The success of a new nuclear test at home appears to have aroused Pyongyang's passions to flex its nuclear muscles in front of different audiences overseas. Last week, the regime of Kim Jong-un vowed to launch a nuclear strike on Washington. North Korea's neighbours (Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing) should expect to be caught in the crossfire helplessly if Pyongyang's raging passions exploded suddenly for any reason. Losing its senses as a result of the UN's new sanctions, Pyongyang scraped the 60-year-old truce that ended the Korean War. Kim Jong-un, who replaced his father Kim Jong-il, visited the North Korean troops on the front line with Seoul last week. Kim Jong-un, who does not seem to fit into his father's robe, ordered his troops to be on high alert, expecting the signal to break the devils' (the enemy's) backbone far off and nearby. He was received with hysterical cheers, which revived in the Arab world the upsetting memory of a deafening standing ovation previously given to the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein by his oppressed and helpless people during mass rallies. Saddam Hussein was eventually captured in a hole and hanged for crimes he committed against his people. Although Pyongyang's threat of a nuclear strike is unprecedented in the history of mankind, the international community represented by the UN's Security Council responded ridiculously: more economic sanctions, at the expense of North Korean people. Likewise, the world community appears to be apathetic in its response to Tehran's swelling nuclear ambitions, which regardless of increasing UN sanctions, is not prepared to restrain its over-enthusiastic nuclear scientists. On Thursday last week (six days before his visit to Tel Aviv), US President Barack Obama warned that Iran is still more than a year away from developing a nuclear weapon. Obama emphasised that military force remained one of Washington's options should sanctions and diplomacy fail to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions. About 1.5 million Iraqis died from malnutrition or inadequate healthcare resulting from economic sanctions that were imposed on the regime of Saddam Hussein in 1999. Sanctions against Iraq were prompted after Saddam Hussein invaded the Arab neighbouring country of Kuwait in August 1990. Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons against Kurdish citizens three years earlier was overlooked by the UN's Security Council. Commenting on the horrendous plight of the Iraqi people under economic sanctions, Denis Halliday, a former UN official, said in a lecture in September 1999: “We are now responsible for killing people, destroying their families, their children, allowing their older parents to die for lack of basic medicines." During a lecture titled “Sanctions against Iraq: Consequences and Alternatives" in Goldwin Smith Hall's Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Halliday also said: “We're allowing children to die who were not born yet when Saddam Hussein made the mistake of invading Kuwait." The UN Security Council imposed economic and military sanctions against Iraq during the Gulf War to prevent that country from rebuilding ‘weapons of mass destruction'. In the mid-1980s and throughout the 1990s, Cairo had called for an international conference to counter Islamist militancy. Washington and European countries in particular responded very poorly to Cairo's appeal. They thought that open channels and undisrupted contacts with the masterminds of militant groups would protect them from the nightmarish reality allegedly confined to its own people. The US wrongly assessed as nil the probability of a transatlantic attack by militants in the Middle East. Washington scrambled piteously to put out the fire after its tail combusted (US embassies in African countries), and quickly billowed across the Atlantic in the 9/11 attack. Cairo is also on a decades-long campaign to free the Middle East from weapons of mass destruction. The nuclear race in the Middle East and on the Korean Peninsula should prompt the UN's Security Council to organise immediately an international conference to counter N-terrorism, before it's disastrously too late. Economic sanctions will not by any means be effective. Obama's hope for effective sanctions is misleading. Concerning the unprecedented development from the Korean Peninsula, more sanctions against Pyongyang will only bring more suffering to the North Korean people for the risky adventures its new, young leader is running after. It is the same as administering more tortuous punishment to a prisoner to make up for the brutalities of his guards. The irony is that more punitive sanctions will only cement the determination of both countries – North Korea and Iran – to pursue their nuclear ambitions. This is necessarily so because while sanctions may negatively and even catastrophically impact large swathes of a society, the high walls of a dictator's palace are not so easily penetrated by such, and the powerful therein continue to enjoy pleasurable lives. Any delay in the announcement of the proposed conference to fight N-terrorism will backfire, and revive large-dimensional tragedy that engulfed the world in the early 21st century when Cairo's call for an international counter-terrorism conference was [underestimated prematurely] looked down upon.
