HONG KONG -- Flower shows, snowdrifts and clouds over Mount Paektu may help explain the continued absence of peace on the Korean Peninsula.
Apologists for South Korean President Kim Dae Jung's "sunshine policy" toward North Korea tend to ignore a crucial point. Whatever words or stance the Bush administration adopts vis-a-vis Korea may be critical, but they are not crucial. What is crucial is North Korea's inability to change a political system that inevitably sustains the Korean Cold War.
The ramifications of that system were superbly illustrated, though widely ignored outside North Korea, just before the recent visit of U.S. President George W. Bush to South Korea.