Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...diplomat Daniel Jackson, "Not only do you have to enjoy banging your head against a wall, you have to feel vaguely guilty about it on those rare occasions when you don't, in fact, have a headache." With the dramatic, surprise trip by U.S. envoy Christopher Hill to Pyongyang after the regime's promise about nuclear inspection - all part of a recent slew of backing-and-forthing between the Hermit Kingdom and the rest of the world - there is a lot of head-banging nowadays among that small band of masochists...
...back in February at the so called Six Party Talks in Beijing: allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor the shutdown of the controversial Yongbyon reactor. That has helped put the optimists in the Kim club in the ascendant. Indeed, Hill's trip to Pyongyang on Thursday, the first high-level mission by a U.S. official there in more than four years, seemed designed to take advantage of the positive opening. A statement from Hill read, "It is critical for the six parties to make up for lost time to restore momentum to achieving our agreed common...
...then, a few years later, sent its Secretary of State to toast Kim with champagne. Early in the Bush Administration, it was back to war preparations and talk of a "strangulation strategy"; now, again, the full diplomatic embrace is on. U.S. envoy Christopher Hill made a surprise trip to Pyongyang on Thursday - the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the North in five years - in order to "move the process forward" and "make up for lost time" in the race to denuclearize the Korean peninsula, according to a State Department statement...
...process, they believe he will live up to his side of the February agreement - "albeit in slow motion," as one diplomat says - as long as the U.S. and its allies do the same. In this view, Kim can say to his cronies in the party leadership in Pyongyang that he has ensured their place atop North Korea, and "got a bunch of economic aid in the process, so we can afford to give up the plutonium program," says one diplomat in the region who watches and deals with North Korea full time...
...That's problem number one. If North Korea ever attacked a U.S. or South Korean base in the South, Pyongyang would be incinerated in response, and the reunification of the peninsula will have begun. Al-Qaeda, however, isn't a country; it's a global terrorist group. It had something of a return address in Afghanistan, but doesn't now. According to U.S. military intelligence, it has cells in more than 70 countries, and at this point there seems to be no lack of radicals from the Islamic world to take the place of al-Qaeda fighters who are killed...