Word: ils
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hear tell, the man at the center of the unfolding North Korean nuclear crisis, Pyongyang's "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il, is a ruthless mastermind. Earlier this month, another American newsweekly put him on the cover under the label "Dr. Evil." The message: he may look bizarre, but Kim Jong Il is deadly formidable...
...This is not just one magazine's judgment. China's Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan calls Kim "quick-witted." Outgoing South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his 2000 summit with Kim Jong Il, praises him as a "man of insight." And the Dear Leader impressed former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as "very decisive and practical and serious...
...With his widely reported virtuoso skills on the Internet and his supposedly intimate knowledge of everything from South Korean politics to French wine, Kim Jong Il sounds like a brilliant villain straight out of a James Bond flick?and a nightmare opponent for the U.S. and its allies. There's just one thing wrong with all this buzz about Kim Jong Il's devilish cunning: it's belied by elementary and obvious fact. These days, he's merely using the playbook of his father, Kim Il Sung, from the previous nuclear confrontation in the early 1990s...
...Il Sung?North Korea's "eternal president," according to its constitution?has been dead for eight and a half years: he's no longer so good at thinking on his feet. Kim Jong Il, for his part, is alive and well but prone to egregious lapses of judgment, especially in a crunch. That is what makes the present crisis so very scary: not the high caliber of America's adversary, but precisely the opposite...
Frustrated negotiators dealing with North Korea can take comfort: one foreigner, at least, got what he wanted from Kim Jong Il's regime. And it only took 30 years...