BANGKOK — Even relatively small misunderstandings, festering underground over time and eating into the foundations of stability, can cause wars. Some poisons work immediately; other poisons take time.
Let us consider a serious current poison that the U.S. media has underplayed — mostly deliberately — of late. North Korean guards or soldiers, stationed on the China border, grabbed two young American journalists, yanked them into North Korea and slammed them into holding pens, probably into a well-known detention/interrogation facility in Pyongyang, the capital.
The two reporters — Laura Ling and Euna Lee, representing the San Francisco-based media outlet Current TV, the brainchild of former U.S. Vice President Al Gore — were apparently shooting video footage of the North Korean border and into the frontier as far as their camera lenses would allow. That area is famous as a tense crossing spot for North Koreans trying to flee to China.