Eventually, China comes to the table on North Korea
Saturday, March 25, 2006 at 6:33PM And we hope Bob Zoellick has them ready for the right conversation...
ARTICLE: "China Warns Lenders on Influx of Fake $100 Bills," by Gordon Fairclough, Wall Street Journal, 24 March 2006, p. B4.
The supernotes are coming! The supernotes are coming!
North Korea's efforts on top-flight counterfeiting of U.S. currency is starting to ring some warning bells even in China, the main target, quick frankly, of such activities. Why? Easiest system to penetrate and fool.
Beijing will continue to get screwed by Pyongyang until it grows up on the subject and begins to realize that what Kim costs them financially is not outweighed by what tidbits he may offer them diplomatically.
Meanwhile the U.S. lays the groundwork for criminal proceedings against Kim. To hell with waiting on the UN and let's get off the WMD fixation. We didn't nail Capone on his guns and murder, but on his tax evasion. So let's begin the U.S. legal proceedings on Kim right now, so when we eventually bring that freakish little monster to trial we've amassed all the right evidence.
You know, they hang economic criminals of this sort in Beijing--regularly.
Reader Comments (2)
"To hell with waiting on the UN and let's get off the WMD fixation. We didn't nail Capone on his guns and murder, but on his tax evasion."
Hmmm, this is an interesting take on this. Are you honestly suggesting that simple counterfeiting charges would be enough to justify deposing a head of state? It seems elegant, to be sure, but I would see two issues:
* Does either the ICC or world Court even have jurisdiction over something like that? If not, who does?
* What message does that send about human rights if we ignore mass famine, torture, et al in favor of the "easy way."?
Don't get me wrong - as someone who rode herd in the stampede to Baghdad in '03, I've no desire to repeat that experience in the Korean peninsula against someone who actually has WMDs. I'm just not sure if the quick-fix here established the kind of new rule-set we want.
It would be rather cheap to hire some PRC economists/legal experts to make a study of how much N. Korean counterfeiting is costing the PRC and then hire a few programmers to make a nice java counter that breaks that down in terms of total cost, the cost so far this year, cost per individual, cost per family, etc. It would be redoing the old style US "debt clock" schtick from the 80s which worked quite well at the time and roused a significant level of support for cutting spending.
We're probably talking about a propaganda piece (in the best sense of the word) that harnesses chinese nationalism and xenophobia in a way that the leadership would be very leery about fighting. It also would be a good candidate for being a self-propagating meme that would generate follow-on efforts from the more inventive over there. The question really is whether anybody would want to pay the ~$10k to pull the trigger on this sort of thing?