In '' Rogue Regime : Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea , '' the veteran Asia correspondent Jasper Becker makes a powerful case for defining Kim once and for all -- not as an ordinary , if nuclear-tipped , dictator , but as an extraordinarily skillful tyrant presiding over the worst man-made catastrophe in modern history , worse than Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge or the Soviet Union in the 1930 's .