Archive for August 2007

North Korea’s Floods: The Next Lost Opportunity

August 20, 2007 Famine & Food Aid 12 comments

The secrecy of North Korea’s regime and the recency of the floods mean that we should be wary of estimates we hear about the severity of the damage they caused, and that goes double for some of the detailed statistical compilations the papers are printing. Â We do know there were fatalies; South Koreans have found corpses that were washed downstream across the DMZ.  Beyond that, things are less certain.  North Korea officially claims that the floods killed 300 people and left 300,000 homeless.  Those figures don’t jibe with each other. Â In a mountainous and underdeveloped country, any disaster large enough to make more than a quarter of a million people homeless — the size of a small city — would have claimed more lives. 

This parade of statistics seems even more suspicious:

The UN said today that 58,000 homes were damaged in the flooding, 50 percent of the country’s health clinics were destroyed, and as much as 70 percent of arable land was under water. More than 800 public buildings, 540 bridges, 70 sections of railway and 500 high-voltage power towers also were destroyed, according to the UN.  [Bloomberg; emphasis is mine]

According to other reports, the floods destroyed up to 450,000 tons of cereals, about 9% of the country’s annual food needs, but 11% of this year’s domestic rice and corn crop. Â Those figures are difficult to reconcile, and they almost certainly originate from the regime. 

If the truth really is that bad, the North Korean government probably wouldn’t be able to pull those statistics together that quickly.  Certainly the U.N. wasn’t given the access to the North Korean countryside needed to do that assessment independently.  But such an assessment is essential if we’re to know the real extent of the humanitarian impact and mitigate it effectively.  If we learned anything from the Great Famine, it’s that we can’t trust the North Korean regime to tell the world the truth, not even for the sake of saving the lives of own people alive.

Still, North Korea seems less opaque than usual this time.  Its television stations have actually aired footage of the damage.  Some novice Korea-watchers (a term that inevitably includes journalists with wide audiences) are ready to declare perestroika.  I am underwhelmed.  The floods struck the area around Pyongyang, the same area where most of North Korea’s TV sets and viewers are. Â North Korea’s propaganda machine may be crude, but it’s not unsophisticated. Â Ignoring the pink elephant in the room — or the flooded subway — would be unsophisticated. Â Instead, the government does its best to shape the public’s perception of a bad situation.  That’s especially understandable if resident of Pyongyang have become less afraid to express their dissatisfaction. 

Here’s some of the footage.

Here’s a Yahoo slide show of news photos, and a selection of them:

flood4.jpg   flood3.jpg   flood2.jpg   flood5.jpg

[Korea News Service/Reuters; the second photo from left is also claimed by KCNA and AFP, so it's fair to assume that all of these photos are from North Korean government sources.]

Last year’s floods also affected the capital, but with less apparent severity than this year’s.  But here’s a statistic for you:

Last year the nation was hit by what its state-run media called the worst flood in the country’s history, which left as many as 54,700 North Koreans dead or missing. Â [Bloomberg, Bill Varner]

That figure is casually dropped into the middle of that last report.  Imagine — 50,000 people erased from the face of the 21st Century Earth, and 99.9% of the world will never even hear it happened.  The floods of 1995 and 1996, which are blamed by some for triggering the Great Famine, were also fairly severe, but they were concentrated further north (more). 

If this disaster is being treated differently, it might be because it’s affecting people the regime doesn’t consider expendable.  Pyongyang is a city of privileged people.  Only citizens of good political background are allowed to live there.  There is a conspicuous absence of handicapped people in Pyongyang, a mystery that may finally have been explained.  The capital contains North Korea’s most politically privileged and necessary people, and much of what they eat is grown within a 100-mile radius the city. 

This time, letting the victims suffer and die isn’t an option, and if these floods really are the “worst ever in history,” there may be too many hungry people around Pyongyang to sustain them on what’s taken from more expendable people.  What’s more, this Reuters photo is supposely of a cornfield in long-suffering South Hamgyeong Province, meaning that some ”expendable” areas were hard-hit, too. 

flood1.jpg

 [Reuters/Korea News Service] 

Only North Hamgyeong, Ryanggang Provinces appear to have been spared, and those areas may have already been experiencing a food situation that was bad and getting worse.  This is a country with no margin of error in its food supply. Â So if Kim Jong Il is telling us the truth, he’s in no position to make unconditional demands.  But he’ll make them anyway, and sadly, other nations will deliver with few questions asked. Â Even the United States has contributed $100,000.  It’s a very small amount, but nothing suggests that the North is ready show any transparency in how the aid is distributed.

What a shame.  In the ruined fields, there is an unprecedented humanitarian, political, and diplomatic benefit to be reaped.  What if, instead of pouring cash and aid into the black hole of North Korea’s Public Distribution System, thus leaving the people vulnerable to its corruption, diversion, and political manipulations, international donors insisted on distributing their aid directly?  This time, Kim Jong Il might not be in a position to refuse. Â There could be no greater humanitarian and political benefit that could be reaped from the ruined fields of North Korea than the sight of compassionate foreigners delivering food, tents, clean water, medical supplies, and even medical services.  In the space of weeks, the regime’s base of support would begin to question all of the xenophobia, national supremacy, and self-sufficiency with which it had been so deeply inculcated.  Proponents of engagement have a historic opportunity to show their sincerity by demanding — just once, after ten years – that engagement finally do something for the North Korean people. 

Too bad that opportunity is already being thrown away.

See also:

*  Lee Myung Bak has won the opposition Grand National Party’s nomination for the presidency of South Korea.  Lee is now heavily favored to win the general election in December.  So far, it looks like Park Geun-Hye will accept the result, meaning a split ticket is less likely.  Here’s some of Lee’s more recent ruminations on North Korea policy, via the Daily NK.  Although Lee’s lastest statements are encouraging, he has been all over the map on the subject.  Lee will run largely on economic issues, but his formula for recovery is massive public-works projects.  I wrote a profile of Lee a couple of years ago, when it occurred to me that this man could amount to something. 

*  I’m also underwhelmed by the fact that in the year 2007, North Korea is finally contemplating getting its own Web domains.  I’ll be whelmed when ordinary North Koreans have access to them, and to sites in other countries.

* Bloomberg reports that the North Korean economy actually shrank last year.

North Korea’s economy contracted in 2006 for the first time in eight years, as the communist country agreed to begin dismantling its nuclear weapons program this year in return for energy assistance.

The economy shrank 1.1 percent last year because of energy shortages and bad weather after expanding 3.8 percent in 2005, South Korea’s central bank said in a report released in Seoul today. This is the first time the economy has shrunk since 1998.

“Adverse weather conditions caused a decline in agricultural and fisheries production,” the Bank of Korea said in an e-mailed statement. “The nuclear issue also led to worsened international relations and energy shortages and appears to have resulted in an overall worsening of its economy.”

One other possible explanation you wouldn’t expect South Korea to highlight is that our enforcement actions against the North’s money laundering had a devastating impact.  That would not only show just how effective those actions were, but just how much of the North’s economy was based on or linked to illicit activity.

*  The latest from the nuke talks:

North Korea is prepared to come clean with a complete inventory of its nuclear programme under a February six-country disarmament deal, its deputy chief nuclear envoy said on Saturday.

Two days of talks on how to go about dismantling the North’s nuclear weapons programme ended on Friday in the capital of northeast China’s Liaoning province, Shenyang, where the U.S. envoy said more wrangling was needed to thrash out key terms.

“We will be making a transparent disclosure of all nuclear programme and nuclear equipment,” North Korean foreign ministry official Ri Kun was quoted by South Korea’s Yonhap news agency as telling reporters in Shenyang.

“More wrangling needed” must mean North Korea is still denying the uranium program.  Meanwhile, as I predicted, the news media are paying almost no attention to talks on the full normalization of relations between the United States and North Korea.

WSJ: ROK-U.S. FTA to Die a Quiet Death

August 18, 2007 NK Economics 4 comments

If the Wall Street Journal says the FTA is now dead, it must be so: 

Only two months after pressuring Seoul to insert labor and environmental concessions, House Democrats now say they won’t approve the FTA in any case. Â [WSJ]

But if the WSJ says “House Democrats” say it, is it necessarily so?

This news reaches us via Brendan Carr, whose post on the subject will do just as well if you’re not a WSJ subscriber.  His blog is a funny and interesting read, and I admire him for his straightforward language (a good quality to look for in a lawyer, I will add).  That said, if the FTA really is dead, the Joongang Ilbo hasn’t caught on (hat tip to Brendan’s commenter Sperwer).

OFK readers will recall that I first predicted the FTA’s death, more prematurely than presciently, on previous occasions. Â The first was in April of 2006, and the second was in this April 2007 post.  The same day as the April 2007 post, the two countries’s negotiators cut through a year of wide and seemingly inflexible differences and reached a draft agreement.  They did this after I had posted a long chronology of the ugly history of the negotiations and the campaign of anti-FTA/anti-U.S. distortion and demogoguery in Korea, and reasoned that the Korean government had done so little to defend the FTA or explain its potential benefits that it had no room to negotiate or compromise on issues that were essential to the U.S. side.  I believed that as a result, the FTA would fail, and that the attempt would actually leave relations between the two countries in a worse state than before. Â Having failed to answer its own far-left base and unwilling to risk its anti-U.S. voter appeal, Roh’s government had walled itself into taking unreasonable positions that I thought the U.S. side would never accept.  Based on the comments I’d seen coming from the U.S. Trade Representative and her negotiating team, I didn’t think we’d cave.  I was wrong.  We did cave. 

The patient lived, but so did the tumor, and that same bad deal now went to a hostile Congress.

The words that deserve to be remembered here were those of former congressman James Leach, who diplomatically predicted both the transfer of power in Congress last November, and that the FTA would have to pass in a Republican Congress or not at all (the second bullet of my “random observations” of this hearing was based on Leach’s comments).  And sure enough, the deal ran into immediate trouble in Congress, even though the draft was signed while Congress was in recess.  This led to my third prediction of the FTA’s death, which I’m relieved to report is holding up. So far.

I assume that like drunken Irish wakes, blogs are places where one’s true feelings about the deceased can be spoken.  Mine are that although this is a lost opportunity in many ways, I’m still glad this particular FTA deal failed.  First, remember that this deal could have passed, even in this Congress, had it been more even-handed and had “outward processing zones” (read: Kaesong) not been sitting there in Annex 22-C screaming “slave labor!“  I should say that well-informed friends tell me that this would never happen, and that Annex 22-C was just token language we agreed to to shut the South Koreans up.  I answer them by saying that none of us thought we’d ever launder $25 million in Kim Jong Il’s drug and counterfeiting money for him this time last year.  I know what the law says about importing slave-made goods, but I’ve lost my trust in this administration (or future ones) not to exempt North Korea from every law of God or man.  Second, after Roh’s miserable stewardship of these negotiations — and, for that matter, the entire U.S.-ROK relationship — this is not a deal he deserved to bring home.  Like Rudy Guiliani, I don’t believe that anti-Americanism should be cost-free, and that when self-described allies encourage or fail to respond to it, we shouldn’t reward them, treat them like allies, or help them argue to their voters that theirs is the most profitable way of dealing with America. 

In the end, however, a ROK-U.S. FTA on the right terms serves the economic and diplomatic interests of both countries, if nothing else because it could serve as a counterweight to the growing influence of China over the South Korean economy.  Maybe next year.

Who Changed Who?

August 17, 2007 Appeasement 3 comments

kims.JPGThere must be something contagious in Korea.

The South Korean Embassy has put out the text of the agreed ”rules” for the upcoming delivery of new instructions to southern cadres North-South summit, which a friend graciously sent me.  It’s good fodder for reflecting on the Sunshine Policy, the legacy of which leftist President Roh Moo Hyun and tyrant Kim Jong Il would have us celebrate with them.  So what is there to celebrate?

If there’s a new spirit of openness to be celebrated after a decade of massive wealth transfers to Kim Jong Il — or even a hint of it – it’s certainly not apparent in the rules that the North Korean Ministry of Public Security wrote for the occasion.  What’s more apparent is that South Korea has acquired the habit of easy and casual acceptance of North Korean control.  Want to do business here?  Stay inside the fence, don’t talk to the workers or give them gifts, and listen to our creepy blaring propaganda.  Want to meet your abducted relatives for a brief moment?  Don’t expect them to speak freely.  Want good relations with us?  Silence our critics.  Want our sports teams to visit you?  Suppress all dissent and revere our Leader’s portrait as a sacred icon.  Want our officials to visit you?  Don’t let us see or hear any free speech.  Want to visit us?  Suspend the preparedness of your military and bow to our total control.  And even then, as we will see, your safety will only be “conditionally” guaranteed.

In principle, you’d think that cultural exchanges and “engagement” have the potential to change North Korea, and occasionally, we will even see a shred of evidence that it worked that way.  Far more often, we see evidence of exactly the opposite, or that the motives behind the various acts of “openness” are downright suspect.  Read the rules and reflect on how little ten years of the Sunshine Policy have accomplished to change North Korea … with the sole exception of its nuclear weapons program.  Who’s really changed who here?  Bracketed comments are mine, pic from here:

Read more

God Has a Veto

August 15, 2007 Appeasement, Famine & Food Aid, Korean Politics 4 comments

[Update 8/18:  Called it:  "The two Koreas on Saturday agreed to reschedule the inter-Korean summit slated for late August in Pyongyang to Oct. 2-4 after North Korea requested a delay because of its extensive flood damage, the presidential office Cheong Wa Dae said."] 

Would Kim Jong Il host a summit in Pyongyang if he couldn’t make a propaganda spectacle of the visit?  Yesterday, I relayed the latest reports of serious flooding North Korea that have reportedly killed hundreds and destroyed thousands of homes.  The damage apparently affected most of North Korea’s West Coast, all the way from the Yalu River to at least the Taedong. Â What I didn’t realize was that downtown Pyongyang also took a serious hit. 

With the rapid rise in water level of Daedong River due to the localized rainfall, damage is supposed to be serious in several places within Pyongyang. The rainfall which poured on the city could not be properly channeled to Daedong River, leading to the submersion of the 1st floor of the Botong River Hotel.

The hotel is a first-rate hotel, a nine-floor building situated in 1973 on the edge of the Botong River in Ansang-dong, Pyongcheon-district. It is a place usually occupied by foreign businessmen seeking out Pyongyang. The US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, who visited Pyongyang in June, was supposed to have shared drinks with Kim Kye Gwan.  [Daily NK]

If the city is a mess, that may explain why the North Koreans failed to show to discuss the necessary arrangements.  Or not.  After all, this is North Korea, the ultimate enigma, the kind of place not just anyone can blog about.  Still, not even the agnostics out there could help but enjoy watching all of the machinations of the politicians wrecked by a vengeful God. 

A more grave question is how this will affect the food situation.  As any visitor or avid Google-Earther can attest, the farms and fields in the area around Pyongyang are clearly better tended than those in other areas, where conditions look almost semi-arid.  This “core” area probably gets first pick at the supply of seed, fertilizer, and pesticide.  It’s the only place where you’ll see what look like viable feedlots.  Second, North Korea’s infrastructure is a wreck, and the flood apparently caused considerable additional damage, according to North Korean sources quoted by Reuters:

Tens of thousands of hectares of farmland were flooded, and 800 public buildings, more than 540 bridges and 70 sections of railway destroyed, it added.  [Reuters]

Which leads to another, more direct, impact on summit plans:

Subsequently, it is highly possible that the [South Korean] government, which has pursued an overland visit to North Korea, will turn its position. The Kaesung-Pyongyang highway which was used at the time of Kim Man Bok’s, Chief of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), visited to North Korea was known to be swept away.

In the case of railroads, experts analyze that visiting North Korea on the Kyunghui Line (from Seoul to Shinuiju), unless the safety issue is resolved, would be difficult since the foundation of the railroads has been weakened.  [Daily NK]

What if food production in the area near Pyongyang is disproportionately affected?  Admittedly, we can’t expect reliable crop damage estimates like this one for months, if ever.  How will this affect the regime and the population? Â Normally, Pyongyang always gets the first pick of all resources, especially food.  But this time, robbing Peter to pay Paul may not be an option. Â During the Great Famine, a wrecked infrastructure meant that the regime could not move food from one part of North Korea to another overland, and its ports are also dilapidated. Â No evidence suggests that the infrastructure is in better shape now than then.  Recent reports suggest that the food situation in the East is marginal, so there’s not much to be diverted from there, and diversion could throw those areas into crisis. 

Crop losses in Pyongyang alone won’t spell disaster, however, just one more setback in a steady series.  My guess is that North Korea will ask for and get food aid from South Korea and China, even if that aid has to land at Nampo.  Even the United States is considering giving aid.  Because North Korea actually places some value on the population living near Pyongyang, the regime will distribute enough of that aid to keep them reasonably healthy.  There will be corruption, diversion, and waste, of course, and that will take some toll of bitterness and disillusion.  If much good cropland was lost, this could add to North Korea’s long-term food dependency. 

See also: 

*  North Korea is accusing the United States of “‘sitting idle’ and turning a blind eye to the protracted captivity of 19 South Korean hostages,” which is pretty ironic if you know what the North Korean government does to any Korean missionaries it catches working its turf. Â 

*  Ignore the openly-expressed desire of so many of its German readers that we not succeed in Iraq.  Ignore the gratuitous political chops.  This lengthy report by Der Spiegel on Iraq is absolute must-reading, a sincere attempt at objective truth-telling in a degree of depth and breadth that makes its flaws seem trivial. 

*  Talking about news often means dwelling on the mean, selfish things people do to each other, and since this is a blog about Korea, it’s nice to have the chance to tell a story this uplifting about an ordinary Korean hero’s sacrifices for the sake of others:

Peter Nguyen doesn’t just tear up when he talks about Jeon and that day on the high seas.  You can actually see rivulets streaming down his face.  “They are tears of gratitude,” he says. “If the captain had not rescued the 96 of us that day, I wouldn’t be here. The storm would’ve claimed our lives. [....]

Jeon’s bosses who had heard about the captain’s defiance ordered him yet again to drop them back into the ocean on makeshift rafts.  Reluctantly, the captain ordered his men to make some rafts. He stood on the deck watching the boat people, talking in hushed voices and huddling close to their families.

Then, in a corner, Jeon saw a young mother. She was holding a tiny infant, barely two months old. There was no way that baby was going to make it on a bamboo raft on the Pacific, Jeon thought.  He ordered his men to stop making the rafts.  [OC Register]

Read the rest here.

For Whom Do They Speak?

August 14, 2007 Appeasement, Diplomacy One comment

It’s not assured that the South Korean public will see President Roh’s going-out-of-business summit for what it is, but if it does not, it won’t be because South Koreans didn’t hear from enough cooler heads about it.  Richardson presents a broad sampling of reaction from the (mostly conservative) Korean papers that dominate their country’s market. Â Most share a skeptical view and agree on that this is an obvious, cynical election-year ploy.  There isn’t anything Roh is proposing to do in this meeting that he couldn’t have done in the last five years if North Korea had reciprocated some of the good will he offered them. 

Current events remind us why, and why we shouldn’t assume that Roh would even get that last chance to ask.  The North Koreans are no-shows for a meeting today when they were supposed to fine-tune the logistical details of the summit.  When will the pre-meeting take place?  The North Koreans say they’ll get back to Roh’s people at their earliest convenience.  If it’s ever a pleasure doing business with these people, you’re either smoking dope or buying it from them in bulk. 

The opposition, fearing that it will be stuck paying for Roh’s next agreement, is asking to make the terms of any deals public, and for a vote :

The Grand National Party (GNP) decided to thoroughly verify agreements to be reached with North Korea at the second inter-Korean summit meeting through the process of confirmation by the National Assembly.  The GNP also decided to ask the government to make public the agenda, discussion procedure, and results of the summit meeting.  [....]

In a phone interview with the Dong-A Ilbo, GNP floor leader Kim Hyung-oh said, “We are concerned that a series of inter-Korean agreements could impose a heavy financial burden on people of South Korea, including the ministries already planning massive aid for the North,” ….  [Donga Ilbo]

This way, the actual terms of the next giveaway become as much a part of the national conversation as the summit itself.  There’s also a greater danger that Roh could make foolish political concessions that the North Koreans will seize on long after he leaves office.  Presciently, OFK favorite Professor Sung Yoon Lee had written about this just before the summit was announced. Â He first notes that nuclear states do not develop nuclear capabilities at such expense “only to bargain them away for money or food – blandishments that carry a short expiration date,” unless it follows a fundamental change in the character of the ruling regime.  Then, he gives an idea of what’s behind North Korea’s interest in a last-minute “peace framework” with Roh:

North Korea knows better than any other that a peace treaty is just an agreement on paper, one that often conceals the true hostile intent of the signatory. At the same time, North Korea calculates that the conclusion of such a peace treaty with the US would create enormous pressure for the eviction of US forces from the South. With the signing of a peace treaty and all the political spin celebrating the dawn of a new era and genuine peace on the Korean Peninsula, the very raison d’etre for US troops in South Korea would vanish.  [Asia Times]

I’m one who thinks that the South can defend itself without American troops, but whatever one’s feeling on that topic, one genuinely hopes that South Korea will maintain a high enough state of readiness to deter the North from trying anything rash. Â Here, the news is already bad before these two unpopular Korean leaders have even sat down.  Roh may have just agreed to delay a major U.S.-ROK military exercise, Ulchi Focus Lens.  North Korea is also demanding that those exercises be cancelled before it will honor the rest of its Agreed Framework 2.0 obligations.  North Korea has run out of easy giveaways and has now reached the point where further concessions would do significant harm to its plans.  Not that North Korean stalling is contrary to the Bush Administration’s own plans at this point.

Via GI Korea, here are some of the best questions Roh will never ask Kim Jong Il, as presented by Suzanne Scholte of the North Korean Freedom Coalition:

  • Who will represent the North Korean people?
  • Will [Roh] ask for the political prison camps to be closed?  [OFK: more]
  • Will Roh ask for the return of the South Korean abductees and prisoners of war as well as the abductees from other nations?  [OFK: more]

Read the rest here.  Sadly, some American politicans are just as good at sidestepping those questions.  Let’s close the discussion with these questions.  First, has a decade of the Sunshine Policy made South Korea safer?  Second, has it changed North Korea for the better?

See also:

*  The NGO Anti-Slavery International has released a lengthy and detailed report on North Korea’s forced labor camps.  I’ll be reading the entire thing and commenting on it further as appropriate; here are links to the full report, an article summarizing it, and a petition you can sign (it goes to the Chinese Ambassador to the UK and then asks you to write your MP, something I haven’t had since 1776; I still signed the petition).  Thanks to a reader for forwarding.

*  KCNA has admitted that severe flooding has yet again struck North Korea.  According to Reuters, hundreds are dead, 30,000 homes were destroyed, and North Korea’s roads and bridges were badly damaged.  Floods last year contributed to a significant decline in food production, and cropland lost to erosion can take decades to replace.  It’s another part of Kim Il Sung’s lasting legacy of agricultural guidance:  he ordered thousands of acres of trees cut down to put marginal acreage into production.  Instead, he got flooding that washed away some of his country’s best farmland.  Natually, foreign observers won’t be able to actually visit the damaged areas to assess humanitarian needs, but South Korea will soon be hit with a big demand for reconstruction aid.  Just like after the Ryongchon explosion.

*  Speaking of Douglas Shin, a reader (thanks) directs me to the gorgeous new Web site of his organization, Crossing Borders.  You may not agree with their goals, but I do.  You can’t replace a bad idea with no idea.  It will take a belief system that can inspire people to break the grip of North Korea’s cultish deification of the Kims.  It’s a matter of how you go about it, of course.

*  More tyranny tourism.  Though mildly interesting and appropriately skeptical, it’s the same circuit of monuments that all visitors follow and probably won’t be anything new to readers of this site.

*  “The number of truck bombs and other large al-Qaeda-style attacks in Iraq have declined nearly 50% since the United States started increasing troop levels in Iraq about six months ago, according to the U.S. military command in Iraq.”  [USA Today, Jim Michaels] 

*  Christopher Hitchens deconstructs unrealistically prosaic mythology about Al Qaeda in Iraq.  Hitchens doesn’t draw the connection, but those myths are almost photonegatives of 9/11 conspiracies.  Both are false realities designed to rationalize away threats from forces we can’t control and transfer them to forces we can control.

*  Not Ready, Part V:  ”Asked whether he would move U.S. troops out of Iraq to better fight terrorism elsewhere, he brought up Afghanistan and said, ‘We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.’”  I’m going to have to make myself a chart, or a weather vane, to keep track of Obama’s bi-policy disorder.

Valor, and The Better Part of It

August 13, 2007 Uncategorized 14 comments

There are some things that should be too obvious to be missed by nearly everyone, and here is one of them:  the only villains of the Afghan hostage crisis are the Taliban.  It may be human nature to seek out demons, heroes, and martyrs, including phantom ones.  South Korea’s masters of public manipulation have certainly offered the South Korean people a wide choice of villains, and that choice occasionally even includes the Taliban. 

As for heroes, I certainly don’t see any, and that includes the hostages, including the two who were released today.  They say they came to help, and I don’t question their sincerity.  But given the history of the Taliban and the South Korean government, it’s unlikely that the Taliban let them go for free or that the South Korean government was too principled to pay.  If so, we can confidently say this mission to Talibanland — and the unlikely relationships it created – hurt much more than it helped, beginning with the very people it was meant to help. 

[Update:  How depressing and predictable.  The Korea Herald, via GI Korea, quotes unnamed sources who say that the ROK government paid "a huge ransom."  So how many American soldiers or Afghan civilians do you suppose will be killed with the TNT and nails the South Korean government's money is buying as we speak?  Now, if there's one thing that allies aren't supposed to do, it's paying people who kill your soldiers and help other people to attack your cities. Â Still, this is only incrementally worse than all South Korea has done to aid America's enemies recently, chiefly North Korea.  South Korea, though protected by thousands of other U.S. soldiers, has even declared itself neutral. Â Korea can choose to be neutral.  It is we who are fools to make expensive protectorates of neutral nations and call them allies.]

The hostages almost certainly didn’t think through these likely consequences of their journey, but their failure to think through those consequences separates this mission from other dangerous missions by Christian missionaries that are having an overwhelmingly positive, humanitarian, and liberalizing effect on our world.  This time, there is a long list of losers, starting with the hostages and the church that sent them. Â Korea’s ”netizens,” faithfully representing the most repulsive aspects of their society, have have spat venom at them from the beginning.  Some have openly wished for their deaths. 

Because it sensibly opposes the rewarding of terrorism, America has become the predictable target of an election-year blame campaign by some South Korean media and politicians.  This campaign may be having its intended effect.  The New York Times reports that “[i]n a survey conducted over the weekend, … a majority of South Koreans believed that Washington’s policy of not negotiating with the terrorists was ‘irresponsible.’”  In fact, our policy is not to give “concessions” to terrorists, meaning the survey already betrays a degree of bias, although I doubt whether that subtle distinction would change the result much. Â I was unable to find any additional information about the survey, but if generally accurate, it reflects an extraordinarily selfish and short-sighted perspective for a nation that owes its freedom, prosperity, and existence to another international intervention (though South Korea’s contribution to this one has been minimal).  I have to wonder if some of the same people who have displayed such malice and venom toward the hostages would let terrorists go free to kill again for their release. 

As a result of the current goverment’s subtle fanning of such sentiments though its public statements, and the less subtle hyperbole of its supporters, South Korea is another loser.  It is now taking a modest but well-deserved beating in the American press and blogs, and here is one excellent example:

This has turned, as most events do by seven degrees of separation or less, into the anti-U.S., anti-Bush blame-a-thon. When it became clear that the Korean negotiations weren’t doing a heck of a lot, Koreans began blaming the U.S. for not intervening by either “making” the Afghans hand over the Taliban fighters – encouraging Afghanistan to toss the lion a T-bone and fervently hope he doesn’t crave any more meat – or otherwise rescuing the hostages.

So when we weren’t doing enough to solve their mess, Koreans began protesting outside the U.S. embassy in Seoul.

This must-read piece goes on to quote “Comrade” Chung Dong-Young, who is now exploiting the misery of the hostages to elevate himself from well-deserved obscurity to spokesmanship for his country’s constituency of the self-centered, cowardly, and irredeemably stupid.  It concludes:

No one forced the missionaries to slip into a war zone, or their choice to run around without security. But it’s another case of the U.S. as Rambo: We get reamed because we supposedly bash recklessly around the world with a machine-guns-first, questions-later style – but when things really hit the fan, what’s the first country that’s expected to solve the crisis du jour?

South Korea has one of the largest standing militaries in the world. That manpower would be a great help in both rescuing their own citizens and trying to wipe out the Taliban. But rather than inspire them to take responsibility and pony up more resources, this incident has had the opposite effect.  [Bridget Johnson, LA Daily News]

In the short term, the Korean government may win a few votes by demonizing America and buying the freedom of as many hostages as it can.  In the long term, that nation’s security will suffer if it pits America’s vital security interests in Afghanistan against its less-vital security interests in keeping a large military presence in South Korea, one of the world’s richest countries.

The only clear winners here are The Taliban.  In a Korean election year, their murder of two other hostages will quickly be forgotten, while these two releases will be held up as proof of the success of a ransom-based response to terror.  Naturally, the Taliban are now threatening to take more hostages.  The South Korean government has made it highly profitable for a wide range of thugs — North Korean thugs, Afghan thugs, Nigerian thugs, whatever — to take its citizens hostage.

“The longer it goes on and the more exposure it receives in the international media, the more strain it creates on the U.S., Afghan, and South Korean governments,” [one terrorism expert] said in an e-mail interview with Yonhap. 

“This is why we call hostage-taking a ‘a weapon of mass impact.’”  [Yonhap]

I do not mean to blame the hostages for the reactions of their government and some of their fellow citizens.  They probably didn’t think through how some of their countrymen would react, or much else about this trip. Â Only they can explain just how they expected their mission to end.  Their government’s decisions to negotiate and pay ransom (possibly to the wrong people), to veto two rescue attempts, or to set America up as the villlain probably didn’t figure into their plans.  It’s not fair at all to blame them for the murderous intolerance of a death cult, though that was the most predictable part of this story.  The missionaries themselves are neither villains nor heroes here.  They were merely the ones who chose, still inexplicably, to be the low-hanging fruit for every breed of swine in the orchard. 

The victims are not villains, but they are also unworthy of comparison to the intrepid South Korean missionaries who are infiltrating into North Korea or smuggling refugees through China, and who face great risks knowing that there is no hope of resue or ransom if they’re caught.  When was the last time you heard a South Korean official call on China or North Korea to release any Korean refugee, missionary, abductee, or prisoner of war, much less plunk down cash to free one?  South Korean officials are far more likely to collude with Chinese or North Korea captors of their citizens than lift a finger to free them.  By all accounts (here, here), plenty of North Koreans are ready to be changed by South Korean missionaries.  By all accounts, virtually no Afghans are.  In North Korea and in the safehouses of China’s underground railroad, missionaries are changing societies and saving lives.  In Afghanistan, this particular group of missionaries has given the death cult its biggest propaganda coup of a year in which it has had some significant military setbacks.  The difference between the underground railroad and the Afghan hostages is the difference between clandestine sophistication and a march of lemmings.  Take it from no less an authority than the Reverend Tim Peters:

“Vacation missionaries [go] to war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, and you get them in situations where they are way out of their depth ….”  [WSJ, Opinion Journal]

Courage and foolishness are sometimes difficult to distinguish, but not impossible.  I draw it along these lines.  First, are those who put themselves in danger trying to minimize risk or maximize it?  Here’s the bus the hostages were riding through Talibanland. Â 

bus.jpg

[link to Reuters photo] 

Here’s a map of where they were:

taliban-map.JPG

So much for discretion being the better part of valor.  Second, were they prepared to face the risks they chose to confront?  I guess not:

“We really want to go home, we are all sick and weak,” said the woman, who spoke both in English and the Afghan language of Dari. “We are all innocent people. We came here to help these people but now we are all sick.”  [USA Today]

Third, is there some reasonable hope that their risk will be rewarded by some meaningful accomplishment? Â Here’s what I’d really, really like to know, because it’s relevant to just how much help these people expected to provide:  what medical training did these people have, if any?  I spent more time googling around than I should have, which turned up some unsourced references to some of the hostages being “medical professionals” or having had six months of medical training.  How many were doctors or nurses?  What, specifically would they have done, and where?  (You may recall a previous group of 1,000 Korean Christian missionaries who were deported “for their own safety” after they ended up knocking on the doors of confused locals in Herat and conducting Korean-language prayer services at local historic sites.)  According to some reports, their medical mission was in Kandahar, in which case, why not fly into Kandahar instead of riding a bright, shiny bus down the highway through Ghazni, halfway between the two cities?  Do the many other Christian charities that operate in Afghanistan — Christian Aid, Lutheran World Relief, the United Methodist Committee on Relief, the Friends Afghan Concern, Catholic Relief, or Episcopal Afghan Aid – operate this way?  I’m sure we’d have read much more about them if they did.  Those groups are getting much less (of the wrong kind of) publicity because they’ve found smarter ways to do good, and to spread their message in the most persuasive way — by example.

Now apply the same three questions to the missionaries who are smuggling North Koreans through China.  There’s no question they’re also taking great risks, but the sheer weight of consequence has forced them to adapt their methods enough to outwit Chinese or North Korean security forces, at least most of the time.  Without question, they’re fully prepared to accept the consequences of getting caught.  The risks they take have upset plenty of diplomats and foreign ministry bureaucrats, but they have probably saved thousands of lives.  If they continue to transform the societies of China and North Korea, they may save millions.  A smarter approach — which Korean churches are now reconsidering — might even help nudge Afghan society out of the middle ages.

What’s been so striking about the whole discussion of the Afghanistan hostages is the tendency of their detractors and supporters alike to generalize and oversimplify the issue based on their own feelings about Christianity generally.  Hate Christians?  Hit one time too many with a ruler in Catholic school?  Odds are you’re among those chatting away in enjoyment at the hostages’ misery, or trying to draw moral equivalence between the hostages and the Taliban.  Likewise, those who generally support Christianity or the right to preach it have tended to hold the 23 blameless for all the pain that came of their mission.  But if it’s error to generalize about Islam — and there’s precious little Muslim criticism of this crime to be heard from anyone but Hamid Karzai – it’s surely a far greater error to herd all Christians onto this ill-fated bus.  Not all faith is the same, not all Christianity is the same, and not every sacrifice is equally worthy of our honor because of the symbol it wears. 

Count me among those who believe that Afghanistan would be a better place if it were minimally influenced by the Christian ethic, but this mission’s most important revelation has been the success of hostage-taking as a profitable business model for terrorists.  It will expose other, more effective Christian aid organizations to greater danger. Â Douglas Shin, one of the savvier operatives of the underground railroad out of North Korea, sees even wider effects:

“People will wonder if it is worth the risk now, and donors will probably withhold more funds because they fear they could be causing someone harm.” Though Shin believes the Afghanistan mission was sincere, he expects that what he calls “camcorder missions” — assignments that are more or less photo ops for groups looking money for supporters — to wane in the near future. Â  [Time]

It merits repeating that anyone not wishing for the safe return of these unfortunates is a poisoned, soulless ghoul.  But it’s one thing to wish for a fool’s deliverance from evil, and another to make a hero of the fool because his role in wreaking destruction was passive.  Having disregarded their government’s warnings and those of the Afghan government, those who sent these hostages into Taliban country now expect both governments to make sacrifices that will get other people maimed and killed to save them.  There are so many places – including places in Afghanistan – where that kind of result would have been less predictable.  Just as we use the phrase “suicide by cop,” this looks to be a case of “martyrdom by Taliban.”  Only now, the burden of martyrdom is being shifted to others — Afghans and future hostages — who never signed up for it.

The Taliban, who only give the superficial appearance of being human, oblige.  When sadists and masochists meet, there is always extra pain to go around.

The Going-Out-of-Business Summit

August 8, 2007 Appeasement, Diplomacy 10 comments

I’ve had the better part of a day to wonder what good can come of an eleventh-hour lame-duck summit between Roh Moo Hyun and Kim Jong Il, and one possibility finally did occur to me.  When Roh returns to Seoul, a DNA swab of his chin will guarantee us a positive ID of Kim Jong Il’s disfigured corpse once it is recovered from some shallow grave or lamppost.  Don’t laugh.  He supposedly keeps a few doubles, and how long were we all reading those Hitler-in-Argentina headlines at the supermarket checkout line?

I certainly can’t see anything else good coming of this.  Assume Roh makes some kind of substantive agreement with Kim Jong Il.  For that matter, assume Kim Jong Il won’t overplay his hand with outlandish demands, and that this meeting even happens.  Is there any doubt that any agreement reached would be just as unbalanced a giveaway as Roh’s diplomacy with the North has always been? 

Could this possibly amount to anything other than a cynical election-year ploy for a photo op?  Roh is deeply unpopular, his party is near the end of a slow and painful process of disintegration, and as of this moment, Uri 2.0 is headed for an electoral trouncing.  By what sort of mandate will Roh bind his country to an agreement’s terms?  How much influence has he ever wielded over the other parties to the six-party talks?  What can he offer Kim Jong Il that he hasn’t already given, asking nothing in return?  Very little.  Roh is still president, but a few months later, he won’t be, and the new President of Republic of Korea may not agree with the wisdom of being bound by Roh’s final close-out giveaway, though Kim Jong Il is a strict contructionist when it comes to what people agree to give him.  It would be the height of irresponsibility for Roh to agree to anything now, but you could say the same of how he financed Kim Jong Il’s nuclear armament or sanctioned his atrocities against the North Korean people.  In other words, it would be just what we expect from him.

It’s also questionable how many security benefits this meeting could possibly bring to the peninsula when Roh didn’t even tell the United States that he was contemplating it.  Sure, the rumors have been floating around for months, and although Roh’s government has downplayed them, I have no doubt that Sandy Vershbow asked about them.  That makes it significant that the United States publicly stated that it had no idea this meeting would take place.  The United States may thus feel equally free to disregard whatever comes of this meeting, though it would probably be wise to make a pretense of its relevance for a few months.  And in case you’re wondering, 

“The president [of the United States] will not be attending.  On the other hand, we certainly support the inter-Korean dialogue.  It’s a way of contributing to peace and security.  The South Korean government has consulted with us on it. It’s an opportunity to continue with the progress made through the six-party talks leading toward denuclearization.  As you know there are, under the auspices of the six-party talks, opportunities for bilateral discussions between parties and this fits into that overall model.”

The conservative Joongang Ilbo samples opinion unscientifically and finds it mixed.  South Korea has some remarkably gullible people, but this isn’t 2000, and South Koreans have now had seven years to see how little June 2000 mattered, and how much corruption it took to arrange it.  This meeting will probably help Uri’s numbers, but I don’t know how much. 

There is an opportunity for co-front-runners Park Geun Hye and Lee Myung Bak here, in the unlikely event they’re shrewd enough to take it.  A shrewd politician would roll with this punch and ask for a seat at the table.  It’s virtually assured that North Korea would issue a shrill refusal and further drive home the cynicism of what Roh and Kim really are trying to pull here.  Then, either would be within his or her place to say that if elected president, he or she would not be bound by said cynical lame-duck ploy agreement.  If the request is granted, Park or Lee would be in a position to dominate the conversation, look presidential, and show their willingness to be tough but diplomatic.  Of the two, Park is more likely to pull it off without screwing it up, but less likely to take the risk of trying it.

Update:  Bruce Klingner of the Heritage Foundation adds this detail on just how much Roh kept the U.S. government in the dark here:

South Korea informed the U.S. only a few hours prior to the announcement, signaling that Seoul is freelancing on peninsular issues and not coordinating with its key ally. The head of the National Intelligence Service, South Korea’s intelligence agency, traveled twice to North Korea in secret to engage in preparation negotiations. This is consistent with South Korean actions prior to the 2000 summit, when the Kim Dae-Jung administration alerted the U.S. Embassy in Seoul only one day prior to announcing that summit.  [Bruce Klingner, Heritage Web Memo]

Klingner thinks that Washington is genuinely concerned that Roh is being played to our disadvantage.  That sounds about right to me.  No matter how much the United States sacrifices diplomatically, it will never be enough for us to expect fair dealing from a certain breed of Korean politician. 

See also:

*  The conventional wisdom can no longer deny that our military is making significant gains in restoring security to the Sunni Triangle, the area where we faced our worst problems until recently, and much of Baghdad.  We have now recruited 25,000 Sunni tribesmen to the fight against al-Qaeda.  While I see no basis in the headline’s claim that those 25,000 are former insurgents, many undoubtedly are, or the streets of Ramadi wouldn’t be so quiet.  The recruits have had their biometric data recorded and have all signed oaths promising not to fight the central government.  Even more positive:  the actual numbers rise so quickly, the present number is no doubt much higher.  Less positive:  it’s clearly going to be a chore to integrate those groups into the government’s security system or prevent them from becoming what they’ve always been — sectarian militias.  Much sectarian division and distrust will have to be overcome.  If the security situtation continues to stabilize, we’ll have a shot at it. 

I’m agnostic about whether Iraq can live as a unitary or federal state, though those who propose dividing Iraq as an easy answer are fooling themselves.  They should consider how much blood spilled when borders were drawn through Bosnia, or between India and Pakistan.  Although I think a loose federal state that gradually strengthens is the best option, I would not be despondent if Iraq were gently divided.  That, and the form of Iraq’s government, will have to be up to the Iraqis.  Their form of government won’t be democracy as we love it for decades, if ever.  For example, Iraq’s government may have to take a hard line toward speech designed to inflame sectarian or ethnic tensions.  Our essential security interests are to leave no part of Iraq unstable, anarchic, a terrorist haven, a charnel house, a threat to its neighbors, or an Iranian puppet.  Those will be great challenges, but meet them and our essential security objectives will have been achieved.  Yes, we could leave behind another ruthless dictatorship, but we’d eventually pay for that.  Fail to meet those essential objectives, and disaster will come sooner rather than later.

[Update:  Similar questions from Victor Davis Hanson]

*  North Korea is very worried about a few leaflets being floated across the DMZ in balloons.

*  Iran is worried about an American-backed “soft revolution.”  I’m worried that by the time any such revolution could succeed, that Iran will be a nuclear power.  I’m also very worried about what Iranian-backed Shiite thugs (more) may be plotting in the next two months to try to achieve a “Tet effect” on public opinion here.  With AQ apparently a declining force in Iraq, Shiite extremists may now be the greatest threat to our forces, and to their own country’s future. 

Buddhist NGO Warns of Return of Famine in North Korea

August 7, 2007 Famine & Food Aid 6 comments

The South Korean NGO Good Friends, which has been well connected inside North Korea since the Great Famine, says that North Koreans are again starving to death in significant numbers, although the numbers do not (yet?) approach the death tolls of the 1990′s.

Good Friends, an organization helping North Korea opened a media information session on the 2nd about the North Korean food shortage and said that immediate food support was necessary as “around 10 people per city and county were starving to death daily.

Previously, controversy had arisen as Good Friends had reported recently that since last June there were people starving to death and recently in Hamheung the number of deaths from starvation had exceeded 300 people.

On this day, Good Friends announced that “there are 10 people starving to death in each city and county of North Pyungan Province, Yangkang Province, North and South Hamkyung as the number of casualties are increasing. In Hamheung, North Hamkyung, there are more than 300 people who starved to death and in each hospital in Chongjin, Ranam, Kyungseong, Uhrang, Buryeong, Kilju and Myungcheon there are 3-4 people who starve to death daily.

In addition, [Good Friends] asserted that “there is an increase in the number of people who commit suicide and the number of households in which the entire family turn to pickpocket and sell their own house. There is a possibility that the pains of 10 years ago will repeat.Â  [Daily NK]

Typically enough, the regime’s response to the problem has consisted mainly of ordering people not to talk about it.  The Daily NK reports that the control of information continues to be so effective that people still only know of starvation deaths among their close neighbors.

Despite the obvious problems with the quality of our information, there is more evidence that large-scale famine has not returned than evidence that it has.  Refugees aren’t reporting a serious deterioration of the food situation, and food prices have generally been stable.  It’s possible that a small-scale famine is claiming the have-nots, those who are starving can’t afford to buy food at any price.  It’s also possible that 10 starvation deaths per day has been a relatively normal occurrence in those parts of North Korea for the last decade, and that not much has changed. 

If wide-scale famine returns, people will begin to sell their homes and possessions and take to the roads in large numbers, there will be drastic fluctuations in food prices, people will pre-harvest immature crops, and farmers will butcher their draft animals.  I’ve been watching for those signs and haven’t seen them.  For what it’s worth, the World Food Program, whose limited access the North Koreans severely limited last year, at least admits that it doesn’t have enough access to information to say whether the Good Friends report is true, either. 

Meanwhile, a report from a U.N. aid agency claims that infant mortality in North Korea has more than doubled in the last decade, which happens to be the decade since the arrival of massive food aid from the World Food ended the worst of the Great Famine.  I can think of two ways to explain why there would be higher infant mortality figures despite the arrival of more food aid.  One is that the figures are unreliable and based on incomplete or manipulated information.  Another is that the aid that did arrive was distributed so unequally that the kids in disfavored political classes were no less hungry.

See also: 

*  North Korea’s latest threat to walk away from AF 2.0 is our annual military exercises with South Korea.  I posit that North Korea has run out of concessions it’s willing to make – other than releasing a few abductees for the right price — but it has made significant gains on money laundering, terrorism, and has pretty much buried UNSCR 1695 and 1718.  They’ll go along for the ride as long as they think they can keep making gains at no cost to themselves.

pak.jpg*  The Hand Not Shaken:  I wonder how strongly even Chris Hill would disagree:

The lead US negotiator on North Korea appeared to show some lingering frustration with Pyongyang on Thursday when he refused a handshake from the reclusive state’s new foreign minister.

North Korea’s Pak Ui-Chun was seen offering his hand to US Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill at the annual Asian security summit here, but Hill snubbed the foreign minister and walked away.  Hill, who had said a day earlier that the North Korean disarmament process was “on track,” was apparently miffed by Pak’s statement at the closed-door ASEAN Regional Forum on Thursday.

“I found it sometimes a little harsh, to be frank,” Hill told reporters, while declining to give any details.  [AFP]

BREAKING: Shots Fired Along DMZ

August 6, 2007 NK Military, ROK Military 3 comments

Here.  Fox’s report suggests they’re still shooting.

Pew: Anti-Americanism Declined in South Korea (But Read the Fine Print)

August 6, 2007 Anti-Americanism 9 comments

According to this year’s Pew Global attitudes report, anti-Americanism has declined significantly in South Korea, from 46% favorable in 2003 to 58% favorable last year.  Pew says that the “U.S. image has improved dramatically” there, and while this result suggests a significant and positive change, Pew’s enthusiasm is overstated, because Pew is comparing two extremes that may overstate the actual situation.

Pew’s first point of comparison is 2003, when anti-Americanism was at its fevered peak, when no South Korean politician of either party dared to say a kind word about us.  Since then, Pew incomprehensibly skipped 2004, 2005, and 2006, which makes longer-term trends and anomolous data harder to spot. Â 

Pew’s second point of comparison also turns out to be problematic – between April 9th and April 24th, 2007.  Under the best of circumstances, South Korean public opinion is notoriously volatile, but that period immediately follows the signing of a free trade agreement with the U.S. in which South Korea got almost everything it wanted.  It also came just as North Korea failed to meet its first disarmament deadlines under Agreed Framework 2.0. Â Given all of the sacrificed U.S. interests that those two developments represented, you’d certainly hope we’d bought a few breaks for ourselves. Â It’s not fanciful to assume that America’s “favorables” got a bounce of 5-15% from them. 

The statistical fine print doesn’t inspire much confidence, either.  The sample size was just 718 people, and the margin of error was 4%.  If I’m right about my “bounce” theory, any longer-term improvement in America’s image that could be measured today would likely be at or near the statistical margin of error.  If our favorables have barely budged since the ugly days of 2003, that’s depressing.  It also suggests that we could be one traffic accident away from going back to that.

Yet Pew’s result is generally consistent with my personal observations, and a limited amount of statistical evidence indicates a short-to-mid-term trend of declining anti-Americanism at this instant.  The intensity of anti-Americanism seems to have declined, but its latent popularity probably hasn’t changed much. The survey also had more troubling indicators, however. Â A very high 79% of South Koreans still said that U.S. policy considers their interests “not much” or “not at all,” suggesting a fairly deep alienation from our policies (such as the protection of their country’s very existence and all of the collateral economic benefits of that?).  Just 24% of South Koreans supported the war on terror, a result right between those of Pakistan (20%) and Bangladesh (28%).  And over the long term, there’s plenty of reason for pessimism.  Older Koreans tend to be much more pro-American than their children and grandchildren.  The ones who like us the most tend to be those who won’t be around as long. 

Interestingly, South Koreans tend to have unusually unfavorable views of both Bush and Hu Jintao.  One of the brighter spots in this survey is that South Koreans have grown much more concerned about China’s increasing power, as they should be.  South Koreans still have a favorable view of China, by 52% to 42%, but that’s a significant decline since 2002 when it was 66% favorable to 31% unfavorable.  Korea also looks less favorably on China than the United States or Canada, and significantly less favorable than most other Asian nations, with the exception of Japan (67% unfavorable). Â By a staggering 89% to 8%, South Koreans see China’s growing military power as a “bad thing,” and by 60% to 36%, they see its growing economic power as a bad thing.

I have compiled other statistics on anti-Americanism in South Korea here.

See also:

*  In North Korea, a man is executed for cutting down “slogan trees,” a fraudulent propaganda creation said to contain the inscriptions of Kim Il Sung’s guerrilla band.  In fact, Kim’s brief career as a guerrilla was spent almost entirely in Manchuria before he was driven across the Soviet border and became an officer in Stalin’s army.  The slogans on those trees probably weren’t even authored until Stalin left his mark on North Korea ideology.  On the other hand, it might be possible to make some lovely step-chests from them.

*  Claudia Rosett on Chris Hill, an unskeptical press, and AF 2.0:

For a serious test of the value of these talks with North Korea, here’s something worth tabling while Kim Jong Il recovers from the exertions of switching off Yongbyon (again). Why not demand that Kim open up North Korea’s Camp 22 to a snap visit by the international press? That would be far more informative than this endless flow of merry briefings from Chris Hill. It would also be a bargaining chip far more in keeping with our own democratic principles than the rotten old habit of trying to buy peace by sending tribute — which we call aid — to Kim’s regime.

She links here, too (thanks), which is flattering, and also telling as to how little information there is out there about North Korea’s camps.  It’s the greatest cause that almost no one ever took up.

*  Mark Steyn on Terror, Censorship, and Saudi Arabia.  And who knew you could make a point about censorship while making delicious pork? 

*  William Kristol at the Weekly Standard believes the defeatists in this city are in retreat.  I wish it were so, but if you watch the Iraq story carefully, you will see that our enemies — particularly those backed by Iran — are preparing to launch a new offensive just before Petraeus reports.  Our only hope to forestall this is through carefully targeted raids at Mahdi commanders and cell leaders to disrupt their plans as much as possible.  So it has come to this:  enemies of the United States coordinate their attacks with those of our domestic political opposition, and the two work in unspoken symbiosis.  They are not in retreat.  They are simply waiting for a better opportunity to strike.  We could defeat them, but the question is whether bin Laden was right about us.

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