Ms. No-prize (Pat) brings us this NYtimes editorial (free reg, blah blah) on the North Korean situation. The author's take: yes, it's rewarding bad behavior, but it puts our foot in the door, and it's only a matter of time till they fall apart all by themselves.

I think they're probably a lot closer to falling apart than we think. In the fall the Washington Post ran a couple of articles to the effect that the US shouldn't jostle North Korea too much because South Korea was in no position to pick up the pieces when they collapsed. They are of course, they just don't want to pay for it.

What was remarkable was the tone... it sounds very much like everyone in Asia knows North Korea's number is up. The famines in particular seem to have knocked a serious dent in them (two million people who had so little to eat they wasted away and died really is a horror beyond speaking... it takes weeks, even months to starve to death.) I get the feeling everyone's just watching the tree wobble, trying to figure out where it will land when it falls to make sure they're not under it.

The final death knell of any empire is when it loses control over its own bureaucracy. When the clerks start leaving their offices carrying the furniture, there's just not much left to do. Unfortunately we simply don't know enough about what's going on in there to tell how close they are to collapse.

But they will.