Is North Korea Backing Down?

I don’t think so:

Coming under united international pressure, Kim Jong Il reportedly apologized for the Oct. 9 nuclear detonation and said he wouldn’t test any more bombs.

That doesn’t mean Kim can afford to show any weakness to a home crowd who live in an officially enforced siege mentality and are long accustomed to blaming their desperate living conditions on outside forces — mainly the United States.

“No matter how the U.S. imperialists try to stifle and isolate our republic … victory will be on the side of justice,” Choe Thae Bok, secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, told a rally of more than 100,000 people, according to the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.

The North also held firm to its demand that the U.S. lift financial restrictions that have strangled Pyongyang’s access to banks abroad as a condition to return to disarmament talks.

Washington has repeatedly rejected that request, and appears even more unlikely to alter its hard-line approach to the communist nation in the wake of the nuclear test — leaving the potential for the crisis to escalate further.

“If the U.S. makes a concession to some degree, we will also make a concession to some degree, whether it be bilateral talks or six-party talks,” Kim was quoted as telling a Chinese envoy, South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo daily reported.

North Korea is just implementing one of the oldest terrorist tactics in the book and just like with the terrorists the media is doing everything it can to aid Kim Jong-il. Kim Jong-il is not apologizing he is just trying to appear conciliatory to save face for China, but also to make the US seem unreasonable because he says they are the ones threatening North Korea and implementing the financial sanctions on him thus causing the nuclear crisis. If the US would just be conciliatory like him and give up the sanctions they would return to talks.

This approach is much like the terrorists in Iraq when they say they want to negotiate with the US, but the US won’t negotiate with them or meet any of their concessions in order to end the insurgency, but at the same time the terrorists are launching death squads to kill civilians and planting as many IEDs as possible to influence next month’s US mid-term election. The terrorists do this because they want to make the US seem unreasonable by not negotiating with them when in fact the terrorists have no intention of negotiating with the US to begin with. This tactic is about as old as the ceasefire tactic used by terrorists when they need time to rearm, reman, and resupply themselves which the media always seems to aid them with as well. Tora Bora, Fallujah, Lebanon ring any bells?

I say the media is complicit in this because they rarely challenge these claims. For example in the AP article I linked to there was no mention that the US financial sanctions on North Korea have nothing to do with the nuclear crisis; they were implemented due to North Korean counterfeiting and money laundering. This just seems like an important piece of information that the AP article just some how left out.

Than again if the media actually challenged the claims of terrorists and dictators than that would effect their access to them; how else would you be able to get video of US soldiers being killed by enemy snipers to air on the news in order to increase ratings?