Archive for July 2008

The Continuum: How (Else) to Screw Up an Occupation

July 26, 2008 History, Korean History 3 comments

hodge-1945.jpgA frequent criticism of the American occupation of Iraq was the “decision” to disband the Iraqi Army.  It’s been said in response that there wasn’t much to disband by the time we reached Baghdad, anyway, and that decision was distinct from (though not unrelated to) our failure to prevent Iraqis from looting their own capital. 

What if we’d done things badly in exactly the opposite different way?  Time’s wonderful archives take us back to events that have brought us grief ever since – that very brief interlude of joint U.S.-Japanese occupation in Seoul:

Meanwhile, Lieut. General John R. Hodge, unbriefed on Korea, landed there. The directive he had not seen told him to replace Japanese officials immediately. Hodge retained the Japs, including the notorious General Nobuyuki Abe [picture, wiki], ex-Governor of Korea, whom he thanked publicly for making the U.S. occupation “simple and easy.” Hodge also kept the Japanese police, holding that Koreans were “too excited” to perform police duty and that they were “the same breed of cat as the Japanese.” Koreans roared and rioted (Japanese soldiers machine-gunned one throng, killed two, wounded ten.)

Even before Hodge arrived they had been in a ferment. U.S. planes had dropped leaflets with Korean translations of the Cairo declaration promising Korea independence “in due course.” The Korean translation of “in due course” meant “in a few days.”

After 35 years of complete Japanese domination, Koreans were falling over themselves with pent-up political activity. One small boat met the U.S. convoy 20 miles offshore. In it was a Korean who nominated himself for Finance Minister.  [....]

In Seoul, General Hodge heard from General MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo (which had heard from Washington). Hodge changed his policy, dismissed Abe and other high Jap Army officials.

U.S. prestige in Korea–and elsewhere–had suffered. Said the N.Y. Times: “A major error of political strategy and principle.”  [Time, Sept. 24, 1945]

I take several things from this, and the first is the great flaw of hindsight, the fact that it never shows you how badly things might have gone had you chosen a different course, or whether a good one even existed. 

The other thing I take from this is that General Hodge was an ass who came to Korea with little knowledge of, or use for, Korea or its people.  Hodge’s ignorance sowed grudges that are held against America to this day.

Photo:  LTG Hodge with a Korean official, 1945, from dok1′s must-see flickr page.

Is State Backing Away from N. Korea’s Terror De-Listing?

July 25, 2008 Appeasement, Diplomacy, Six-Party Talks, U.S. Politics One comment

If you want to know what I think, no.  I think it’s posturing.  But Yonhap catches some significance in these remarks that I had missed:

“It’s a 45-day minimum notification, but we certainly expect, and we’re watching very carefully, to see20whether or not North Korea is going to come through on the essential issue, which is verification, and to act accordingly,” Rice said. “I just wanted to clarify it’s a 45-day minimum notification, not maximum.”

Rice reiterated her skepticism about the North’s declaration of its nuclear facilities and activities.

“This declaration has left some questions,” she said. “Nobody is going to trust the North Korean number on how much plutonium they need. One of the facts is that in this process, thus far, we have learned more about some activities, questionable activities in North Korea than, frankly, we had learned before we engaged in this process.”

North Korea has said it has acquired 37 kilograms of plutonium from its Yongbyon nuclear reactor, but the U.S. intelligence community believes it should be up to 50 kilograms.

“Fortunately, there are very good, tried and true, as one of my colleagues called it yesterday, international — internationally recognized methods to verify the number of kilograms of plutonium make,” Rice said.  [Yonhap]

Translation:  trust me. Â The fact that Rice feels compelled to say things like this — which can’t fail to aggravate the North Koreans — can only mean that Rice’s move to delist North Korea as a terror-sponsor is in some degree of peril in Congress.  She knows that North Korea gave a low-ball estimate on the plutonium, and she’s trying to cover her right flank by suggesting that what is undone can be done again, though she knows very well it won’t be.

Several additional points:  (1) you can’t get complete verification without a complete declaration, which North Korea still hasn’t given us; (2) she isn’t exactly saying that de-listing is conditional on verification, she’s only hinting; (3) if Congress doesn’t object within 45 days of June 26th, she has the power to de-list North Korea on, say, election day, when nobody’s looking. Â Waiting longer than the 45-day minimum gives her the flexibility to do just that while looking hawkish.  All she wants to do is give Congress enough reassurance to give her — and Kim Jong Il — carte blanche.

One point that’s occurred to me recently is that with conditions improving rapidly in Iraq and with even the Iraqis saying it will be safe enough for us to withdraw most of our forces 2-3 years from now, the differences between the candidates have narrowed, and McCain can’t make Iraq his signature national security issue.  Winning wars — the current trajectory, though hardly a foregone conclusion — has a way of putting those issues into the past tense.  McCain needs to keep national security issues in the foreground because those are the issues where he has an advantage over Obama.  Iran is one of these.  North Korea is another.  It hardly hurts McCain much if by pressing those issues, he splits from a highly unpopular incumbent administration, something he’s never hesitated much about doing before.  A forceful denunciation of this deal from McCain would probably derail it in Congress, and if you read his words carefully, McCain has laid a good foundation for that.  Obama’s position, though punctuated with moments of skepticism, is more “nuanced.”

I’ll give you a fuller quote from Rice below the fold for more context.

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For the Thousandth Time, Secretary Rice, We Are Not Giving Up Our Nukes.

July 24, 2008 Abductions, Appeasement, Diplomacy, Proliferation, Six-Party Talks One comment

Somehow, I don’t think Condi Rice’s “‘very strong message’ about [North Korea's] nuclear disarmament obligations” quite got through:

North Korea reportedly asked to be recognized as a nuclear state at a meeting of foreign ministers from countries in six-party talks on Wednesday. North Korean Foreign Minister Pak Ui-chun urged the U.S. to stop its hostile policy toward the North, saying verification of the nuclear facilities and stockpiles it has declared is not a duty but cooperation.  [Chosun Ilbo]

Somewhere, Jack Pritchard must be smiling.  In May, when he brought back this very same message from Pyongyang — “that the United States should get used to a nuclear-armed North Korea” – the State Department lit into him with the sort of fury you only see in the face of damaging truths and unexpected betrayals (State probably saw the dovish Pritchard’s denunciation of its current policy as both of these things).

That brings us to Rice and Hill’s distorted characterization of the meeting with Pak, which should fuel Congress’s doubts about their candor.  I’ve pasted the texts of their subsequent statements to the press below the fold (thanks to a reader).  Scan those carefully for any hint of what just happened here:  a flagrant North Korean renunciation of any intention to disarm, even as Hill and Rice continue to tell us that they will.  Any boldface in the remarks is my own emphasis.

Provided the Chosun Ilbo’s report is true — and Pritchard’s corroboration suggests that it is — we have our third and biggest whopper from Hill, now joined by Rice, on North Korea policy (here’s the first; here’s the second). Â Imagine how the sleeping watchdogs in our media would have treated lies and obfuscations like these if they had come from John Bolton, Douglas Feith, or Paul Wolfowitz.

I should note that the Chosun Ilbo’s report comes via an unnamed ”diplomatic source,” which might mean some highly placed person in the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and then again, might mean a Japanese diplomat.  Japan recently made it known that it will opt out of giving North Korea one yen of aid until its abducted citizens are accounted for, an issue on which it reports “no progress whatsoever” thus far: 

“Unless and until North Korea really comes to grips with this issue of abduction, there is no way for it to expect economic assistance from Japan,” Kazuo Kodama, a spokesman for Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura, told reporters late yesterday in Singapore.  [Bloomberg] 

A few other points to take away from those transcripts below:

  • Rice says twice that there were no surprises in her discussions with the North Korean Foreign Minister.  There are two ways to interpret that, both of them bad.
  • There is no agreement on any sort of time frame for verification.  Read:  license to stall.
  • Hill speaks of the North Korean declaration as an issue we’ve put behind us so that we can get on with verification.  So much for continuing to press the North Koreans on answers about uranium, existing weapons, fissile material, or proliferation to Iran and Syria.

Parting shot:  when you read Hill and Rice speak of this picayune verification mechanism they’re working day and night to put in place, ask yourself how detailed a mechanism you can fit into four pages.

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Anju Links for 24 July 2008

July 24, 2008 Anju Links 5 comments

CONDI RICE WAS NOT AVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: A South Korean NGO reports that North Korea carried out 901 public executions last year. Don’t expect to see this in State’s human rights report next year.  Boy, talking to the North Koreans really is changing them, isn’t it?

JUST KILL YOURSELF NOW IF YOU ACTUALLY BELIEVE THIS:

The protocol has to be one “that can give us confidence that we’re able to verify the accuracy of the North Korean declaration,” she said. It must also offer “a way to address proliferation as well as all nuclear programs as well as highly enriched uranium.”  [Chosun Ilbo]

She’s talking, of course, about things that she’s insisted for years were an essential part of any “complete and correct” declaration, which would be a prerequisite to lifting sanctions.  So why should be believe her now, on the death-bed of her tenure?  Acceptance of Rice’s assurances by any demographically significant segment of the U.S. population would be conclusive proof that Darwin has been away for too long.

NORTH KOREAN LUMBERJACK-TURNED-REFUGEE Han Dong Man, who sought refuge in the U.S. Consulate in Vladivostok [correction:  in the UNHCR Office in Moscow], will be allowed to leave for the United States.  I think I’ve blogged about this guy before, but I don’t have time to dig through my archives.  Han would mean that our government has accepted a whopping 62 North Korean refugees since the passage of the North Korean Human Rights Act almost four years ago.

THE DEATH OF AN ALLIANCE:  Five months into the new, improved, America-friendly administration in South Korea, South Korea still refuses to pay even half the cost of maintaining the USFK.  Worse, it persists in trying to scam us into accepting payment in goods — no doubt made by favored South Korean suppliers — rather than cash.  According to the Hanky, a State Department official is negotiating this instead of Defense, which probably means the South Koreans will get everything they want and PX privileges.  For the congressional staffers out there, I hope you’ve thought to ask the GAO if that would even be legal under our procurement rules.  It’s funny how little has changed, even when we don’t have Roh Moo Hyun to kick around anymore.

BUT WE MUSTN’T POLITICIZE THE OLYMPICS: 

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the ranking Republican member in the House foreign affairs panel, said Beijing had ahead of the Olympics “intensified its brutal crackdown on political dissidents and activists.

“One would wish that the motto of this year’s Olympics, ‘one world, one dream,’ could ring true,” she said. “Unfortunately, when it comes to the pursuit of democratic values and human rights, we remain a world divided with a dream unfulfilled.”

Ros-Lehtinen also claimed Beijing had initiated “broad and sweeping measures to silence internal criticism,” allegedly detaining hundreds of practitioners of the Falun Gong spiritual sect and members of other organized movements.

“The number of reported raids and summary executions continues to rise, and the regime has even taken violent measures to discourage North Korean refugees from seeking asylum in China,” she said.  [AFP]

Ros-Lehtinen is supporting Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman (D, CA) who is pushing a resolution calling on China to be a little less brutal, and a little less supportive of others who are brutal.  Good luck with that, but I’m starting to like Howard Berman’s actions more than I liked Tom Lantos’s lofty words.  There’s some bipartisanship left in Congress after all.  (hat tip to a reader)

MAD SHEEP DISEASE UPDATE:

Instead of the People’s Association for Measures Against Mad Cow Disease, whose leadership has been significantly weakened, a small number of groups such as the radical National University Student Council or Jeondaehyup led the protests. Without a concrete plan, the protesters carried out guerrilla rallies, marching without direction from the Cheonggye Stream through Jongno and Namdaemun to the Seoul Railway Station.  [Chosun Ilbo]

Sounds as though most of the flock is off to graze in other pastures.  The fad is passing, although I wouldn’t necessarily connect that fact to the exposure of its inspiration as total bullshit.  There’s always more bullshit to get inspired about, especially in a country full of demagogues in desparate need of a cause.

THE CONTINUUM:

Gandhism is rife in Korea, province of Japan. Koreans are being urged by their leaders to use only articles of Korean manufacture. Although civil disobedience has not been advised, the movement is an attempt to copy the Gandhi methods in India. Governor-General Saito says that the people are as a whole satisfied with the Japanese regime and that the state of unrest should not be taken too seriously.  [Time, Mar. 3, 1923]

MORE SKEPTICISM about North Korea’s version of the killing of South Korean tourist Park Wang-Ja, some of it from former North Korean soldiers.  The killing turns out to have been bad for business, though not nearly as bad as it would be in a more sensible place and time.

“KOREA’S FIRST U.S. State Supreme Court Judge” isn’t Korea’s.  When Koreans equate ancestry with nationality, they should know that they’re diluting the loyalty and patriotism of Korean-Americans.

AN INTERESTING ANALYSIS of the candidates’ positions on Iraq: as the security situation improves — dramatically — and the need for a large U.S. presence declines, both candidates seem likely to withdraw about half of our troops within the next 2 years, especially if a democratically elected government wants us to.  Iraq should not become a permanent U.S. military dependency in the same way that our fair-weather allies in South Korea and Europe have. 

On the other hand, Barack Obama’s “residual” force turns out to be a lot bigger than his supporters might have guessed, and we’re entitled to wonder how much bigger it would be than the force McCain (who has the disadvantage of knowing the value of strategic ambiguity) would leave behind.  I think the key realization is that for now, the improvements are probably fragile.  That said, if things don’t significantly worsen in the months leading up to a competitive presidential election in America, we’ll know that Iraq has been won.  If that’s so, large withdrawals can and should follow, though Iraq is still years from having a decent air force, or self-sufficent logistics, command, and control.  We should be mindful that Iraq hasn’t been a perfect place for a few thousand years, and stability there is always going to leave some room for interpretation.  We should also be mindful that the government forces of South Vietnam in 1973 and Afghanistan in 1990 proved surprisingly persistent without foreign forces … as long as they had external financial support, spare parts, ammo, and air cover. Once a nation’s own forces are capable of maintaining stability, foreign forces become more of a political liability than they are a military asset.

The Washington Post takes issue with the idea that the Iraqis endorsed Obama’s timetable, but that will be the perception.  You can’t help but pity John McCain here.  In precisely the same way that a stopped clock is right twice a day, a 16-month timetable to withdraw most of our forces has only now become reasonably plausible because of a strategy McCain has risked his political life to demand, and which Obama vaulted himself to the nomination by opposing, without putting any more thought into it than his escapist constituency would tolerate.  We all been taught not to use four-letter words that start with “f.”  The worst of these is “fair.”  As in, what life isn’t.  And if Iraq will not be a host for terror and a venue for genocide, that will be fair enough.

Anju Links for 22 July 2008

July 22, 2008 Anju Links No comments

BUT WE MUSTN’T POLITICIZE THE OLYMPICS:  To further its pre-Olympic “cleansing” policy, China will shut down the bridges to North Korea until the Olympics are over.  Those who promised us that the Olympics would mean more openness and liberalization have a lot of refugee “cleansing,” oppression, censorship, arrests, and a tidal wave of state-inspired Lebensraum rhetoric (see comments) to answer for. 

IF IT MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER (PT.1):  Pressed by a reporter last week, White House Spokeswoman Dana Perino said that North Korea was still a member of the Axis of Evil (can these people even appease competently?). Â I’m sure I speak for very few when I say how much I look foward to State’s explanation of how those Axis of Evil sanctions will keep slave-made North Korean goods off Wal-Mart shelves or help us restore the kind of pressure that’s needed to secure any actual disarmament. 

IF IT MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER (PT.2):  North Korea assures us that the killing of South Korean tourist Park Wang-Ja by one of its soldiers was not premeditated (meaning, instead, that this was just a part of North Korea’s natural cycle of death).  The North Koreans have even taken the elaborate step of reinventing the soldier who killed Park as a 17 year-old female.  As I predicted, this has resulted in no mass protests. Â What if the shooter had been an American?

JAY LEFKOWITZ HAS CANCELLED a trip to the Kaesong Industrial Park for the second time in almost exactly two years.  Conspicuously absent from the story is an explanation of why that happened, or any comment from the muzzled Lefkowitz, who is one of the few administration officials who still even talks the talk.  One wonders whether the North Koreans, sensing how completely Lefkowitz has been marginalized in Washington, simply withdrew his permission to visit.

Agreed Framework 2.0 Update

July 21, 2008 Appeasement, Diplomacy, Six-Party Talks No comments

Updates:  According to this AP report, we’ve now presented the North Koreans with a proposed verification protocol and invited North Korea to stall for two more months and gut it offer comments. Â South Korean negotiator Kim Sook says, “The ball is actually in the North Korean court ….”  True to form, State is withholding all details about what the protocol would consist of. 

And as if in response for my rant below about the lack of media skepticism, Reuters’s Jon Herskovitz writes one of the more skeptical stories on AF 2.0 I’ve seen since the Singapore Surrender:

Sputtering talks on ending North Korea‘s nuclear plans will gain a higher profile this week with an unprecedented meeting of ministers, but lingering questions on the North’s ambitions threaten to drag the process down.

Kudos to Herskovitz for being one of the few to point out how little this deal will accomplish, and the administration’s obvious legacy grasp before it hands the the problem to the next administration unsolved, only with less leverage over the North Koreans.  Well worth reading. 

Meanwhile — just six months from the end of her tenure – Secretary Rice dutifully keeps up the pretense that she is remotely interested in getting meaningful verification, full disclosure, or actual disarmament from the North Koreans.  No doubt, plenty of people are actually fooled by this demonstrable B.S.

~~~

It’s another breakthrough!  They’ve agreed to talk about maybe someday agreeing on how to verify what hasn’t even disclosed yet:

Technical details of the verification process still need to be hashed out by a working group, but the six nations hope to agree on specific steps by early September, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said.

“We would like the protocol to be reached within 45 days and, secondly, to begin verification within 45 days. We’re anticipating that, and we don’t see any obstacles,” Hill told reporters after the talks.

The envoys will be gathering later in the month for a regional security forum in Singapore and may hold informal talks there, he said.

The agreement, though not yet complete, signals the start of the final phase of years of on-again, off-again negotiations to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

Beyond the October deadline for disabling North Korea’s main nuclear facility at Yongbyon, the agreement did not set a timetable for full disarmament. But President Bush is believed to be eager to see North Korea disarmed before he leaves office in January.

Kim Sook, Seoul‘s top nuclear envoy, said afterward that “a very difficult task” lies ahead in implementing verification, though he did not elaborate. He added that there should be “unlimited” access to the North’s facilities during the verification process.

Questions remain about how much of its nuclear programs North Korea disclosed in a declaration last month. The North, which exploded a nuclear device in 2006, is believed by experts to have produced enough weapons-grade plutonium to make as many as 10 nuclear bombs, and the U.S. has accused Pyongyang of running a second weapons program based on uranium.  [AP, Tini Tran] 

Just don’t expect our generally uninquisitive press corps to ask questions that might reveal that.  Reading this CNN report, for instance, you could be forgiven for thinking that a substantive agreement had been reached.  It’s odd how Bush’s fiercest critics have a way of assuming uncharacteristic silence about his policies of which they happen to approve. Â I wonder how well this issue would be covered if they were half as skeptical about this policy shift as they were about The Surge. Â One question they should be asking is just how technically prepared this Administration really is to design and oversee a meaningful verification process.  Their own assessments don’t inspire much confidence:

“What we need to do is, you know, verify the declaration, but also pursue the next and the final phase of denuclearization concurrently,” Sung Kim, director of Korean affairs at the State Department, told reporters accompanying Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Seoul. “And I think, you know, if we work together with the other parties, it’s possible that we might complete the task. I don’t think we should rule it out.”  [Yonhap; emphasis mine]

The gist of Yonhap’s article is that the next president is going to be stuck with a deal full of loopholes in which neither candidate has has expressed much confidence.  But let’s not allow that to interfere with any photo ops.

Related:  I’ll leave the last word to veteran CIA officer Art Brown, writing in the New York Times, and saying a lot of the same things I’ve said here.

Anju Links for 21 July 2008

July 21, 2008 Anju Links No comments

THE KOREAN CHURCH COALITION’S final prayer vigils will take place on July 20th.  Here are the details.

ROH IS LONG GONE, and yet all is not well in U.S.-Korean relations (imagine that).  Discord recently broke out over the premature announcement of a POTUS visit to Seoul.

“Washington has offered an apology for making public Bush’s schedule for his South Korean trip without consultations with Seoul. But this is not the first time such an incident has occurred. It could be intentional disregard of diplomatic etiquette,” said a ruling party lawmaker.

“The U.S. has to be blamed for disregarding its strategic ally South Korea. What is worse, the Lee administration has failed to adequately respond. It should have lodged strong protests over Washington’s breach of diplomatic etiquette,” said the lawmaker.  [Yonhap]

IT’S A PITY THE HAGUE WILL GET HIM, because Radovan Karadzic deserves the kind of punishment the Soft Reich doesn’t believe in anymore. 

Picture of the Day

July 20, 2008 China One comment

 

beijing-sex-shop.jpg

 

[link]

Feel free to write your own caption.

The End of Sunshine

July 20, 2008 Appeasement, Deprogramming, NK Economics No comments

Don Kirk has some straightforward observations about scholars in Washington, who, remarkably enough, are still debating how North might reform its economy, as though the decade-long Sunshine experiment had never happened.  Kirk saves his most acerbic observation for one of the participants in a recent seminar:

Probably no Washington think-tanker has been quite so divorced from reality of late, at least in public utterances, as Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution.

In a recent commentary he held up Vietnam as an example of “what might a reformed North Korea look like”. North Korea today “is about where Vietnam was in the late 1970s”, he wrote, but “that former US enemy has restructured its economy and begun to open its society and politics while retaining communism as official dogma”.

O’Hanlon did not find it necessary to mention that Vietnam did not begin this process until conquering South Vietnam in a protracted war. Nor did he show any awareness of the immense economic power of capitalist South Korea – or the fears engendered among South Koreans by the idea that unification might happen on any terms remotely acceptable to North Korea.  [Asia Times]

Nor did O’Hanlon mention Hanoi’s decades-long debates and purges over economic reform, the very suggestion of which is more likely to get you sent to a prison camp in today’s North Korea than to start any kind of discussion.  North Korea’s society and economy do appear to be changing, but probably as a result of rising corruption and the fact that people simply can’t live off the state anymore. Â Even so, the regime has not lost its ardor for reimposing state control where it can. Â Just as emotions lead some people to believe in believe in horoscopes, they lead others to see reform in these developments.  No real evidence supports such a belief.  North Korean officials don’t even like the word “reform” (see footnote 36).  Yet myths can have great persistence when they lend themselves to solutions that analysts are eager to offer.

“Vietnam has proved that a more gradual path to reform can work for all concerned, including the US and its regional allies,” O’Hanlon wrote.  [Asia Times] 

The comparison really suggests that O’Hanlon knows very little about Vietnam or North Korea.  (O’Hanlon has given us much more realistic analysis – backed by exhaustive research – on Iraq, but no one can be a jack of all trades.) 

This entire discussion can remind you of medieval alchemy.  It took centuries of misspent wealth for mankind to conclude that at a molecular level, lead is just lead.  The same seems destined to happen with Washington’s wishful analysis of North Korea. Â Ironically enough, reality is taking hold in the South Korean government.  The Sunshine experiment now seems to be ending almost as quickly as the life of Park Wang-Ja did. Â 

South Korea plans to suspend shipment to North Korea of material needed for agreed-upon inter-Korean projects, as well as government-level humanitarian aid, a source here said Friday.  The move comes in retaliation for Pyongyang’s refusal to cooperate in the investigation into the recent killing of a South Korean tourist by a North Korean soldier, the source added.  [Yonhap] 

South Korea may shut down its remaining tours to North Korea following the recent shooting death of a female tourist in the communist state’s high-profile mountain resort, an official here said Friday. 

President Lee Myung-bak convened his first National Security Council (NSC) meeting earlier in the day to discuss last week’s killing of a South Korean woman by a North Korean soldier on Mount Geumgang. The incident led Seoul to immediately halt the decade-old tour, a symbol of reconciliation between the divided countries. Â [Yonhap]

The murder of a South Korean citizen, for which North Korea refuses to answer is more than a justification for this.  It’s an imperative if North Korea can’t guarantee the safety of South Koreans on the territory it occupies.  And if the end of this largess means including more of the North’s elite in the misery currently experienced by the rest of its population, so much the better to hasten the regime’s extinction.  Failing that, none of our problems with North Korea will ever be solved anyway. 

In place of Sunshine, a new experiment just might be taking shape.  What happens now that South Korea insists on some mutuality for once, for the first time since North Korea has acquired a degree of dependence on South Korean aid?  Under any circumstances, it’s exceedingly difficult to extract any responsible, transparent, or civilized behavior from North Korea, but Lee Myung Bak probably has as good a chance as anyone. 

(Lee will still find it convenient, from time to time, to talk with the North Koreans, and to pretend that he has reduced tensions by doing so.  That gambit is such an established part of South Korean politics that cynical voters call it ”the North wind.”)

This may be an unsporting occasion to say, “I told you so,” but North Korea still wants nothing to do with “engagement” as past South Korean administrations have sold it.  North Korea will tolerate engagement only on its own terms – terms that are antithetical to any meaningful contact between its subjects and the outside world.  North Korea’s engagement is a means of preserving the unreformed system by seeking enough outside aid to compensate for its inefficiencies.

Participants in scholarly discussions in foreign capitals have the luxury of believing otherwise.  But then, how many of them would be willing to test their theories under the more realistic conditions under which Park Wang-Ja did?  It is fitting that this experiment ended in such a modest reaction of inverse alchemy:  never in human history has any nation expended so much gold for the ultimate return of a two lead bullets.  That is not to say that the alchemy is necessarily complete, of course, given the potential yields of plutonium and uranium.

Related:  I don’t know whose asinine idea it was to bring McDonald’s to a nation that appears to be in a worsening famine, and in any event, it’s doubtful that the regime would have gone for it.  After all, they have their priorities.

Sorry, Can’t Talk Now

July 17, 2008 Uncategorized One comment

Things are busy at work, and that means my blogging time is being used for work stuff.  Hopefully, normal service will be restored in a few days.

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