Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

SEOUL — The job of a journalist for the North Korean propaganda machine surely must be one of the more fun-filled gigs in the media business. Imagine the laughs the writers up there must be having as they dream up fresh turns of phrase with which to pillory South Korea’s President Lee Myung-Bak.

“The mischief made by rat-like Lee Myung-Bak reminds one of a rabid dog barking towards the sky,” goes one of the lines churned out by Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). Then, as if the “rabid dog” image were not compelling enough, the next sentence mangles the metaphor by calling Lee’s utterances “no more than squeaks made by the rat before being killed by all people for its wrong doings.”

KCNA writers take special pleasure in coming up with new ways to let readers know the bad things that will befall “rat-like Lee and his group” as they “meet the most miserable and disgraceful end for doing such mischief in rat holes as defaming the sun.”

The great defamation was to besmirch “the Day of the Sun” — the great day celebrating the centennial on April 15 of the birth of Kim Il-Sung. The North Korean machine can’t seem to get over Lee’s practical words of advice — that the North give up the collective farming that’s throttling production — and his reminder that the money invested in the birthday party and the launch two days earlier of the rocket that plunged into the Yellow Sea would have fed the North’s hungry people for years.

“The time has come when we should show in actuality the might of our armed forces to the Lee Myung-Bak swarm of rats hell-bent on hideous wrongdoings,” an officer named Kim Myong-Chol is quoted as saying. “I am eager to join the special action group to cut off the head of rattish Myung-Bak.”

In case beheading the South Korean president will not suffice, the officer pleaded to be able “to bury those disgusting rats in the South Sea once a sacred war starts.” But what’s stopping him? A mere word from Kim Jong-Un, it seems, is all the brave soldiers need. “Supreme Commander, please give us an order,” the officer begged.

While chortling over the florid prose wafting from the North, Pyongyang-watchers are less than amused by the implications of whatever the North may have in mind. Are “special action” teams really on alert awaiting “an order” from Kim Jong-Un to go to war or at least to stage a surprise attack reminiscent of those two incidents in the Yellow Sea in 2010 — the sinking of the navy ship the Cheonan and the shelling of Yeongpyeong Island — which together killed 50 people?

The betting here is, yes, the rhetoric is more than mere rhetoric, especially when accompanied by the reference to “the order” that Kim Jong-Un has the power to pass on down a chain of command that’s been carefully reorganized while he was confirmed as both first secretary of the Workers’ Party and first chairman of the National Defense Commission.

The name that counts most is Choe Ryeong-Hae, a civilian who vaulted to the top of the military heap as a vice marshal in charge of the general political bureau and vice chairman of the party’s central military commission under Kim Jong-Un. Actual orders, however, have to go via Vice Marshal Ri Yong-Ho, chief of the general staff of the Korean People’s Army, meaning all 1.2 million members of the armed forces, who’s also vice chairman of the central military commission.

Ri seemed to be engaging in more than idle threats when he suggested yet another way to annihilate the apostates from the South, vowing on the 80th anniversary of the armed forces to “cut off the windpipes” of those guilty of inciting “sacred war”. In the same speech, he appeared to talking about the North’s development of a long-range missile that could theoretically deliver a nuclear warhead as far as the US west coast when he claimed the North in “a single blow” could deal a devastating defeat on the United States.

How the career soldiers get along with the civilians is far from clear, but Choe is believed especially close to Pyongyang’s power couple, Kim Kyong-Hui, younger sister of the late Kim Jong-Il, and her husband, Jang Song-Thaek, both of whom were named generals by Kim well before he died in December. Auntie Kyong-Hui is a party secretary while Uncle Jang is a vice chairman of the National Defense Commission, the apparatus that controls all the ministries.

While no one seems to have a real fix on the power games these people play among each other, no one doubts the leadership in Pyongyang has something very unpleasant in mind regardless of whether Kim Jong-Un is the real leader or he’s ruling behind a clique of faithful factotums who owe their power to his father’s dying wishes.

“We’re going to see more provocations, a nuclear test or something more conventionally directed,” said Victor Cha, who served on the National Security Council under former president George W. Bush.
Cha, who runs the Korea program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, had no doubt the South Koreans would respond forcefully to attack. Memories of the failure to answer in kind to the shelling of Yeongpyeong Island or the sinking of the Cheonan run deep.

“The next time they do something conventional, said Cha at a forum here sponsored by the Asan Institute, an enormously wealthy think tank financed by elements of the Hyundai empire, “the ROK [South Korea, the Republic of Korea] is not going to sit back and take it.”

Intelligence analyst Ken Gause, author of books and articles on the North Korean leadership, is also convinced the North’s military planners are up to something. “In the past couple days the special operations command” — a new term to Pyongyang-watchers — “has been very very belligerent,” he said at the same forum.

Gause believes “the idea of the dignity and sovereignty of North Korea” is the motivating factor. “I expect we’ll see provocations over the summer” — possibly another incident in the Yellow Sea or a cyber-attack or a nuclear test,” he said. “They do need to make up for the missile failure.”

North Korea also has more practical military and political reasons for wanting to conduct the test in defiance of diplomatic efforts to persuade its new leader, Kim Jong-Un, to call off the project.

“There’s a military imperative,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, a former U.S. State Department official now with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. The North’s first two underground nuclear tests, in October 2006 and again in May 2009, he said, “did not go very well.”

Although North Korea did manage to explode nuclear devices on both occasions, they were so small as to have been viewed by scientists elsewhere as a possible failure.

North Korea’s top priority now is to be able to miniaturize a warhead in order to send it to a target on a missile rather than drop it as a bomb from a plane. “They want to get something small enough to fit on a Rodong,” said. Fitzpatrick, also at the Asan forum.

Yet another issue is the need to convince the North Korean people that Kim Jong-Un is a strong leader, capable of controlling a military establishment with 1.2 million troops while solidifying his power over the country. “Having failed on the missile,” said Fitzpatrick, “they’ve got to do something that goes boom” — and provides more fodder for KCNA journalists to come up with ways for snuffing the South Korean “rabid dog” and “rat” whom they love to hate.

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