North Korea fires missile

Just two weeks ago, an Onion headline screamed: N. Korea Wondering What It Has To Do To Attract U.S. Military Attention.

"What does it take to get a few F-16s or naval warships deployed to the Yellow Sea?" North Korean president Kim Jong Il asked Monday. "In the past month and a half, we've expelled U.N. nuclear inspectors, withdrawn from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, restarted a mothballed nuclear complex capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium, and threatened to resume missile tests. You'd think that would be enough to get a measly Marine division or two on standby in the Pacific, but apparently not."

Kim said his nation is "way more deserving" of B-52 deployment than Iraq.

Very funny, as is the norm with the Onion, yet brilliantly illustrative of a real-world phenomenon -- a nuclear-armed belligerant North Korean regime completely ignored by an Iraq-obsessed Bush, yet desperate for attention.

And North Korea is still desperate for that attention:

North Korea Launches Missile

North Korea fired an anti-ship missile that landed in the sea between the Korean Peninsula and Japan on Monday, a South Korean Defense Ministry official said.

The Seoul government was investigating whether Monday's launch was a test of a new missile or whether it was the firing of an old missile as part of the North Korean military's ongoing winter training, said the official, who asked to be identified only as Maj. Chun.

Posted February 24, 2003 05:33 PM | Comments (17)