Good Riddance, Ministry of Silly Talks

After weeks of conflicting reports, Lee Myung Bak’s transition team had made it official:  the UniFiction  Ministry goes to the ash-heap, along with  the Ministries  of Truth Information and Communication, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Science and Technology, and the Anti-Sex League Gender Equality and Family.  The  Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade will become a much larger  and more powerful  Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Unification.  As a whole, the government will shrink by more than 5%, about 7,000 employees.  

I would add to what GI Korea and Robert Koehler have said, but they’ve already said almost all of it well enough.  Mourning UniFiction’s demise is reporter  Choe Sang-Hun, who tries to give  Roh and D.J. their legacy:

The two leaders, promoting a so-called sunshine policy, brought about profoundly closer relations with the North, but they have been faulted for pouring aid across the border without managing to end North Korean nuclear weapons programs and human rights abuses.  [N.Y. Times]

Define “profoundly closer,” please.  The DMZ is as impermeable as ever, although its countours have shifted to  wall off  two little subsidized  Potempkin enclaves of reform and openness that  couldn’t last for an instant  in the real North Korea.  North Korea has more artillery and more fearsome weapons aimed at South Korea today, not less.  Commercial relations  remain infinitessimal and dwarfed by aid.  Families are still divided and can’t talk to each other.  Talks aimed at reducing tensions  still end in brawls.   Prisoners  of war and abductees  are still hostages after decades.  North Korea’s people are still terrorized, stunted, and starving.  Can anyone really  list one single significant way in which North Korea has become less ghastly to its people, less threatening to its neighbors, less open to the world, or  less a quicksand for the hapless investor than North Korea in the last decade?

Like Choe, Robert thinks that the leftist opposition will fight this.  Lee gave them a nasty beating in the December presidential election, and as things stand now, Lee’s Grand National Party  is expected to  give them another nasty beating  in next April’s elections.  Lee  has a choice to make:  either he can try  to bulldoze his reforms through now, or later, after the election.  The latter is the safer choice, though it won’t prevent this from becoming an election issue.  But wouldn’t it be more fun for the rest of us if Lee opts for the former?  If he plays  this right, it’s a no-lose issue for him:  either he gets his way, or he  loses, capitalizes on the loss, and runs  against the obstructionists in the do-nothing National Assembly.  Plus, we’d get to see Lee Myung Bak actually  defend his  views in opposition to appeasing Kim Jong Il.