Links for Today

*    As I write, the news is breaking on TV that the Afghan Army  has launched a rescue operation to save the  remaining Korean hostages.  By the  time I get home, I’ll know how things went.  If you’re practiced at prayer, this would be a good time. 

*   The press is mostly talking about North Korea’s cooperation with the U.N. at Yongbyon, while failing to mention a shocking new report.  Chris Hill is making an impromptu visit to Pyongyang, and he sounds less impressed on substance:

“We have to catch up on some of the timelines, because we really fell behind this spring. I think we have to do everything we can do to accelerate the timelines,” Hill told reporters in Tokyo.  [Reuters, Linda Seig]

Hill appears to be managing  superficial optimism by observers with only a  superficial understanding of North Korea and its nuclear programs.  That’s a good sign.  He also has  his work cut out for him; there  is another fresh sign that this deal is in trouble.  Following up its renewed and unagreed  demand for a light-water reactor, the North is now saying that continued progress depends on the lifting of all U.S. and U.N. sanctions, which the Administration and the Chinese are saying won’t happen, for  now:

North Korea said on July 16 that its decision to shut down five nuclear facilities at Yongbyon should be followed by the end of U.S. and UN sanctions on trade with the regime of Kim Jong Il — some dating back to the Korean War. North Korea also sought its removal from a U.S. list of countries that sponsor terrorism.

“Not yet,” Wang Guangya, China’s ambassador to the UN said today. “Progress has been made through the six-party process, but we have agreed that this is only the first stage.”

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said that lifting the sanctions was “not something that is under consideration.”   [Bloomberg, Bill Varner]

We’ll see.

See also:

*   Life imitates  The Onion (see Janus’s comments in previous post):   One hundred percent of North Koreans have “voted” for the pre-approved candidates.   

*   An optimistic assessment of the surge, from war critics Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon.   I plodded through Pollack’s entire thousand-page “Case for Invading Iraq” before the war he advocated and then turned against, so it’s hard to take  his analysis  all that seriously.  After all, much of Pollack’s book was about the huge WMD stockpiles that Saddam assuredly had (but hey, who doubted that?) and how the country would likely settle down after we rolled in.  I mostly see  people like Pollack and O’Hanlon  as  good weather vanes of conventional Washington wisdom, such as it is,  but when perception is a reality unto itself, that matters.  If they can get printed in the New York Times, they may change some perceptions on the  one front of this war that isn’t going especially well at the moment.  More consistently accurate are the assessments of Michael Yon and Michael Totten on the ground, both of whom have an established record of reporting bad news as well as good.  Both have new dispatches today.  But remember:  AQ and Iran’s puppets need a go-for-broke offensive before Petraeus reports, so I would discourage excessive optimism if your standard is absolute tranquility, and I’m most worried about the Shiite militias.  The larger trends are positive:  popular rejection of an insurgency is  the highest prerequisite to defeating it, followed by the  restoration of security and the establishment of effective government.  No one doubts that we have far to go, and this thing won’t really be over for a long time.  It’s still worth it.

*   Is  it unpatriotic to seem this worried that the U.S. might succeed?

*   Freedom House lays out what’s wrong with the U.N. Human Rights Council, at the U.N. Human Rights Council.