Word: ils
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...nuclear device. "He is very knowledgeable about what goes on in the international scene," South Korean President Kim Dae Jung recently told TIME. And yet Kim apparently is convinced that he will someday go to war with the U.S. According to Kim Hyun Shik, a former professor at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, the North Korean leader watched the Gulf War closely and even ordered a film produced that analyzed the weak points of the U.S. military. The conclusion: Iraq lost because it lacked the will to attack U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and explode gas and oil pipelines...
...failed to devise a strategy to thwart Kim's ambitions before he realizes them. Many Korea watchers in Washington say the White House's rhetorically bellicose approach toward Pyongyang--underlined recently by Bush's declaration that "I loathe Kim Jong Il," made to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward--has heightened the regime's paranoia about a U.S. attack and accelerated its nuclear rush. Says Derek Mitchell, who worked on Asia policy in the Clinton Pentagon: "People talk about North Korea being crazy, but it's not. It's purely rational for a nation with no assets being threatened...
...JONG IL LOVES HIS movies. Not just the more than 15,000 he's collected on videotape. His movies. Movies of him. The North Korean ruler is trailed not by the tight video crews that sometimes accompany Western leaders but by a film team straight out of 1930s back-lot Hollywood, armed with spotlights and huge reel-to-reel Panaflex cameras so loud they sound like insects feeding...
...world's leaders, Kim, 60, may be the most strange, despite his effort in recent years to appear less so. Before he ascended to power, when his predecessor and father Kim Il Sung died in 1994, he was regarded outside North Korea as something of a joke--a pampered playboy who, with his Mao-era leisure suits, puffed-up coiffure and shoe lifts, would likely falter in his father's footsteps. Though he's maintained his singular sense of style, Kim has lessened his reputation for kookiness. The first time the outside world got a good look...
Culture was Kim's first official portfolio. After earning a political-economy degree from Pyongyang's Kim Il Sung University, he was put in charge of arts and cultural affairs for the Central Committee of the Korean Workers' Party. He took his brief to an extreme, ordering the kidnapping of a South Korean director and his actress wife to assist in developing the North Korean film industry. When they escaped eight years later, they related that at a first meeting, Kim had asked, "What do you think of my physique? Small as a midget's dropping, aren...