Those Wacky North Koreans

It kind of strikes me as similar to W's "Bring 'em on!" statement, except they haven't invaded (again) yet.

From Yahoo!:

North Korea threatened South Korea with destruction Sunday after Seoul's top military officer said his country would consider attacking the communist nation if it tried to carry out a nuclear attack. ...
"Our military will not sit idle until warmongers launch a pre-emptive strike," said an unidentified KCNA military commentator. "Everything will be in ashes, not just a sea of fire, if our advanced pre-emptive strike once begins."

This is the thing about North Korea. They have virtually nothing. They rely on foreign aid for just about everything, from energy to food to weapons to clothing. There is really nothing for them to lose by playing dirty, and, in order to keep up their regime, cannot play nice, lest the citizens of the nation catch on that the rest of the world is not as unbelievably poverty-stricken and barren as they are. This means tough rhetoric - an us against the world position. This also means that aid that goes to North Korea that is supposed to help ease tensions somehow end up not being attributed to the helpers who provide it.

Kim Chong Il would much rather see his people starve to death and stay in command than relinquish control of a nation that's been propped up by international aid for over a decade. Yet, in the wake of over 2 million North Koreans killed at the hands of a leader who won't help them, we invaded another nation in a pre-emptive strike to keep them from launching a strike against us (which, incidentally, is what South Korea said they would do, and what North Korea said they'd do if South Korea did that).

Every now and then, North Korea just has to make sure its name is back in the headlines, lest we forget they exist (because it's so easy for us to forget our Axis of Evil enemy without the oil reserves who has quite possibly committed many, many more crimes against humanity in the name of "Self-Reliance," or "Juche").