Rocket a DPRK ploy to draw attention
With North Korea's rocket launch, Kim Jong Il has the world exactly where he wants it: with all eyes on Pyongyang and its defiance of demands by the US, South Korea and Japan to cancel the firing.
The leaders of those nations warned that a launch would come at a high price, including possible punishment by the UN Security Council, which banned the North in 2006 from testing ballistic missiles the same technology it used in the communications satellite launch.
For the North Korean dictator, the risk of censure may well be worth it. It's exactly the attention Kim is looking for as he looks to consolidate his power base at home and seeks to wrangle aid and other concessions from the new US president.
The 67-year-old communist leader is scheduled Thursday to preside over his first parliamentary session since disappearing from the public eye for several weeks beginning last August.
Kim is believed to have suffered a stroke so serious it prevented him from appearing at a military parade celebrating North Korea's milestone 60th anniversary, a marked absence that prompted fears of a succession crisis in the totalitarian nation of 23 million people.
With the North built on a cult of personality encompassing Kim and his father, national founder Kim Il Sung, the regime denied rumours that diabetes or a stroke had struck Kim, a man credited in state media with such physical talent that holes-in-one are routine when he golfs.
But the top brass in Pyongyang who no doubt took over for Kim when he was bedridden are clearly spooked and want to show North Koreans, and the world, that Kim is back in charge.
None of Kim's three sons is considered polished enough to take the family dynasty into a third generation, so the "Dear Leader" who has never inspired the reverence his father commanded knows he has to foster unity.
The satellite launch also provides a propaganda coup for Kim by pushing the North ahead in the space race with South Korea, which plans to put its own satellite into orbit later this year. Inter-Korean relations are at their lowest point in a decade, and missiles is one of the only areas where the North can claim a lead over the far more economically strong South.
But Kim's main audience is President Barack Obama. After eight years of a hard-line Bush administration, Pyongyang may harbour hopes of a return to the relatively warmer ties of the Clinton presidency.
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