Symbolism and Numerology in North Korean Rocketry

HONG KONG - North Korea has announced it will make another attempt to launch a long-range rocket, and speculation is rife on the peninsula about the when and the whys of this latest effort.

So far, North Korea has said only that the launch window was between Dec. 10 and Dec. 22, and it has alerted Japan of this time frame and the rocket's proposed southward trajectory. (Tokyo, Seoul and Washington, meanwhile, are said to be ramping up their monitoring and intercept teams.)

Weather permitting, it seems likely that the launching will occur Dec. 17, all the better to mark the first anniversary of the death of the longtime dictator Kim Jong-il.

Numerology is always a factor when assessing rocket launchings and other military-political events of import in the North: The previous attempt came on April 13, two days before the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung, Mr. Kim's father and the North's founding president.

Pyongyang has not yet announced whether foreign journalists would be invited to the upcoming launching, as they were for the April attempt, which ended in failure when the Unha-3 rocket broke apart and fell into the sea.

Meanwhile, time is running short for North Korea's political elite, which has promised the citizenry that 2012 would herald the North's emergence as “a strong and prosperous nation.”

The “prosperous” part is clearly out of the question, as Pyongyang's continuing appeals for food aid attest. Childhood malnutrition and chronic hunger are epidemic, according to foreign charities and aid groups. Hospitals remain woefully short of basic medicines, and patients are even told to bring in their own bottles - often empty beer bottles - to use for saline drips. Many factories across the country have closed for lack of electricity, raw materials and export markets.

But the regime still has a chance to redeem the “strong” part of its 2012 propaganda mantra: A successful rocket launching by the end of the year would see to that. Not even technologically advanced South Korea has managed to get a satellite aloft, and the North's propagandists would have a field day with a successful and historic launching.

The “when” of the launching dovetails with the “why,” and the timing seems to indicate that the North's latest effort is largely about domestic politics and not about roiling the elections in Japan (Dec. 16) or South Korea (Dec. 19), nor provoking Washington a month before President Obama's second inaugural.

In this South Korean election, despite all its baleful, sea-of-fire hectoring, North Korea has been a decidedly minor issue - a factor much less important than pressing domestic issues like the economy, a widening wealth gap and chronic corruption in politics and business. Analysts in Seoul say that a rocket launching by the North, whether successful or not, would merely harden (rather than change) the policy approach es of the leading South Korean parties.

If the launching does succeed, the new leader in the North, Kim Jong-un, would be assured of a double-barreled bonus: He gets a triumph he can claim entirely as his own, one that further cements his leadership position intramurally by achieving something that even his father couldn't pull off. Second, he fulfills his father's long-held dream of establishing long-range rocket, missile and satellite programs.

“North Korea seems to be striving to establish its image as a space power as the first anniversary of Kim Jong-il's death comes near,” Chang Yong-seok, a senior researcher at Seoul National University's Institute for Peace and Unification Studies, told the Yonhap news agency in Seoul. “Through such efforts, Pyongyang also appears to try to strengthen domestic foundation for the Kim Jong-un regime.”

“Kim Jong-un is apparently nervous that he does not have any achievements to call his own as he completes hi s first year in power, and experts agree that a successful rocket launch would be just what is needed in the eyes of the North Korean public,” said a commentary on Monday in the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo.

“The North Korean military, which has been rocked by purges aimed at bringing it to heel, may be seeking to restore its honor by successfully showing off advanced missile technology.”

The principal state-run news outlets in China - People's Daily, China Daily and the official news agency Xinhua - have all run stories this week expressing Beijing's “concerns” over the upcoming launching. How deep those concerns run in the new Chinese leadership remains to be clarified.

What the \'Swing Counties\' Tell Us About the Future of American Politics

WASHINGTON - In the eight states where President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney competed fully there were 94 so-called swing counties that voted for George W. Bush in 2004 and the Democrat in 2008; in November they split, Obama winning 48 and Romney 46.

There are two reasons that was insufficient for the Republicans. One, Obama won a convincing victory four years ago and to win this time, Romney had to win most of these counties.

Second, many of the counties that the Republican nominee carried were smaller, often rural, outlets in Wisconsin and Iowa. Actually 80 percent of the swing counties that Romney won this time were in those two states and made only a small dent in Obama's clear winning margin in both states.

The Democrat, on the other hand, carried more populous swing counties in Florida, Ohio, Virginia and Colorado. He swept all the swing counties in Colorado and won the vast majority in Virginia, Florida and Ohio. In my latest Letter from Washington, I dissect the results in eight key swing counties.

Hometown ties didn't help the Republican ticket, although these weren't swing venues. Rock County, Wisconsin, where former vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan resides, went for Mr. Obama 61 to 38 percent, Romney lost both Oakland County, Michigan, where he grew up, 54 to 46 percent, and Middlesex County Massachusetts, where he has spent most of his adult life, 63 to 36 percent.

Mr. Obama carried Chicago's Cook County, his Illinois home, 74 to 24 percent.

The Real Scandal Behind Benghazi

For conservatives, the Benghazi scandal is a Watergate-like presidential cover-up. For liberals, it is a fabricated Republican witch-hunt - aimed squarely at Susan Rice, a candidate to succeed Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. For me, Benghazi is something else: a call to act on an enduring post-9/11 problem that both political parties ignore.

One major overlooked cause of the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans is the underfunding of civilian agencies that play a vital role in our national security. Instead of building up cadres of skilled diplomatic security guards at the State Department, we have rented security personnel from the lowest bidder, trying to acquire capacity and expertise on the cheap. Benghazi showed how vulnerable that makes us.

I'm not arguing that this use of contractors was the sole cause of the Benghazi tragedy, but I believe it was a primary one. Let me explain.

The slapdash security that resulted in the de ath of Ambassador Stevens, technician Sean Smith and CIA guards Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty started with a seemingly inconsequential decision by Libya's new government. After the fall of Muammar Qaddafi, Libya's interim government barred armed private security firms â€" foreign and domestic â€" from operating anywhere in the country.

Memories of the abuses by foreign mercenaries, acting for the brutal Qaddafi regime, prompted the decision, according to State Department officials.

Once the Libyans took away the private security guard option, it put enormous strain on a little-known State Department arm, the Diplomatic Security Service. This obscure agency has been responsible for protecting American diplomatic posts around the world since 1916.

Though embassies have contingents of Marines, consulates and other offices do not. Moreover, the main mission of Marines is to destroy documents and protect American government secrets. It is the Diplomatic Security agents who are charged with safeguarding the lives of American diplomats.

Today, roughly 900 Diplomatic Security agents guard 275 American embassies and consulates around the globe. That works out to a whopping four agents per facility.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the State Department relied on hundreds of security contractors to guard American diplomats. At times, they even hired private security guards to protect foreign leaders.

After President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan narrowly survived a 2002 assassination attempt, the State Department hired security guards from DynCorp, a military contractor, to guard him. Their aggressiveness in and around the presidential palace, however, angered Afghan, American and European officials. As soon as Afghan guards were trained to protect Karzai, DynCorp was let go.

But the State Department's dependence on contractors for security remained. And Benghazi epitomized this Achilles' heel.

Unable to hire contract ors, the Diplomatic Security Service rotated small numbers of agents through Benghazi to provide security, on what government officials call temporary duty assignments, or “TDY.” Eric Nordstrom, the Diplomatic Security agent who oversaw security in Libya until two months before the attack, recently told members of Congress that when he requested 12 additional agents he was told he was asking for “the sun the moon and the stars”

After his request was turned down twice, Mr. Nordstrom replied bluntly to his superiors in Washington.

“It's not the hardships,” he testified he had said. “It's not the gunfire. It's not the threats. It's dealing and fighting against the people, programs and personnel who are supposed to be supporting me. And I added it by saying, ‘For me, the Taliban is on the inside of the building.'”

Other State Department officials also say the reliance on contracting created a weakened Diplomatic Security Service. They say de partment officials, short on staff and eager to reduce costs, nickeled-and-dimed DS security requests.

“That is not a DS-centric issue,” said a State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “That is a Department of State issue.”

Democrats have blamed Republicans for the lack of funding. They point out that House Republicans rejected $450 million in administration requests for increased Diplomatic Security spending since 2010. They say Senate Democrats were able to restore a small part of the funding.

But these partisan charges and counter-charges ignore a basic truth. Resource shortages and a reliance on contractors caused bitter divisions between field officers in Benghazi and State Department managers in Washington.

State Department officials confirmed complaints from Lieutenant Colonel Andy Wood, the former head of a U.S. Special Forces “Site Security Team” in Tripoli, that Charlene Lamb, the Diplomatic Security Servic e official who oversees security in Washington, urged them to reduce the numbers of American security personnel on the ground even as security worsened across Libya. Mr. Wood and his team left the country the month before the attack.

In equivocating and evasive testimony before Congress in October, Ms. Lamb at first said she received no formal requests for additional security from Libya. She then claimed, “We had the correct number of assets in Benghazi.”

Ms. Lamb's superior, David Kennedy, has defended her. He argued that a handful of additional Diplomatic Security guards in Benghazi â€" or the Special Forces team in Tripoli â€" would not have made a difference.

To date, no evidence has emerged that officials higher than Ms. Lamb or Mr. Kennedy were involved in the decision to reject the requests for additional security from Libya. Both are career civil servants, not Obama administration appointees.

Ms. Lamb has declined all interview requests.

There is a broader issue beyond the political blame game. Benghazi is a symptom of a brittle, over-stretched and under-funded State Department. Without being able to hire private contractors, the department provided too few guards and hoped a nearby CIA base or friendly Libyan militia would help them. An excellent recent report in the New York Times found that the U.S. military's Africa Command was under-resourced as well as unable to help.

The investigation by the Senate and House intelligence committees into whether or not the Obama administration misled Americans after the attack or altered intelligence should continue. But the core issue before the attack was a lack of resources and skilled management, not shadowy conspiracies.

David Rohde is a columnist for Reuters, former reporter for The New York Times and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. His forthcoming book, “Beyond War: Reimagining American Influence in a New Middle E ast” will be published in March 2013.