North Korea's tugging at our chain. Again.

Every time North Korea decides the rest of the world has forgetton it exists, Kim Jong Il, its Daffy Duck-obsessed leader, does something crazy to get attention. Yesterday, it was detonating a powerful explosive device equivalent to 550 tons of TNT that it claimed was a nuclear bomb in the barren northeastern part of the country. (I personally believe that it's far more likely that they detonated 550 tons of TNT, but that's just me.) By doing this, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (three lies in one name!) calls the bluff of the United States, which has said it will not tolerate North Korean nuclear power. Kim Jong Il knows we don't have the cojones to invade.

Obviously we shouldn't invade. So what should we do? We should stop sending North Korea aid through the UN. Every dollar we send in aid is another dollar the DPRK can spend on weaponry. If the UN stopped its aid to North Korea, the government would have to feed its people or face a revolution.

The immediate response to this argument is that stopping aid to North Korea (which is sent mainly in the form of food) would precipitate a humanitarian crisis. The people that make this argument evidently fail to recognize that every day that the DPRK continues as the government of the northern half of the Korean Peninsula is another day in a humanitarian crisis that has been going on since the government was established in 1948.