Mario,

No, they've actually been learning. See Bush's recent admission that "mistakes were made" in Iraq. Though probably the understatement of the year, it's a rather big step for him and his administration. Evidently dire straits will make anyone do anything.

David, your comments about the NK elite are interesting -- I hadn't heard/read anything about the power structure there any more complicated than 'It's crazy, Kim Jong Il owns everything,' etc.

Can you recommend any books/sources for further reading? I would love to learn more.

The North Korean elite have the mentality of gangsters. They are a very rough group of men. Kim Jong Il cannot lead them by being a nice fellow. He has to keep impressing them with audacity and harshness--real audacity and harshness. In that context you cannot fake it and survive. But also members of the North Korean elite understand that their regime is not stable. It has to be kept alive artificially, through savage repression, censorship and infusions from abroad of aid and profits from weapons trafficking and drug smuggling.

The combination of these two things--the need to impress and the instability--produces the erratic behavior which is typical of them. It is key to understanding their behavior.

"Of course, Messrs Carter and Perry may just be playing the bad cop to Bush administration's good cop, for a change."

That would require this administration to have some kind of a functional brain, which it has evidentely lacked so far.