ìTaste of Change in North Korea: Pyongyangís Experiment With Consumerism Bears Some Success,î by Bertil Lintner, Wall Street Journal, 11 May, p. A16.

Interesting story about tiny breaths of reform from deep within the unbelievably cruel Kim Jong Il regime in North Korea. Yes, the same place that denies foreign medical disaster aid to victims of the train explosion because letting in aid workers might let the world understand what a desperately sad place this incredibly disconnected country has truly become under Kimís bizarre rule.

The story describes very limited examples of consumerism being allowed in favored Pyongyangósuch a great place to live that Kim has never appeared before a crowd there. So the capital city gets to taste Singaporean beer and sees its first billboard, while the countryside suffers ìfood shortages, chronic malnutrition and decaying infrastructure.î

Three schools of thought exist on these limited reforms: they are nothing (Bush Administration), they are real but reversible (old Korea hands), or they are real and will be hard to reverse (many foreign residents living there). Being the optimist, I go with the third scenario, but believe it will take too long to wait out all the North Koreans who will die in the meantime, all the mischief Kim will seek to inflict outside his borders in the meantime (smuggling drugs, counterfeit money, etc.), and the continuing danger of WMD there.

I remember this sort of very limited reforms under Brezhnev in the USSR in the late 1960s. It was neat, and eventually it helped pave the wave for connectivity with West that came with dÈtente. But Soviet system muddled along for two more decades this way, and two more decades of Kim and his criminal negligence of his own peopleís continued suffering seems simply wrong.

I say take him down ASAP and build an East Asia NATO over his graveóone that sends China and the U.S. down the pathway toward strategic partnership.