Stardate 20030427.1815

(On Screen): It's often noted that the leaders of many autocratic regimes seem to say and do things which suggests that they perceive themselves to be more powerful and more important than they truly are. Is it bluff? Is it knowledge of secret strength? Is it insanity, or arrogance, or posturing?

Sometimes it's delusion. And as a general rule, the more brutal the regime the more likely it is that the leader will be out of touch. This article includes interviews with some Iraqi officers describing why it was that their units didn't put up as much of a struggle (or often no struggle at all) and points out an example of this kind of thing:

The accounts of Khalidi and other officers also make it clear that military morale began eroding long before the first U.S. troops crossed the Kuwaiti border on March 20. Compounding the problems of low morale and poor leadership — the Republican Guard was led by Saddam Hussein’s youngest son, Qusay, a civilian with no military experience — was a culture of self-deception in which soldiers and officers consistently lied to one another about everything from the condition of their equipment to the presence of U.S. forces inside Baghdad

"There has been practically no air defense since 1991," when Iraq was defeated in the Persian Gulf War and forced to withdraw from Kuwait, said Gen. Ghanem Abdullah Azawi, an engineer in the Iraqi army’s air defense command. "Nobody rebuilt it. We didn’t receive any new weapons." TV broadcasts boasting of scientists' modifications to Iraqi air defense missiles were "lies, all lies," he said. "People were lying to Saddam, and Saddam was believing them or deceiving himself."

Whenever anyone would ask about the state of their equipment, "we would always say, 'very good,' " Khalidi said. "It was all lies, because if you told the truth ... you’d be in trouble. ... One lied to the other from the first lieutenant up until it reached Saddam. Even Saddam Hussein was lying to himself."

That's hardly unique to Iraq and Saddam. All organizations everywhere suffer from some degree of this. But it is far more common and much more debilitating in autocratic governments. When you face execution after torture for such revelations, the impetus to cover up is rather stronger. And as a result of this, the leaders in these kinds of nations have a tendency to hear what they want to hear, or at least to not hear about bad news and unpleasant surprises and problems.

Because of this, it's an occupational hazard of brutal dictators everywhere that they come to believe that their position is stronger than it actually is. They may believe that their enemies fear them. They may believe that their military is strong and dedicated and well equipped, when in fact morale is dreadful and most of the equipment doesn't work. All such delusions eventually come to an end, but when such a man's delusions collapse it can cost a lot of other people a lot of pain and death and sorrow.

The ongoing bizarre behavior by the government of North Korea must involve some significant component of this. Kim Jong Il, like his father Kim Il Sung before him, is actually the object of something approaching a religion. They're officially atheist there (in good Stalinist tradition) but there's a state-sponsored cult of the leader, and if you aren't sufficiently devout publicly you can earn yourself a fate worse than simple death. NK has gotten much less international scrutiny than Iraq (especially post-war Iraq under American control) for a number of reasons, but the lives of the people in North Korea are, if anything, even worse than was the case in Iraq under Saddam.

Kim is something akin to a living god, and you don't tell God that his nation is a failure. You don't tell God that foreigners don't worship him. When God demands something, you do your best to deliver it. And thus God, or Kim, gets in the habit of getting whatever he wants, or at least thinking that he is getting it. God will be surrounded by Potemkin villages. God, or Kim, comes to see himself as the center of the universe.

In such a case, it's less than surprising that he might think he can make outrageous demands of other countries and expect them to bend knee and bow head, especially if those countries had demonstrated what seemed to be fear and obsequiousness in the past (such as the US in 1994).

Is this insanity? In a sense, it is a form of institutional insanity. The entire government and the entire population exists to feed the delusions of grandeur of the leader, because no one wants to take the risk of making him mad by revealing the truth. And ultimately the only way such delusions can end is to run the ship of state onto rocks of reality. But until that happens, some of what such leaders do, or their governments do, can seem inexplicable to outsiders. They don't share the same worldview as Glorious Leader. It can make it rather difficult to communicate rationally.

And it won't be possible to talk rationally with North Korea until there's been a wakening to the real situation, and the NK government begins to live once again on the same planet as the rest of us. Which is why, in a sense, American participation in the Beijing talks was a significant success for us. The real reason for participating had nothing to do with talking to North Korea; that was hopeless. The real reason to participate was to let the Chinese