Archive for September 2007

Is North Korea Selling Nukes to Syria?

September 13, 2007 Proliferation, Six-Party Talks 6 comments

Update: 

North Korea may be cooperating with Syria on some sort of nuclear facility in Syria, according to new intelligence the United States has gathered over the past six months, sources said. The evidence, said to come primarily from Israel, includes dramatic satellite imagery that led some U.S. officials to believe that the facility could be used to produce material for nuclear weapons.

The new information, particularly images received in the past 30 days, has been restricted to a few senior officials under the instructions of national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, leaving many in the intelligence community unaware of it or uncertain of its significance, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Â [Washington Post, Glenn Kessler]

Calling all diggers.

Original Post:

If so, this is the biggest North Korea story of the decade (ht to Richardson).  The story is hidden in the middle of a New York Times story covering last week’s fracas between Israel and Syria, something that would otherwise be an ordinary page 15 story.  But this time, along with conducting air strikes on unspecified targets, Israel was overflying Syrian territory with reconnaissance aircraft:

One Bush administration official said Israel had recently carried out reconnaissance flights over Syria, taking pictures of possible nuclear installations that Israeli officials believed might have been supplied with material from North Korea. The administration official said Israeli officials believed that North Korea might be unloading some of its nuclear material on Syria.

“The Israelis think North Korea is selling to Iran and Syria what little they have left,” the official said. He said it was unclear whether the Israeli strike had produced any evidence that might validate that belief.  [N.Y. Times, Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper]

This report raises some extremely grave questions without doing much to answer them.  Can we verify the Israelis’ suspicions to a reasonable degree of probability?  How certain are we that North Korea is only selling nuclear “materials,” and at what stage of refinement, enrichment, or reprocessing are those materials? Â I already have one grave doubt, although it isn’t dispositive to the concern:  the words, “selling … what little they have left.”  I cannot believe that North Korea would permanently give up all of its nuclear weapons or materials under any circumstance except the overthrow of Kim Jong Il’s regime.  I can believe they’re selling off excess materials that could prove cumbersome in the event of more robust inspections that move beyond the immediate vicinity of Yongbyon, the box within which they’ve been kept so far.

Depending on those answers, the implications are tectonic. Â The first of these is a perfect illustration of why every agreement North Korea signs should come stamped with the following prominent disclaimers:

FOR COSMETIC AND ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY

NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR AN ACTUAL POLICY

DO NOT TAKE INTERNALLY

This would be a deal breaker for Agreed Framework 2.0 and Agreed Framework 2.1, so the State Department’s less principled personalities have an incentive to disbelieve the story, and to discourage everyone else from believing it.  In circumstances like those, legitimate questions about this report will be especially difficult to sort out from illegitimate ones, and if this story gets legs in our current political climate, count on plenty of addlebrained conspiracy theories to fog up the image. 

Second, this would be a great leap over The Red Line, as articulated by one of State’s more dovish alumni, Jack Pritchard. 

Third, a North Korean discount sale on nuclear material (or weapons?) would make the decision not to impose a blockade on North Korea irresponsible, although there are good reasons (read on) to impose it as softly as circumstances permit.

Fourth, treating this report with the importance it merits risks some obvious political consequences (see addlebrained theories, above).  It tests a public grown weary — though mostly, of discomforts borne by other people — at a time when congressional support for President Bush’s Iraq policy seems to be gradually regaining some of its rigidity. 

It could also favor left-wing candidates in South Korea’s upcoming election.  Given what we’ve learned about South Korean apathy about contributing to terrorist threats to Americans, South Koreans would probably vote for the politician least likely to cooperate with the United States in dealing with this threat.  There’s little question that Roh would think nothing of the security of the United States and exclusively of domestic politics.  And although I’ve long believed that we’ve mostly failed to use our considerable leverage to control South Korean policies that threaten our own security, there would be great benefits in having South Korea as an ally again, even if only to a limited degree.

What the Bush Administration Really Thinks About ‘The Spat’

September 13, 2007 An Alliance?, Diplomacy, U.S. & Korea 4 comments

Commenter Michael Sheehan dropped a link to a must-read by former senior NSC advisor Michael Green, on Roh’s bumbling open-air negotiation with President Bush last week.  Green also thinks that Roh knew what he was doing, that he did it for domestic political reasons, and that he set his own goals back in the process.  In other words, typical Roh:

Watching the exchange later on YouTube.com, I felt great sympathy for my former national security colleagues in both countries, since I’ve also had to “explain” apparent gaps between the leaders on more than one occasion. However, this one was the biggest I had ever seen and veteran White House reporters knew what they were watching.

The exchange over the peace treaty issue reveals how unpredictable Roh is in these summit meetings. Before going in front of the press, the leaders and their staffs usually huddle to anticipate any questions and to put the best possible spin on their meeting. That rarely works with Roh. I cannot think of another foreign leader ever pressing the president of the United States to “clarify” a position in front of the press in this way. There is a certain charm in a head of state who will not be scripted, I have to admit, but in this case it was hard not to suspect that Roh had an objective in mind and was not merely extemporizing. 

What was Roh’s objective? The obvious answer would be that he wanted to extract a public commitment from Bush on delinking the peace treaty from denuclearization. But if this was Roh’s goal, he set it back with this exchange. Â [Joongang Ilbo]

You can’t help suspecting that Green was asked to convey this message.

See also:

*  Lee Myung Bak is articulating his North Korea policy:  massive aid, but not unconditional aid.  Interesting, but I’ll wait to see how words translate to actions.  More than most politicians before elections, Lee is a man with great ambitions for things that his treasurers can’t afford.

Anju Links for 9/12/07

September 12, 2007 Anju Links 4 comments

*  maurice-strong.jpgCanadian Oil-for-Food scandal figure Maurice Strong, who took $1 million from Saddam Hussein as a senior U.N. official and confidant of Kofi Annan, has resurfaced in China.  You’ll remember that Strong was also Kofi Annan’s Special Envoy to North Korea, and that the North Korean-born Tongsun Park, now serving a five-year prison sentence, was his bag-man and informal advisor on North Korea.  All of which may go far to explain why the U.N. stood around performing a colonoscopy on itself while Kim Jong Il starved 2.5 million people and killed hundreds of thousands more in his killing fields.

*  Also in U.N. scandal news:  former Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth will lead the “independent” panel investigating irregularities in the UNDP’s North Korea program, and the firing of the whistleblower who revealed them.

*  If you’re going to be in Washington with some free time at 2:30 on September 19th, one of South Korea’s few heroes of the Great Famine will speak — the Venerable Pomnyun, leader of the Korean Buddhist Sharing Movement.  More info and registration here.

*  The South Korean-financed, appeasement-minded, and well-connected Korea Society spent last weekend touring North Korean diplomats and their families around Washington, D.C.  The Korea Society is led by a former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, whom I debated here, but the State Department assures us that the visit involved no diplomatic contacts.  Bullshit really is an industry in this city.

*  Meanwhile, North Korean defectors are still showing up in Thailand, and South Korea is apparently still doing nothing for them.

*  So Roh Moo Hyun wants to have a summit with Kim Jong Il where they won’t talk nukes or human rights.  I could ask why they’re having a summit at all, and I could ask why South Korea has a Human Rights Commission, but those questions are asked well enough by ruNK, DPRK Forum, The Nomad, and Andy Jackson (don’t miss the Marmot’s comment).  Front-runner Lee Myung Bak is now publicly urging Roh to raise the nuclear issue.

*  What’s a band of wackadoodle 9/11 “truthers” to do if it can march right through Haight-Ashbury without drawing a crowd?

*  If you read Korean, the Epoch Times covers a protest meeting led by Son Jong Hun, the brother of Son Jong Nam.

Noland and Haggard: Kim Jong Il’s Palace Economy Is Broken

September 11, 2007 Money Laundering, NK Economics 9 comments

North Korea is a land made in the vision of John Edwards:  to a greater extent than almost anywhere, there are two North Koreas.  That division is even preserved by a semi-official, hereditary caste system.  That’s why it wouldn’t be completely accurate to say that North Korea’s economy is near collapse; one of the North Korean economies — the peoples’ economy — collapsed a dozen years ago.  What was left of it was severely disrupted by the Great Famine, when hundreds of thousands of people left the gutted factories that no longer paid them to become fugitives in China, vagabonds in their own country subject to internment in so-called 9/27 camps, or corpses. 

Then there’s the palace economy:  the system of privileges, rations, and benefits that sustains the military, the party, and the system of control.  Its favors range from Japanese televisions and bicycles reportedly made in a prison camp in Chongjin to Mercedez S-Class sedans.  That’s the economy that sustains Kim Jong Il’s luxurious life and his grip on power.  Last year, I reported in exhaustive detail about how the palace economy was devastated by the Treasury Department’s crackdown on the illegal proceeds that fuel it.  More recently, we learned the interesting fact that last year, the North Korean economy declined for the first time in years.  I speculated (see also, third item) that Treasury’s enforcement measures might have been a cause of this, a fact that the original South Korean report conspicuously did not bring up.  My theory now has some strong new support from two of the foremost experts on the subject.

In a new article for Newsweek, Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard — fresh from their appearance on this humble blog — are also talking about the significance of those developments.  They believe that this time, North Korea really is ready to disarm and reform because it’s out of options, and because the absence of other options means that this time, we’re negotiating from strength:

We think we know why North Korea is softening, or at least appears to be. We’ve been working on an in-depth profile of the North Korean economy, and it is in serious trouble. The North Korean economy had been in weak but steady recovery since 1999, growing about 15 percent over the next six years despite its isolation and increasing backwardness. Then came a new setback. Last year the national income contracted by 1.1 percent, according to the South Korean government. Our research suggests the main reason for the downturn was that U.S.-led sanctions hit harder than most people realize. Now more than ever, North Korea needs the financial benefits of a nuclear deal to survive.

The sanctions struck a feeble economy from many sides. The United States led actions to shut down North Korea’s missile trade, and put the squeeze on its illicit smuggling and counterfeiting revenue. The black-market rate on North Korea’s currency plummeted after a small bank in Macau, central to the North’s money-laundering activities, was shut down. Japan effectively cut off a heavy flow of remittances to Pyongyang from North Koreans in Japan. We estimate that together with legal arms sales, revenue from contraband–including the production and trafficking of drugs, counterfeit cigarettes, smuggling of liquor and endangered-species parts, to name a few–may have accounted for as much as half of North Korea’s exports in the late 1990s but has fallen to roughly 15 percent in recent years due to sanctions. In the meantime, aid now finances 40 percent of imports. There are benefits to playing nice in the nuclear talks–or pretending to.  [Newsweek, Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard, emphasis mine]

This article is too fascinating and too significant not to read in its entirety, even if I don’t agree with Noland and Haggard that North Korea has made a strategic choice to reform or disarm.  North Korea will remain true to form and try to hide as much as possible and change as little as possible.  Like all of the other announced “breakthroughs” with North Korea before this one, any still-unrealized reforms will only seek to recognize the economic realities that have already spun out of the regime’s control.  To the extent it recognizes them, it will only be to reestablish its control.

The real question is whether it will succeed.  The more repressive the state, the more powerful the pressures for change that build within its society.  In North Korea, probably the most repressive state of all, those pressures are potentially explosive.  Any relaxation of official control could spark that explosion, and Kim Jong Il knows it.  Yet as time passes, it becomes progressively more difficult and more expensive to contain those forces.  Who will pay for all that barbed wire and concrete?  Will it be us?

Kim Jong Il might have been forced to choose between utter bankruptcy and terminal reforms a decade ago, but South Korean aid allowed Kim Jong Il to choose neither.  I agree with Noland and Haggard that the palace economy is unsustainable without outside aid, and in the wake of this year’s floods, I don’t think that’s ever been more true.  So much depends on our next move, and that of Lee Myung Bak, South Korea’s presumptive next president.  A coordinated strategy between the two ex-allies — along with Japan — might just force the softest landing for North Korea that can be conceived. 

Or, we could decide to keep feeding this beast.

Newsweek Reports on Son Jong Nam, North Korea’s Only (Possibly) Living Dissident

September 11, 2007 Inside NK, Religion, Resistance 2 comments

son-jong-nam.jpgA new Newsweek piece about North Korea’s underground movement reports on the plight of Son Jong Nam.  If Son still lives, he sits on death row in Pyongyang for spreading his faith.  You will recall that I previously wrote about him here, and told you how you can join in a campaign to save his life.  Newsweek estimates that there are between 20,000 and 100,000 underground Christians in North Korea. You can’t bring Christianity to such a place on a shiny bus. It takes resourcefulness, guile, courage, and determination to pull something like this off. This kind:

Missionaries say Christians often keep their Bibles buried in the backyard, wrapped in vinyl. Preachers based in China sometimes conduct services by mobile phone. In five to 10 minutes the pastor reads Bible passages and prays for the sick and needy. Services are kept short; the regime uses GPS trackers to locate the phones.  [Newsweek, Christian Caryl and B.J. Lee]

Son knew the risks he was facing going into this.  Although he is legally a citizen of South Korea, don’t expect to hear a single word from the South Korean government to save Son Jong Nam’s life.  South Korea has other priorities. 

Note that there’s a significant inconsistency in the story:  according to the previous source I quoted, it was Son’s pregnant sister in law who miscarried after being kicked by police.  In Newsweek’s story, the woman was Son’s wife. 

New readers may not have seen this detailed chronology of what appears to be growing anti-government dissent and resistance.  The obvious cautions apply:  it’s almost impossible to verify most of the fragmentary reports we hear from the world’s most closed society.  On the other side of the ledger, there’s little question that the North Korean regime has extinguished some extraordinary courage in its death camps and dungeons without the word ever reaching the outside world.  In all probability, that’s going to be the fate of Song Jong Nam, too.  But no chance to save Son, or the next brave men and women who will follow him, should be missed.

Another interesting fact I would never have guessed: “Billy Graham’s late wife, Ruth, attended Christian boarding school in Pyongyang as a teen in the 1920s.” Heh? I’ll file that one right next to the ones about Mohammad Ali and Eldridge Cleaver.

What General Petraeus Said

September 10, 2007 Terrorism/Iraq 2 comments

Read for yourself and decide for yourself. Deepest thanks to the reader who forwarded these documents.

petraeus-slides.pdf

petraeus-testimony.pdf

Update: Here’s Amb. Crocker’s statement:

crocker-testimony.pdf

North Korea Is Losing Control of Its Border

September 9, 2007 Deprogramming, Inside NK, NK Military 6 comments

[Update: Someone "Dugg" this post --thanks -- and it's climbing fast. The digg permlink is here. Page one of "Digg" gets far more attention than just about anything out there, so your diggs are greatly appreciated and are a great way to spread the word. Thank you.]

Last week, North Korea announced that several “spies,” possibly including a foreign national, had been caught.  The Daily NK informs us that North Korea’s National Security has claimed credit for the arrests.  The news site speculates about the identity of those arrested and prints an interesting backgrounder on the National Security Agency, which is also responsible for the horrific conditions in North Korea’s concentration camps.

If the report is true, rather than a fictionalized account meant to whip up popular vigilance against foreign enemies, some brave people may have risked all and lost. Â We can be fairly certain of what their fate will be:

[9:59, From CNN's "Undercover in the Secret State"]

Recently, North Korea has taken to executing people in public. Having accepted that it is no longer loved, the regime now aspires only to be feared. The execution you just saw happened in March 2005. Three people were shot for making contact with the outside world, most likely missionaries or defection brokers.

It would be especially sad if those arrested were part of the nascent resistance network that brings us its remarkable ”guerrilla camera” footage, such as this footage of Camp 15, the concentration camp at Yodok.

 

In the escalating clandestine war between the regime and those who would subvert the lies on which its survival depends, however, the regime seems to be losing the wider war.  Nowhere is the erosion of the regime’s control more consequential than the losing battle to control its borders. 

The Daily NK now brings us dramatic evidence of just how deep the regime’s troubles really are, in the form of a video of North Korean border guards smuggling across the Yalu River. Â The man you see here crosses the river on an inner tube, where he is greeted by a uniformed border guard and hands the guard a bag the size of a potato sack.  All of this happens in broad daylight.  You can hear the sound of horns honking, presumably on the Chinese side of the river.  Slow to load, but still a must-see.

north-korea-yalu-river-smuggling.jpg

I’ve previously posted about low morale and indiscipline among North Korean border guards, including a recent mass desertion. Corruption is reportedly rife among the poorly paid border guards, but for the regime, the most unforgiveable offense was the appearance of two of the deserters in an interview for a Japanese television station. For the right price, it seems that you can get just about anything into North Korea, which opens up more subversive possibilities than I care to list here. Â A few years ago, finding a way through Kim Jong Il’s information blockade would have required some extraordinarily (any maybe excessively) creative thinking.  Today, ordinary means seem sufficient to reach people in most areas of the country, though not with large quantities of food or other supplies. Â 

How much good will an expensive new border fence do if those who should be guarding it are looking for ways under, over, and around it? Â Probably not much.  If the guards are on the take, the cost of building that fence would be just one more small cut that bleeds the regime white.  If every citizen, train, and truck is a potential carrier of subversion, the regime will be forced to spend more of its limited resources on internal control until the cost of stemming the spreading discontent breaks it. 

Unless the next South Korean government continues Roh Moo Hyun’s geometric escalation of inter-governmental aid, the erosion of the system’s capacity to sustain itself will accelerate.  Indeed, Roh’s election may well have that delayed Kim Jong Il’s Ceaucescu Moment for several years.  The cost in human life of delaying that moment may be incalculable. 

Burma’s Fighting Monks Battle the Generals’ Thugs

September 9, 2007 Southeast Asia 5 comments

Far away and out of notice of the international press, one of the bravest and unlikeliest acts of defiance of recent times has been playing itself out in Central Burma.  And as is so often the case, the spark for political dissent is economic hardship — in this case, a rise in fuel prices:

BANGKOK–A standoff between Burmese authorities and hundreds of Buddhist monks in the central city of Pakokku has ended with the release of 13 officials taken hostage by the monks after government forces violently suppressed an earlier demonstration.

Monks angry at being beaten with bamboo poles in the crackdown took 13 local officials captive in a compound before burning a number of government vehicles in front of thousands of onlookers, witnesses said.

“The monks told them [onlookers] not to join in, as they didn’t want to get people into trouble, but some of the people helped them turn the cars upside down before they burned them,” one resident said.

Witnesses said 500 monks marched peacefully through the town ahead of the military intervention, chanting prayers and holding placards, with local people offering them bottles of water.

It was broken up by government troops and hired thugs of pro-government groups, who blocked the monks’ way, pointing guns at the unarmed protesters and firing shots into the air, before setting upon them with truncheons and rifle butts, residents said.

When the monks ran, their attackers rounded them up using rope lassos, one monk told RFA. At least one young monk was severely injured. “They were throwing ropes to catch the monks like cowboys. Two monks who got caught with a rope round their neck and later were released now have injuries on their neck and cannot eat because of the pain,” one monk said.

“Two monks were tied to a lamppost with rope and beaten,” he added.  [Radio Free Asia]

Read the whole thing.  Burma’s regime is exceptionally repressive, although it still doesn’t compare to the all-encompassing, cultish control of North Korea.  It’s still an object lession in how dissent can coalesce suddenly in the most repressive states.  The junta acts worried about this latest wave of unrest, which may be the most serious challenge to the regime since pro-democracy protests with ruthlessly put down 1988:

Myanmar’s military government stepped up its propaganda campaign against the country’s pro-democracy movement Sunday (9 Sept), alleging top activists planned terrorist acts and received money from Western nations.

The junta also charged that Htay Kywe, a prominent activist who escaped a security dragnet last month, was assisted in hiding by the embassy of a “powerful country.”  [e-Sinchew] 

North Korea uses so little fuel that higher fuel prices will mostly affect the military, along with the many people who hitch rides on its vehicles.  Note also that a probable majority of North Korea’s civilian motor vehicles are powered by slow, smoky, clunky gas generators that burn wood or charcoal.

See also:

*  The effects of North Korea’s floods continue to look very severe and only seem worse with each new report:

Thousands of people in North Korea “require immediate and continued humanitarian food assistance” after devastating floods last month wiped out key food sources, the U.N. World Food Program said….  According to the agency, the floods had their greatest impact on the “Cereal Bowl” lowlands of North and South Phyongan, and North Hwanghae and South Hwanghae provinces, representing 76% of the country’s total arable land.

It cited estimates by North Korea’s Agriculture Ministry that 16% of total arable land _ normally cultivated with rice, maize, soybean and other crops _ had been damaged.  [e-Sinchew]

Anticipating donor fatigue, the WFP says that the North Korean government has given them “extensive access and cooperation.”  That may be true to an extent, because this time, the floods are affecting the food supply of the ruling classes and the military.  This time, most of the victims are not expendable.

The Death of an Alliance, Part 67

September 7, 2007 An Alliance?, Korean Politics, U.S. & Korea 30 comments

[Update:  As I had figured, only video really does it justice.  Just watch the body language and Bush's expression.  And for that matter, Roh's. Â Roh certainly has used his presidency to perfect a sublime aura of idiocy.  It's hard for me to imagine that South Korean voters will be impressed if their media ever decide to cover this story.  There definitely isn't much love in that room.  Click the image.

bushroh.PNG

Update 1 continued below, with an AP report that does a better job of reporting the dialogue and putting it in context.]

[Update 2: A full transcript of the photo op at the end of this post. My sincere thanks to the reader who sent this.]

[Update 3: I try and fail to explain why the Korean papers aren't reporting this, regardless of their ideology. Maybe you can explain this. Is it Korean pride? Censorship? Just not that big a deal to Koreans? None of those theories makes sense to me.]

[Update 4:  This site's peerless commenters, several of whom are fluent Korean speakers, report that what Roh actually said to Bush was almost universally mistranslated to airbrush out most of the venom.  Roh's actual words were more like, "You keep saying the same thing.... Chairman Kim Jong Il and the Korean people are waiting to hear more from you," or "Same story. Same story, Chairman Kim Jong-il and the South Korean people want to hear a different story.Â  See also this post at DPRK Studies.  So apparently, Kim Jong Il is the only man in North Korea who is represented by an elected politician.]

[Original Post:]

In a testy public exchange Friday with South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, President Bush said the United States would formally end the Korean War only when North Korea halts its nuclear weapons program.  [AP, Tom Raum]

Does a public argument between two lame duck presidents qualify for a DOA post?  Admittedly, it’s marginal, but this would have been unthinkable five years ago, and it says much about the migration of South Korean public attitudes that Roh would see any profit in this.  Roh may be many things, but he’s not stupid, and he’s completely capable of keeping his differences with Bush, Kim Jong Il, Hu Jin Tao, or anyone else private.  For obvious reasons, Roh chose to have them out in the open instead.

[Bush and Roh] agreed there had been progress. But then they had a before-the-cameras back-and-forth that was remarkable in the diplomatic world of understatement and subtlety. 

Roh pushed Bush to be “clearer” about his position on an official end to the 1950-53 Korean War. The two Koreas were divided by the conflict, which ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, meaning they still remain technically at war.

The leaders’ tone remained light, but Bush responded firmly: “I can’t make it any more clear, Mr. President. We look forward to the day when we can end the Korean War. That will happen when Kim Jong Il verifiably gets rid of his weapons programs and his weapons.”

No matter what you may think of Bush — and I’ve been very critical of his Korea policy recently — he seems to have handled this with statesmanlike maturity and a self-discipline that I do not possess (more below on how I would have reacted).  If only I had more faith in the sincerity of what Bush actually said.  For Roh, this is a new low in boobery. 

The tense moments with Roh came as the leaders each made statements to reporters after their meeting. Roh concluded his by questioning why Bush hadn’t mention the issue of the war’s end.

“I might be wrong. I think I did not hear President Bush mention a declaration to end the Korean War just now,” Roh said through an interpreter. “Did you say so, President Bush?”

“It’s up to Kim Jong Il,” Bush said.  Roh pressed on. “If you could be a little bit clearer,” he said, prompting nervous laughter from the U.S. delegation and a look of annoyance from Bush.

Instead, the White House said, “There was clearly something lost in translation during the photo op.”  If you say so. 

For its part, Yonhap did a Rodong Sinmun-quality job of airbrushing all of the unpleasantness out of the story, making no reference to the disagreement and publishing only language to suggest to its readers how peachy things must be:

Friday’s Roh-Bush meeting, the eighth South Korea-U.S. summit during Roh’s term, lasted over 70 minutes in a “very friendly and warm atmosphere,” presidential spokesman Cheon Ho-seon said, noting Bush called Roh his friend during the talks.  [Yonhap]

It goes on to report cheerfully that the two leaders reaffirmed their commitment to the free trade agreement and visa waiver, and if you think the odds of either item just improved at this meeting, you need to take a closer look at the fine print that came with your medications.  Those are two items that (1) have some hope of being achieved, and (2) would have a significant impact on the lives of many South Koreans.  And with the crew that’s running the State Department these days, maybe a completely premature and unrealistic peace treaty is also possible.  But how many of those goals have been advanced by Roh’s choice of tactics, which have nothing to do with diplomacy and everything to do with the short-term domestic political goal of showing the voters how Roh stands up to the Yankees? 

Surely South Korea has differences with China — or should have – but we didn’t see such an adolescent display when Roh met Hu Jin Tao last week.  When it comes to South Korea’s discussions with China and North Korea, the Blue House blows smoke about “quiet diplomacy” and leaves it up to us to infer that it’s exercising responsible statecraft and thinking of the interests of, say, thousands of its abducted citizens, even when reality supports no such inference.  Can anyone still argue that South Korea is an ally of the United States to any greater extent than dozens of other nations we merely refer to as “trading partners?”

Which only causes me to wonder just what will be revealed of the rest of the Il Shim Hue spy ring story after the new crew takes over the Blue House.  Surely the shredding crew will miss something (more fuel for that speculation here).  And it wouldn’t be South Korea if the ex-president wasn’t disgraced (and quite probably, imprisoned).

Had it been me instead of Bush – please suspend your darkest fears for a moment — I would have been unable to resist the temptation to respond just about like this:

You’re absolutely right, President Roh.  You’ve convinced me that tensions on the Korean Peninsula have been reduced so much by your highly effective diplomacy with North Korea that I’m pleased to announce that all U.S. ground forces will be out of Korea by the end of my term.  Furthermore, I’m asking Secretary Gates to conduct a full BRAC review of all other U.S. forces in Korea. 

The United States has interests beyond any differences over the DMZ.  Our own problems with North Korea will continue as long as Kim Jong Il continues to perfect the means to destroy entire cities, and as long as he shows such a disregard for human life that moral restraint clearly does not prevent him from doing that, or from selling those weapons to others who would.  We will give Kim Jong Il until the end of this year to verifiably and completely comply with his agreement to disarm.  And if he doesn’t, the severe consequences for his misrule will begin with the overnight destruction of the palace economy that sustains his military, his weapons programs, and his luxurious lifestyle.  And not even the aid that Mr. Roh provides to Kim Jong Il will be immune.  Good day. 

Read more

The Shooting Starts Before the Whimpering Ends

September 5, 2007 Appeasement, Terrorism/Iraq 4 comments

I hope this will be the last post I do on the Korean-Afghan hostage story, at least until we start to see the proceeds of its resolution in bombs, mangled bodies, and the next round of kidnappings it will inspire.  Koreans are still furious, but mostly at the victims rather than the terrorists.  I admit to having thought, “better them than us.”  The Korean street is a capricious thing.

Consider all that the South Korean government was willing to do to free these hostages.  Now, try not to think about the discussion of the thousands of South Koreans (and others) abducted by North Korea, North Korea’s place on the terror sponsor list, and how hard South Korea has not tried to secure the freedom of those South Korean hostages.  You could burn out some of the diodes in your head if you think about it hard enough.

We have a little more clarity about one issue I had wondered about:  it seems the hostages’ medical qualifications were somewhere between dubious and fictitious.  Another weight added to the “cost” side of the scale.  (Were they also missionaries?  I don’t really care.  I care about the humanitarian value their mission added.  Not diminishing the sincere humanitarian motives behind missionary work itself, Afghanistan is a deperately poor and backward place. Â Spirituality isn’t the kind of aid the Afghan people need most or are prepared to accept at this particular instant.)

Some Korean “netizens” are now demanding that the sending church compensate the government for its expenses.  Would that include compensation for the ransom the government says it didn’t pay, but which everyone seems to think it did pay?

While Koreans fight among themselves, the U.S. Army and the Afghan government are getting to the grim work of pulling up the death cult’s evil roots:

Security forces killed a Taliban commander involved in the kidnapping of 23 South Koreans in an operation that left more than a dozen other rebels dead, Afghan officials said yesterday.  The insurgents were killed in an Afghan and U.S.-led coalition operation that started late Monday in the central province of Ghazni, where the aid workers were snatched July 19, and lasted several hours, the officials said.

Among the dead was Mullah Mateen, a key player in the abduction of the group, two of whom were killed before the remainder were freed “• the final batch of 19 of them late last week.

“We killed 16 enemy fighters and among them was Mullah Mateen, a Taliban commander who, along with Mullah Abdullah Jan, was a key person behind the kidnapping of the South Koreans,” Ghazni police chief Alishah Ahmadzai said.  “We are sure that Mullah Mateen is dead and I’m sure and everyone knows that he was behind the kidnapping of the South Koreans,” he told AFP.  [Joongang Ilbo]

Not a Korean soldier is to be found helping them track down the murderers, kidnappers, and perhaps rapists of their people.  I suspect it’s now a race against time to kill these people before they use their new-found cash to kill us.

See also:

*  Politics is a nasty thing in South Korea.

*  And unpredictable.  The leading candidate of the left-wing quasi-incumbent party is the former opposition governor of Kyonggi Province, Sohh Hak-Kyu.  I’ve never been a fan of Sohn’s.  I never thought Sohn would recover from this corruption scandal, but he did.

*   “South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun said Wednesday that his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, slated for Oct. 2-4 in Pyongyang, will not produce outcomes that would burden his successor.”  So the significance of this vanishes when the final two months of Roh’s term are over?  Someone justify that expense for me.

*  The news from the North is almost always grim and seldom trustworthy, but it often provokes further curiosity:

North Korea has arrested a number of its citizens on charges of colluding with foreign intelligence agencies, the North’s state media reported Wednesday.

“The foreign intelligence agency employed some unsound North Korean citizens by giving money, providing sex or blackmailing in order to carry out clandestine operations against key military objects and strategic locations,” the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.  [Yonhap]

*  Japan worries about being betrayed by the United States for a deal with North Korea. 

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