A mendicant hones his knife busily on the roadside, testing its sharpness from time to time, when five passersby come along. They tell him to stop honing the knife because it's scary and dangerous. The mendicant agrees to do so if they leave chips for him to live on for the next 50 years. The five passersby call the demand exorbitant and ask him to come down to 30 years. The six then strike a deal.
Looking at the six-party talks, I can't help but see the comedy in North Korea's demanding annual economic aid equivalent to 2 billion kilowatts of electricity and 500,000 tons of fuel oil in return for closing down its nuclear facilities. In November, North Korea agreed with the other five parties to disable its nuclear facilities and list all its nuclear programs by the end of 2007 in return for 1 million tons of oil.
North Korea is an insolvent economy -- no doubt unable to feed even its own people sufficiently. How could such a country be a military threat against Japan and the United States? One should know they're using nuclear and missile ventures simply as bargaining chips for extracting ever more profitable economic aid from the "five passersby." Washington and Tokyo cannot use North Korea's missile and nuclear testing as reasons for the U.S. to maintain its vast military bases on Okinawa permanently.
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