Jasmine fall

With the regime of Moammar Gadhafi's regime really on the verge of collapse this time, I thought it might be a good chance to review a few posts from earlier this year that managed to tie together Libya and North Korea.

For starters, there's this post on how North Korean workers in Libya were not being allowed to return home despite the violence going on there, for fear that they would bring word of decades-long dictatorships starting to fall in the face of popular opposition and armed rebellion. I wonder what has happened to those North Korean workers and what their future holds. I'm guessing they really are better off in Africa for the time being, and I hope they're allowed to stay.

Probably a legal phone.

On a related note, this post talked about how the Pyongyang regime was trying hard to round up illegal cell phones in order to prevent the spread of such news.

Back in March, when it looked like Gadhafi might accept a deal to take his sons and go away to a comfortable exile in a neighboring country with lots of open desert, I suggested the same model might work for North Korea (Mongolia has lots of open desert).

Of course, Gadhafi didn't take the deal, but depending on whether he ends up like Slobodan Milošević (with a long prison term) or Saddam Hussein (with a long neck), Kim Jong-il and his cronies may wish to consider that option.

[source]

In this post, I also noted that North Korea may be looking at NATO's air support in Libya and thinking to themselves, "Like hell we're ever going to give up our nukes" (that was Libya's quid pro quo for US recognition).

Or, to borrow from Winston Churchill: "Never, never, never, never give up (your nukes)."

Best thing to do is to trick the North Koreans into testing each of them, one by one. Keep accusing them of lighting up a bunch of TNT deep in a mineshaft each time and watch them try to go ballistic.

UPDATE:
Joshua at One Free Korea has taken a hiatus from his hiatus to bring us some timely thoughts on the same subject.