Bill Richardson's "Private Mission"

"Realizing that its plan to intimidate North Korea has backfired and brought the peninsula to the brink of war, the Obama administration is now looking for ways to ease tensions," begins Mike Whitney — Korea Steps Back From the Brink. On the news that "New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson has been dispatched to Pyongyang along with Wolf Blitzer and a team from CNN to offer Kim Jong il inducements to back down," Mr. Whitney speculates:

The CNN report doesn't clarify what the North gets in the negotiations, but that should be expected. After all, Blitzer was sent to construct a story that would make it look like the North was backing down. This report achieves that objective. But, in truth, the North has probably won major concessions from the US on bilateral talks as well as help building its lightwater reactors which is what they sought from the very beginning.

"The United States has repeatedly bullied the North with sanctions, added them to the State Dept's list of terrorists, forced them from the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), disparaged them to the world as a member of the 'axis of evil', and threatened them with regime change," reminds Mr. Whitney. "But now that US is faced with the real prospect of another war on the Korean peninsula, the administration has done a quick about-face and deployed its secret envoys (and propagandists) to defuse the situation."