Kim Is Skeer’d

Yesterday when news broke through the North Korean state-run Yonhap News Agency casting doubt on next month's summit between Kim Jong Un and President Trump over joint Air Force Max Thunder drills taking place in South Korea, the news agency declared, "This exercise targeting us, which is being carried out across South Korea, is a flagrant challenge to the Panmunjom Declaration and an intentional military provocation running counter to the positive political development on the Korean Peninsula."

"The United States will also have to undertake careful deliberations about the fate of the planned North Korea-U.S. summit in light of this provocative military ruckus jointly conducted with the South Korean authorities.”

Today, the hermit nation decided pissing and moaning about drills, which have taken place for decades, wasn’t a suitable enough excuse and took aim at National Security Advisor John Bolton for remarks he made about “the Libya model” in April on CBS’s Face the Nation.

“I think we're looking at the Libya model of 2003, 2004. We're also looking at what North Korea itself has committed to previously and most importantly I think going back over a quarter of a century to the 1992 joint North-South denuclearization agreement where North Korea committed to give up nuclear weapons and committed to give up uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing. Now we've got other issues to discuss as well; their ballistic missile programs, their biological and chemical weapons programs, their keeping of American hostages, the abduction of innocent Japanese and South Korean citizens over the years. So, there's a lot to talk about.”

"In the case of Libya, for example, and it's a different situation in some respects...One thing that Libya did that led us to overcome our skepticism was that they allowed American and British observers into all their nuclear-related sites." (It should be noted Gaddafi allowed certification that his nuclear and chemical weapons program had halted after the U.S. invaded Iraq and deposed the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein.)

The bluster coming from Pyongyang apparently is emanating Kim Kye-gwan, a senior figure in the North Korean hierarchy who has negotiated with the U.S. before. In 2003, North Korea refused to participate in multilateral talks if Bolton was present after he labelled then leader Kim Jong-il a “tyrannical dictator”, a memory which the regime invoked on Wednesday.

"We do not hide our feelings of repugnance towards him," said Kye-gwan, warning the Trump Administration to remember the lessons of the past. 

If the “Libya model” comparison carries dark connotations for the  rogue nation, perhaps someone needs to forcefully remind them Muammar Gaddafi was killed on October 20, 2011.  Bolton left government service on December 31, 2006.

Who was POTUS? Barack Obama.  Who was Secretary of State? Hillary Clinton.  Who was Secretary of Defense? Leon Panetta.

On August 22, 2011 the cumulative efforts of the international coalition bore fruit when exuberant rebels stormed the Qaddafi compound in Tripoli. The dictator was still at large, but his reign was over.

Hillary Clinton’s old friend and political adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, who regularly emailed her political advice and vaguely sourced intelligence reports on Libya, urged her to capitalize on the dictator’s fall.

“Brava!” Blumenthal exclaimed. As always, he was thinking about Hillary’s presidential ambitions. “You must go on camera. You must establish yourself in the historical record at this moment.” She should be sure to use the phrase “successful strategy,” he wrote. “You are vindicated.”

The first news reports of Qaddafi’s capture and killing in October 2011 reached the Secretary of State in Kabul, Afghanistan where she had just sat down for a televised interview with CBS News. “Wow!” she said, looking at Huma Abedin’s BlackBerry™ before cautiously noting that the report had not yet been confirmed. But Hillary Clinton seemed impatient for a conclusion to the multinational military intervention she had done so much to organize, and in a rare unguarded moment, she dropped her aloofness.

“We came, we saw, he died!” she exclaimed.

The World’s Most Dangerous Community Organizer said the biggest mistake of his presidency was the lack of planning for the aftermath of Muammar Gaddafi’s ouster in Libya that left the country spiraling into chaos and coming under threat from violent Islamic extremists. He conceded the intervention “didn’t work”.

A year later four Americans were brutally slaughtered in Benghazi.