The brinksman
From Brian Todd
CNN
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The United States and North Korea appear to be heading down a familiar road, with tensions at a high level.
This time, North Korea is boasting it has nuclear weapons, pulling away from negotiations and demanding one-on-one dialogue with the United States.
The Bush administration is in no mood for this dance.
"The problem is, we've been down that road before. The 1994 agreed framework was the road that we went down before. It was a bilateral approach between the U.S. and North Korea. North Korea violated that agreement and continued to pursue nuclear weapons," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Friday.
Once again, Kim Jong Il, the reclusive leader of a hermetic, bankrupt nation who's accused of allowing millions of his own people to starve to death, is forcing the world's only superpower to worry, calculate and react.
"That brinkmanship for the most part has worked for him. He's crossed red line after red line," says Jerrold Post, a former profiler for the CIA.
How far will he go? This is a man who cut his political teeth from the father of modern North Korea -- his own father, Kim Il Sung, himself a brutally repressive dictator.
Before his father's death in 1994, Kim Jong Il was known as a fast-driving, chain-smoking, binge-drinking playboy who many thought was crazy.
Since his father's death, observers say he's cut way back on the smoking, drinking and erratic behavior but still has some eccentricities.
"He recruited attractive young girls of junior high school age to take part in joy brigades. And the joy brigades' function was to help in relaxation to his senior officials. He lives in this seven-story pleasure palace. He has this collection of 15 to 20,000 movies," Post says.
And, U.S. officials say, he once ordered the kidnapping of a South Korean movie star and her director husband.
He's only 5 feet 2 inches tall but wears 4-inch lifts in his shoes.
While some think of Kim Jong Il as ruthless tyrant, one journalists disagrees.
"Really everybody who's met with Kim Jong Il, and there've been quite a few -- South Koreans, Americans, Russians, North Koreans who've since defected -- they all come out saying this man knows what he's doing. He's not crazy. He might be somewhat emotional. He might be somewhat eccentric. But crazy? Absolutely not," says Peter Maass, a writer who has profiled Kim Jong Il for the New York Times Magazine.
