The credibility of the US government and the War in Iraq

The credibility of the US government is so much in doubt in the context of the Iraq War and the public discourse about the threats to individual liberty that have come about in the context of the so-called war on terrorism that it is hard to credit anything coming out of an organization that was created and is funded by that government. Nevertheless, Andrew S. Natsios's account of the famine that was experienced in North Korea in the 1990s, published by the U.S. Institute of Peace, which was created and is funded by Congress, gives a wide range of information about multiple causes of the food shortages that North Koreans suffered and the multiple motives of their and other governments' response to them. Natsios deals with the reasons that the famine could have occurred and how North Korea and the international community responded to it. A key argument is that North Korea's political environment and leadership were most responsible for the impact of the famine and that this fact, together with the profound reluctance of the resident regime to change its approach to economic management and public administration, is the principal reason that the future of North Korea's infrastructure--thus the well-being of North Koreans--continues to be in doubt.

The question that Natsios says his report raises for American public policy is "how to balance moral values against political, diplomatic, and geostrategic interests" (2000, p. xi). He says that is problematic because "what may seem t

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n (2000, p. xvii). This was especially the case in North Korea. Kim Il Sung, the country's previous and venerated dictator, appears to have manipulated agricultural policy for years with a view toward pushing North Korea in the direction of large-scale industrialized, chemically based farming to support the nationalistic Utopian ideal. The result was disastrous for the land and crop yields and amplified by the sudden shock to the land of retransforming industrial practices into labor-intensive natural farming; everything led to a massive drop in production (pp. 12-15). To shore up the "wisdom" of such policies, Kim Jong Il, his son, seems to have made a practice of concealing the results of bad policy and of ordering maldistribution of food in a way that resulted in many starvation deaths among the people. This happened even before the death of Kim Il Sung, whose failing health, particularly eyesight, enabled the younger Kim to assume de facto power. In 1994, not much before his death, the elder Kim was "shocked" at "reports of starvation deaths in the remote provinces" (Natsios, 2000, p. 167). Still, younger Kim took power and continues to hold it today. Until 1995, when a big flood fell on North Korea, the country sought food s

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