According to CNN Kim Jong Il is currently trying to rally his people to support him as he ups his rhetoric in the latest nuclear crisis.

North Korea urged its impoverished people Satuday to rally around Stalinist leader Kim Jong Il, after Washington rejected Pyongyang’s demand that the sides hold direct one-on-one talks to curb nuclear tension.

“At a time like today, when the situation gets tense, no task is more important than to strengthen our single-minded unity,” the editorial said. Minju Joson, another state-run daily, said that “devotedly protecting the leader is our life and soul.”

If Pyongyang doesn’t get the bilateral negotiations that it wants from the US they will probably try to up the confrontration some more. The most obvious place to start a confrontation is by shooting at soldiers on the DMZ or getting in a naval confrontation in the Yellow Sea. It appears a naval confrontation may be the route they are going to try with this rhetoric:

At the same time, North Korea repeated warnings of military clashes on its loosely defined and tense western sea border with South Korea. It accused the South of infiltrating a warship into communist waters on Saturday following “a grave situation created due to the U.S. imperialist warhawks’ invariable hostile policy toward the (North).”

In a news released carried by KCNA, North Korea’s navy command said “such dangerous military provocations may entail a very serious disaster.” The accusations, repeated several times in recent weeks and denied by the South, coincided with the worsening nuclear standoff. The two Koreas fought bloody naval skirmishes in western waters in 1999 and 2002.

I just hope the Norks don’t get so desperate where they try something really provacative like a nuclear test or a missile test fire in the future. Hopefully the diplomats from not only the US but the region can work out a compromise before something like this happens. In the end I expect some agreement to be worked out.

The Norks are pushing the current crisis to put themselves in front of the line of international issues that have been led the last two years by the Iraq War. The North Korean issue has been ignored by just about everyone because of Iraq. The Norks now appear impatient waiting for the international aid they so desire in exchange for suspending their nuclear program. So they are doing whatever it takes to get the world to notice them again.

The way the international news has been reporting the current nuclear crisis over and over again I would say they have succeeded in the short term, but the story probably won’t have much legs in the long term unless Pyongyang tries something else to keep them in the international spotlight. So expect more rhetoric and possibly incidents until an agreement gets worked out.