North Korea is not a serious military threat to anyone. The most its corrupt, decrepit, so-called army can do is commit suicide with a week long artillery bombardment of the Seoul area in South Korea. That would be horror show, but it would end quickly for a variety of reasons included running out of ready ammunition in its border forts and American precision guided munition (PGM) decapitation. But it won't happen due to the phenomenal corruption of the North Korean Army.

What got me here started about 10 years ago when I noticed the spontaneous criminal entrepreneurial activity by the Chinese Navy (PLAN), commonly referred to as piracy. While I was puzzling over that one, I started reading of North Korean support of terrorism ceasing in favor of drug smuggling after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Two recent articles toggled me over to the conclusion in my first paragraph. The first was in the Asian Wall Street Journal titled "China Props Up An Evil Regime" By Danny Gittings (and clipped over in the FreeRepublic.com web site).

The key section from the ASWJ article:

"Mr. Lim, who served for more than a decade in the North Korean military before fleeing to the South in the early 1990s, says he knows what he's talking about. He claims to have participated in a 1991 attempt by disgruntled army officers to kill Kim's father, Kim Il Sung. The assassination attempt, known in South Korea as the Sept. 24 incident, reportedly collapsed when Kim didn't turn up as scheduled at the site of the proposed shooting.

It's one of five coup attempts against the North Korean regime reported in Seoul over the past decade. But none have been confirmed, and Mr. Lim's account contained some inconsistencies. Even the best known of these attempts -- the U.S. embassy reported evidence of a revolt by the army's sixth corps in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong in 1995 -- may have been more complicated than it appears at first sight. A veteran foreign analyst in Seoul told me it was more of a "squabble among thieves," after the sixth corps refused to turn over to a greedy leadership in Pyongyang the hard currency it had made through illicit activities such as opium smuggling.

Whatever the true circumstances behind the reported coup attempts, they shatter the pervasive myth that North Korea is a hermit kingdom of docile slaves, who know nothing of the outside world and still swallow Pyongyang's propaganda about the two Kims being living Gods.

That myth suits the regime's evil purposes. After all, those who know no better are unlikely to revolt, even against a leadership that is starving them to death. But it has long since ceased to be any more than a myth. According to Mr. Lim, more than a decade ago army officers were already grumbling in private about the regime. By the mid-1990s, officers in the northeast, if not actively plotting to bring down the regime, were at the very least more interested in lining their own pockets than defending Kim Jong Il."

This made me sit up and take notice. Corruption that endemic in a military is only a symptom of wider corruption in the state and society. The only model I had for similar corruption was Syria. Whose only hard currency earning exports are colonists to Lebanon and heroin to Europe. And whose political parties were made up of, according to Jim Dunnigan, the Syrian Army's I through V Corps.

Then this US News & World Report article "The Far East Sopranos " by David E. Kaplan filled in the pieces of the puzzle and gave me my title. From the last paragraph:

While the younger Kim gambles away funny money, some 2 million of his countrymen have died of hunger since the mid-1990s. Still, North Korea's racketeering could damage Kim Jong Il's regime. Its official crime wave is helping fuel growing corruption there and prompting independent crooks to get into the game. Smugglers now find they can more easily bribe border cops and other officials. Some U.S. officials welcome the development. "The key here is lack of government control," says one. "Criminal activity may bring about the disintegration of this regime."

Bingo!

In communist states, supreme power has always rested in the hands of the Party with the Army and Secret Police being near co-equals. These two institutions were always set against one another by the Party so the Party could maintain control.

The various communist nation's cultures also played a role. For example, East Germany was never allowed by the Russians to have a large army because Russians were afraid of a large German Army. Various "Peoples'/Workers' militias" were created to fill the role of militarizing and regimenting larger society for East German communists that the Red Army did for the Soviet Union (and let more East Germans wear spiffy uniforms).

In North Korea, a much larger standing army was required earlier in the history of the communist state. This resulted in the the Army filling many of the "ecological niches" in regime politics that in other communist states were held by the Party and the secret police/forced labor camps. The end result was corrupt regional power groupings centered on the various Army Corps. These military leaders are North Korea's "Tony Sopranos" and like their TV name sake, they chose a weak leader they could dominate, Kim Jong Il.

Once these North Korean "Tony Sopranos" got in the habit of disobedience for the sake of corruption to line their pockets, they became "a little bit pregnant" in the disobedience department regarding other things, hopefully including suicidal orders to bombard Seoul. This is why I feel there is little chance of that.

And it is good news for us and bad news for China. North Korea is a failed state doomed to fall because of its corruption no matter what anyone does. It is only a question of when and what the body count will be, despite China's providing the Kim regime 40% of its food and 88% of its oil. All America has to do is nothing, and it will win in North Korea, something Steven Den Beste pointed out recently. And no matter what else happens, China will be faced with a free, unified, Korea with lots of ethnic Koreans on China's side of their common border.

Of course, America isn't going to do "nothing." As I have said on Winds before, the Bush Administration is filled with senior people who are expert in bringing WMD armed totalitarian regimes to soft landing via psychological warfare. The corruption in North Korea has reached the point that the CIA can bribe North Korean border guards to let in radios for American psychological warfare broadcasts. And there is circumstantial evidence the CIA has already started to do so. Again from the ASWJ article:

"As Radio Free Asia President Richard Richter said earlier this week, while announcing a doubling in broadcasts aimed at citizens of the giant gulag, North Korean listeners "have demonstrated extraordinary ingenuity to secretly hear our broadcasts." Although foreign visitors still return with tales of a highly regimented nation, where everyone wears Kim Il Sung badges and does what he is told, the increasingly numerous refugees paint a very different picture. They describe a society where corruption of all kinds, including prostitution, is now rife. In short, they depict a regime in decline and more vulnerable than ever to being overthrown from within."

Mark this well ladies and gentlemen, I had thought that the Bush Administration was just going for a "Bloodless Victory" in Iraq with a pick up of the Iranian Mullahocracy as a opportunistic benefit. Now I think we will not only get a bloodless victory trifecta over all of the names states in the "Axis of Evil", but we may get them all before the end of the year and almost certainly before the 2004 Presidential elections.

UPDATE: Hat tip to David Adesnik of Oxblog for spotting this NY Times article titled "Russia Helped U.S. on Nuclear Spying Inside North Korea." The CIA has been working with Russian intelligence to emplace sensors to detect nuclear weapons manufacturing.

From the article:

"Traditionally, uranium enrichment facilities have required large amounts of electricity and water, making it possible to identify them by spy satellite photographs of power grids and other industrial infrastructure.

Plutonium reprocessing, on the other hand, is a chemical process requiring less power and water, and so such plants can be situated in more remote locations, like Yongbyon, which is about 60 miles north of Pyongyang.

But plutonium reprocessing gives off distinctive emissions that can be tracked and measured, even in very small amounts. Experts familiar with the joint operation between the C.I.A. and Russian intelligence said plutonium reprocessing emits an isotope of krypton in gaseous form that is relatively easy to detect. The Russians were apparently given American sensing equipment to help analysts determine whether reprocessing was under way at Yongbyon, which after 1994 would have been a violation of the agreement reached under the Clinton administration, known as the Agreed Framework. The equipment could also help the C.I.A. determine whether plutonium reprocessing had secretly been moved to another site in North Korea.

"Krypton is a very good technical indicator that is hard to hide," said one person familiar with the intelligence efforts. "If you are able to situate the sniffers in the right places, then you could have confidence that you can find out whether plutonium reprocessing is going on or not."

Now, if the Russian and American intelligence services were cooperative to this extent, how hard would it be to conspire to bribe North Korean border guards to let smugglers get in American radios for psychological warfare broadcasts?