As I mentioned in an earlier message, anyone forecasting disintegration of North Korea is a candidate for buying a well known bridge in Brooklyn.
The fSU suffered from ruling a multi-ethnic empire whose constituent parts had long lasting national independence movements, many of them predating the Bolshevik Revolution. The disintegration largely involved those national independence movements coming to fruition, along with Boris Yeltsin's assertion of power in Russia, and whose personal political interests (as President of Russia) conveniently coincided with theirs for dissolving the fSU (to get rid of his arch rival, Gorbachev).
OTOH, North Korea is an ethnically homogeneous society with a deeply Confucian heritage that the Kims have played into hard and heavy. If there is a serious dissident movement, it is probably in the military. But the success of such a movement, if there is one, would probably not mean the dissolution of North Korea, merely the replacement of the current ruler with somebody else. But I would not (and am not) predicting such an eventuality, although certainly if North Korea does collapse, it will probably come suddenly and unexpectedly. Barkley Rosser ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ulhas Joglekar" <uvj at vsnl.com> To: "lbo-talk" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2003 10:56 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Wolfowitz Speaks Plainly: Oil Was The Prime Motivation(fwd)
> Michael Pollak wrote:
>
> > The difference between Iraq and North Korea is not that oil is harder to
> > indict. It's that people dying in North Korea aren't laid at our
doorstep
> > because we didn't invade 12 years ago.
>
> Nobody has blamed North Korea for 9/11. I think the need to reorganize
West
> Asia and North africa is seen to be vital for the US.
>
> One half of korea (South korea) is larger and economically stronger than
> North Korea. So one can expect North korean regime to disintegrate. if the
> fSU disintegrated, even more the reason to believe that NK regime would.
>
> Apart from north korea's nukes, North Korea shares a common border with
> China. How China will react to a possible war on the korran peninsula is
> unclear. Further, South korean don't like the idea of nuclear brinkmanship
> in Koreas.
>
> Attack on Iraq was obviously less risky thing to do.
>
> ulhas
>
>
>
>
>
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