Nuclear fiasco
Korea is not tropical; in autumn, the leaves turn yellow and red and, by October, the process is pretty far along, especially in North Korea. That is why there are grave doubts that Kim Jong-il is in good health, as Pyongyang pretends, and indeed some question whether he is alive at all. And, despite last Monday's agreement by Washington to take Mr Kim's regime off its list of terrorism sponsors, which persuaded North Korea to let international inspectors back into its Yongbyon nuclear site, we still don't know where its nuclear weapons (if they exist) might be hidden.
The 'Dear Leader' and absolute ruler of North Korea since 1994 has not been seen in public for some time. There was intense speculation in South Korea that the 66-year-old dictator had suffered a stroke and undergone surgery.
The North Korean regime denied anything was wrong (as it always does), and then finally produced some recent footage of Mr Kim inspecting a women's military unit. The only problem was that it was an outdoor location, with lots of trees and bushes, and all the leaves were a lush green colour. Nowhere in Korea looks like that in mid-October; a horticultural expert at Seoul National University estimated that the event took place in July or August.
This confirms that Mr Kim is at least seriously ill. For all we know, he may be dead, and there may be a fierce succession struggle going on in Pyongyang. Whatever the state of palace politics, however, the regime retains the ability to run circles around the Bush administration in diplomacy.
The most recent confrontation began last month, when North Korea announced that it intended to restart nuclear activities at Yongbyon because the US had not kept its promise to remove Pyongyang from its terrorism blacklist. That was part of the six-country deal signed last November, in which North Korea agreed to end its nuclear activities in return for badly needed aid.
As part of the deal, Washington agreed to remove North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism - and a lot of the aid could not legally flow to Pyongyang until that was done. But the Bush administration, as so often before, overplayed a weak hand: it stalled on removing the terrorism label in the hope of forcing North Korea to allow US and International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors freer access to suspected North Korean nuclear sites. So the North Koreans simply stopped dismantling the Yongbyon nuclear site (including the plutonium reprocessing plant) and announced that they were re-activating it. It took the Bush administration, in legacy mode and desperate for at least one apparent foreign-policy success, only a couple of weeks to yield to Pyongyang's demand. Washington removed North Korea from the terrorism list on Saturday, and Pyongyang let the inspectors back in on Sunday. But they can't go wherever they please.