Why folks wish to apologize for the actions of North Korea is bewildering. Gregory Clark again, in his Dec. 1 article "The N. Korean conundrum," takes up the North Korean mantle as if to disguise the true brutality of this regime.
Outside intervention by the Soviet Union helped its pet project, Kim Il Sung, assassinate his way to power. The Soviets helped Kim clamp down on the border to stem the flow of refugees south before the Korean war. Both Soviet and Chinese military aid helped Kim launch his brutal assault against relatively helpless South Korean forces, and Chinese "volunteers" flooded into the country when all seemed lost. So accusations of U.S. intervention pale in comparison.
In fact, communist regimes up to that point had not been masters of finesse, so why should the United States not have intervened? The Northern Limit Line is still a matter to be settled, but its origins are not as nefarious as made out to be by Clark. North Korea ignored it for almost 20 years and only began fighting about it in 1999. North Korea launched the Korean war and was beaten back, but it did get the Onjin Peninsula, a sizable portion of land.
The most galling aspect of Clark's article is his willingness to overlook the millions of lives destroyed by the Kim family. I find it strange that anyone would want to defend the North.