You don’t play games with Kim Jong-il

Sad, but hardly surprising news out of North Korean this morning: the sentencing of two U.S.  journalists to 12 years of hard labor after a high court convicted Laura Ling and Euna Lee of illegally crossing into North Korean territory.

Not surprising because you simply don’t mess with the DPRK — not when the regime feels under threat, the aging Dear Leader wants to iron out successor issues and placate the military, and the secretive regime wants to take the temperature — and find the resolve — of a new and relatively untested Obama administration.

N. Korea sentences US reporters to 12 years labor

You can feel nothing but sympathy for the U.S. pair now theoretically facing a long period of unpleasant confinement unless some intermediary — think Rev. Jesse Jackson or New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson — pulls some rabbit out of the hat and somehow gets them released.

But alas, this has also been a case of  “amateur hour” on the part of the journalists and Current TV, the rather secretive SF-based cable outlet that apparently sent them to the Chinese-North Korean border.

First, I suspect the pair (whose journalism creds are  not completely clear to me) simply weren’t careful enough at the DPRK border.  There are a number of places along the Tumen River where the border is  narrow and ambiguous and the temptation to literally “cross the line” in order to say you’ve set foot in the forbidden nation must be very tempting. (I myself once illegally entered into Cambodia during the bad old days of the Khmer Rouge there…just to be able to brag later that I’d done it, even it was relatively pointless and dangerous. Was this part of what went wrong?)

Second, Current TV, which is connected to Al Gore, has been incredibly cloddish and ambiguous in its attempt to ‘free” the two captured journalist. Instead of creating a public uproar, Current TV refused to discuss the case, why they were sent or to set out explanations about what might have happened. Unlike the case of Roxana Saberi, who was detained, and later released by the Iranians, neither the family nor the company that employed them tried to actively engage the United Nations, the Chinese or other potentially influential parties, to raise the international profile of the case.

Only in the last ten days — when the hammer seemed ready to fall — did Ling’s sister, who has a relationship with the Oprah Winfrey show, begin to speak publicly about the case and urge the release of the two women…But even then, she chose her venues carefully and went out of her way to be apologetic and kowtowing to the North Koreans.

I’m not sure that weakness and “falling on your sword” is a successful strategy for dealing with a very paranoid and vindictive regime, that is looking for new ways to push itself on the international agenda. Remember, this is a government that abducted Japanese citizens from the country just so it could teach its spies better Japanese!

So now it seems certain these two women — aged 32 and 36, with children at home in America — will become bargaining chips in the high-stakes poker game already being played with a secretive and highly militarized regime that does not bow easily to pressure. They have lived in a state of juche or self-imposed self-reliance for decades…so it’s hard to see how more sanctions and economic pressure will force them to move in a conciliatory path to release the women. I’m not sure the term “goodwill gesture” translates in Pyongyang.

Already smarting because of the DPRK’s provocative missile launches and underground nuclear tests, the Obama administration would love to find another way to ratchet up the pressure — perhaps imposing a blockade, or some sort of inspection regime, on all ships attempting to enter North Korean waters. Will they work?

Another problem: If you are advising President Obama, are you more worried about the fate of two journalists now condemned to spend a number of yeras behind bars or the possibility that Pyongyang might sell nuclear technology to Hezbollah or the Syrians?

We’d like to have both…but which is your priority? What would Jack Bauer do?