear club in 2006, while emerging a leading producer of computer and cell-phone programs and TV animation films such as Pocahontas and The Lion King.

A US spy satellite might soon fall to the earth, caught off guard when it tries to take night images of well-lit North Korean cities, such as Pyongyang, Hamheung, Wonsan, and Chungjin, since a host of new power stations are in operation and domestically produced LED lights are in use across the country.

A Financial Times report on February 3 quoted Khaled Bichara, chief executive of Orascom, operator of the mobile network in North Korea as saying: “They are really looking to have, by 2012, a much stronger economy. We believe that mobiles and eventually international communication will definitely be part of this…we believe that this [3G-cell-phone] business will have customers in the millions within the next four or five years.” The British daily revealed that North Korea has already a “surprising number of foreign investors”.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported in September 2009 that the towering 330-meter tall Ryugyong Hotel that dominates the Pyongyang skyline “has come back to life with a facade of shiny glass windows affixed to one side of the concrete monolith”, as part of a campaign to try to turn the state into a “great and prosperous nation” by 2012.

Less than 20 years ago, given the demise of the socialist camp, the passing away of the legendary founding father Kim Il-sung and a series of natural disasters, including floods, and overt and covert American attempts to engineer the collapse of the country, almost every expert outside North Korea predicted its eventual implosion from economic degradation.

The September 26, 1993, Washington Post carried a prediction by the then deputy defense secretary, William J Perry: “This is a government which has clearly failed, and in my opinion is going to collapse some time in the next few years.”

However, the Financial Times on March 17, 2005, quoted Gary Samore, a non-proliferation expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London who served in the Clinton administration, as saying in exasperation. “People have been betting on the collapse of the North Korean regime for 15 years now, and it hasn’t happened.”

Fourth, what underlies Kim Jong-il’s popularity is balancing his military-first policy with his populist Korea-first policy. This has been exemplified by his all-too familiar field guide and tours – potent evidence of the accountability and transparency of his policy conduct.

Kim Jong-il visited more than 200 places throughout North Korea in 2009, according to a February 12, 2010 Korean Central News Agency report.

The above-quoted Christian Science Monitor article wrote:

One side of Kim only now emerging is how closely he stays in touch with the people. The Dear Leader is on the road, working the crowds, a great deal. Studies of Korean media show Kim averages about 150 local visits a year. He may not make live televised speeches, but he’s at a school, a factory, a farm, a military base – every three days. (He shows up at a military unit once a week.) This suggests a populist streak.

“When someone you worship comes to your factory, it’s a personal connection. We tend to overlook this simple fact,” says [Alexander Mansourov of the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu], who has tracked Kim’s appearances. “Kim knows the local leaders, the opinion makers, the local cadres. He’s not in a fishbowl. He may be a dictator, but he’s also a populist.”

This popular identification with Kim Jong-il’s leadership, which is misrepresented in the West as personality cult, goes a long way to explaining why the North Korean leader was able to keep his population united, resilient and mentally sane, while living “under the shadow of nuclear threat for longer than any other nation”.

Dr Gavin McCormack, a professor at the Australian National University, noted in a op-ed in the January 8, 2003, issue of the Age: “After facing for half a century the threat of extermination, it would be surprising if North Korea did not now show signs of neurosis and instability.”

Kim Jong-il’s fifth and last success comes in the distinguished leadership qualities he has shown in weaning the former allies Russia and China from the American fold to court the friendship of a nuclear-powered North Korea again.

A Rockefeller-funded 1997 DPRK report was prepared by Russian analysts as a joint project between the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and the Russian Center for Contemporary International Problems, located at the Diplomatic Academy, Moscow. The report notes:

Thus, American strategy failed completely North Korea responded with strong countermeasures, including departure from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Faced with Pyongyang’s toughness, the Americans got scared and made numerous concessions.

This line of Russian “analysis” concludes with suggestions that Moscow should learn from the North Korean experience and respond to the expansion of NATO and other unfriendly policies of the United States with strong countermeasures. The Kremlin is advised to abandon all arms control agreements, conclude military alliances with friendly Arab regimes, and preserve a strategic partnership with the DPRK.

Reuters reported on November 6, 2009:

Last month, Premier Wen Jiabao courted [North Korea’s] secretive top leader, Kim Jong-il, with a visit and President Hu Jintao hosted one of Kim’s confidantes and invited Kim to visit.

“‘China remains worried about North Korea’s atomic weapons and wants to revive nuclear disarmament talks,” John Park, an expert on ties between the two countries at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington DC, told the news agency. “But recently China has focused more on healing bruised ties with the North, driven by a belief that Pyongyang appears set on keeping its small nuclear arsenal for a long time, and that US policy remains uncertain.

“I think the Chinese did an assessment and realized that the US approach is ineffective, so they had to recalibrate policy toward North Korea,” Park said.

Kim Myong Chol is author of a number of books and papers in Korean, Japanese and English on North Korea, including Kim Jong-il’s Strategy for Reunification. He has a PhD from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s Academy of Social Sciences and is often called an “unofficial” spokesman of Kim Jong-il and North Korea.

(Copyright 2010 Kim Myong Chol.)