But back to North Korea. The country is the ultimate dictatorship allegedly led by an absolute psychopath. How many macho tough guy dictators would like to go through life known as "the Dear Leader"? The title sounds more like something from a children's fairy tale than an appropriate form of address subjects of this brutal tyrany are expected to repeat ad infinitum and with a straight face when referencing the dictator. "The Dear Leader has ordered your execution at high noon...". "The Dear Leader demands that all grain and meat rations be halved again...". "The Dear Leader hereby orders the immediate arrest and imprisonment without trial of anyone suspected of hoarding food...". A "Dear Leader" indeed.
Like many other tyrants of the worst breed, North Korea's ruling thug keeps his power purely by cult of personality. Those who surround themselves with people who flatter and parasitically seek to please eventually convince themselves they are infallible. Such is the case in North Korea. The "Dear Leader's" father the "Great Leader" also ruled according to this system. First the ruler's lackeys convince the ruler and themselves the ruler is essentially divine; then the ruler convinces the subjects of that divinity.
When the cult of personality and the habitual process of misleading, decieving, and cohercing the subjects are complete, the next step towards the goal of unimpeded domination is to do the same thing to other heads of state and government and multinational organizations. North Korea's most recent attempt at this involves the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN, and the US.
Intelligence sources have long indicated that North Korea is well on its way to establishing a nuclear weapons/WMD program. IAEA inspectors visited the country during the 1990s to investigate the acquisition of various "dual usage" components - equipment and chemicals that can be used for acceptable civilian purposes and/or for nuclear weapons/WMD purposes. The IAEA believed North Korea used these components for dual purposes, but substantive findings of the inspections were inconclusive. A rather unworkable deal was done through the IAEA and the UN by which North Korea promised to halt its nuclear weapons/WMD programs development, and the US would oversee the sale and installation of several "water-safe nuclear reactors" which could only be used to generate nuclear electricity. Of course anybody with slight technical skill and knowledge of nuclear reactors could easily alter this "water-safe" adaptation, and North Korea could use the reactors for any purpose - the least of these would be generating electricity for homes and businesses. These "water-safe" reactors were shipped at approximately the same time the US government serious speculated about ways to make "safer guns and safer bullets", which of itself indicates the complete naivity of the Clinton administration.
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