Archive for October 2008

Sankei Shinmun: N. Korea May Announce Transfer of Power

October 19, 2008 Kim Jong Il, Kremlinology 5 comments

OK, You have my undivided attention.

Quoting unidentified sources at Japan’s defense ministry, the Sankei [Shinmun] said Tokyo had information that “there will be an important announcement on (Oct.) 20th.”

The Sankei said there was speculation within the Japanese government that the North’s announcement could be about Kim’s death or a government change induced by a coup.

North Korea will also ban foreigners from entering the country starting Monday, it said, without giving further details.  [AP]

Admittedly, the Sankei has a reputation for being a far-right rag, but its North Korea reporting has generally been good.  The Yomiuri Shimbun has also reported that North Korean diplomats have been told to stay inside the embassy.  The first I saw of this was in a question at the end of this daily press briefing at the State Department.  At the time, I was too busy and too sick to blog it, but if there really is something to those health rumors about Kim Jong Il — or if those rumors are cover for him being ousted — this is the way I’d expect to hear it.

Here’s hoping that Obama-Kim “without preconditions” summit will have to be held in a mausoleum.  Still, we can assume that no one managed to get into a position to replace Kim Jong Il by being enlightened, magnanimous, or reform-minded.  Kim Jong Il’s death would not be the end of our problems with North Korea, but it could very well be the beginning of the end.

Update:  One place you won’t see much talk of this story, oddly enough, is in the South Korea papers.  The South Korean government is downplaying the reports and saying it has seen “nothing unusual,” which would suggests that the men who control the tanks either weren’t been taken by surprise, are powerless to do anything about it, or ran out of gas. 

Rumor: Bush will de-list N. Korea as a terror sponsor today.

October 10, 2008 Appeasement, Diplomacy, Six-Party Talks 11 comments

I heard the rumor yesterday afternoon, but now I see the AP is reporting it.  According to the Financial Times, the only thing holding up the announcement is notifying / strong-arming the Japanese, and perhaps the South Koreans.  You can see Condi and her mouthpiece not answer questions about this below the fold, if you’re interested. 

There’s nothing quite like giving right in to extortion.  Somewhere on the troposphere of Kim Jong Il’s clot-riddled, misshapen, hideously coiffed cranium, a drooly grin probably needs wiping.

Of course, we know nil about what verification terms North Korea presented us with in the ultimatum we’re about to accept.  Safe to say, no verification regime the North Koreans would offer, even under the best of circumstances, is going to give us any real assurance that we’ve disarmed them of anything.  That would seem to be doubly so when the North Koreans think they’re holding all the cards, and when we’re unwilling to consider other options that would put actual pressure on them.  I have to wonder what John McCain and Barack have to say about this, since they’d both previously gone on record opposing de-listing the North without a strong verification mechanism, something it’s safe to say Chris Hill didn’t get by kowtowing in Pyongyang. 

Try not to clench down there.  It will only hurt more.

All I want to know is this: what “gains” is Condi so desperate to salvage?  More succinctly: Â in what way is North Korea even arguably disarming?  North Korea isn’t giving up its existing nukes, its fissile material, its uranium program, or even its most threatening plutonium reactor, the big new 50-MW model recently reported to be near completion. Â Recent information from credible sources tells us that the North is still developing long range missiles and still working hard on nuclear warheads to put on them, both in flagrant violation of U.N. resolutions 1695 and 1718.  As far as we know, they’re still proliferating nuclear technology, since we opted to overlook that back in April. Â North Korea just evicted the monitors from Yongbyon yesterday, and to the extent it matters, it’s begun putting its older, smaller 5-MW reactor and fuel fabrication plant back together.  It tells anyone who bothers to ask — including Condi Rice herself – that it’s keeping its nuclear weapons, period. 

Will someone please explain what on earth we actually gain in exchange for throwing away what’s left of our leverage here?

The irony is that George W. Bush has now made a far worse deal than the original Agreed Framework he rightly abandoned and denounced.  And oddly enough, nearly all of the Republicans who protested against Clinton’s bad deal don’t have much to say about George W. Bush’s much worse deal.  Not to worry, though.  They’ll all become stalwart opponents of appeasement soon enough when Obama sends “Kim Jong Bill” Richardson back to Pyongyang with a big check in his hand.

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Rosett: ‘Bordering on Tyranny’

October 9, 2008 China & Korea 3 comments

Claudia Rosett goes to the increasingly porous border between China and North Korea — for those with money, anyway.  This has to be one of the few places where one could see the Chinese side as a land of relative freedom, but that wouldn’t be true if China didn’t prop up so many exceedingly noxious satellite regimes.

S. Korean JCS Chair: N. Korea Building Lighter Nuclear Warheads for Missiles

October 9, 2008 Appeasement, Diplomacy, NK Military, Proliferation, Six-Party Talks, U.S. & Korea, WMD No comments

You might have thought that an agreement whose nominal objective is nuclear disarmament ought to be reasonably clear about dismantling, disabling, or dissing those arms in some specific way.  If so, you thought wrong, and here are the consequences of that.  In fact, Chris Hill’s February 2007 disarmament deal was intentionally vague about North Korea’s existing nuclear arsenal.  Until this summer, State had insisted that the North’s nuclear weapons were covered by the phrase “all nuclear programs,” although North Korea’s differences with that interpretation revealed that Hill’s deal was really no agreement at all.  Later, State dropped the demand for the North to list its existing nukes on its woefully inadequate “declaration,” signaling to Kim Jong Il that the Americans were prepared to give in and let the North keep them. But as always with North Korea, inches become miles.  Now we learn that North Korea is still hard at work on new nuclear warheads that can fit on its substantial arsenal of missiles, helpfully summarized here.  This information comes to us from the South Korean government, which is making its displeasure with Washington’s soft line increasingly apparent with leaks that undermine the risible suggestion that our State Department is really disarming the North:

“I understand that North Korea is working to develop a small nuclear warhead which can be loaded into a missile,” Gen Kim Tae-Young was quoted by South Korean media as saying.

“As I said earlier, it is certain that North Korea possess plutonium. It is certain the North has enough plutonium to make six to seven nuclear weapons, but it is not clear whether it has produced nuclear weapons,” he said.  [BBC] 

Although North Korea continues to develop a long-range missile capable of hitting the United States, those efforts so far have not been successful.  The North’s short and medium-range missiles are another matter.  They are reliable, increasingly accurate, and capable of hitting virtually all of South Korea and Japan, respectively.  If the North were able to miniaturize a nuclear weapon such that it could be carried by a missile, it would have a major strategic impact in Northeast Asia.  If, as I predict, the North decides to start up its larger, nearly complete 50-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon, it will be within easy reach of becoming a major nuclear power.  Within an indeterminate period of time, it will have enough nukes to bully the neighbors and sell off the surplus production.

The North is expected to test more short-range missiles this week.  State (see below) doesn’t think this violates either of the same two U.N. Security Council resolutions that the North’s ongoing long-range missile program clearly does violate, but about which neither the U.N. nor the U.S. government does anything.

The other story here is the degree to which the Bush administration’s relations with Lee Myung Bak’s government are clearly worsening.  The State Department press briefing transcript attached below the fold indicates that Secretary Rice’s most recent meeting with her South Korean counterpart was “painful.”  So far, however, the ROK government has generally had enough class to keep its disagreements with the outgoing administration private, which is how diplomacy between nominal allies is supposed to work.

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Did They or Didn’t They? (Pt. 2)

October 8, 2008 Anju Links, Appeasement, Diplomacy, NK Military, Six-Party Talks One comment

You’d think that if Chris Hill and the North Koreans had made up, the North Koreans wouldn’t be launching missiles again.  The new launches appear to have been short-range missiles launched from the island naval base at Cho-Do, which you can see in full Google Earth color here.  One thing this illustrates is why North Korea always seeks to narrow the focus of talks:  while they sell temporary concessions on plutonium, they pursue a uranium program at full speed; then, they sell temporary concessions on nukes generally while they pursue missile development at full speed.  Negotiating the containment of North Korea turn out to be a lot like the containment of water in your cupped hands.

Some Anju Links:
TIME HAS A DETAILED STORY about the worsening food situation in North Korea.  Money quote:

The regime’s leadership “would rather have a proportion of their population starve to death” than pursue reform, says Nicholas Eberstadt, a North Korea expert at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. Pyongyang believes market reform “would risk ideological and cultural infiltration, which is how they see the Soviet system going down.”

KATHLEEN STEPHENS, the Chris Hill crony about whose nomination I had such misgivings, has presented her credentials to Lee Myung Bak.

Lee’s N. Korea Policy Will Be, as Lee Says, ‘Pragmatic.’

October 8, 2008 Activism, Human Rights, U.S. & Korea, U.S. Politics 4 comments

Suzanne Scholte has accepted the Seoul Peace Prize, offering this prescient comment in her speech:

“When all the atrocities committed by North Korean dictators are exposed in the future, people will assess how adequately the Seoul government then responded,” said Scholte, referring to the current administration. “Consider the judgment of history.”  [Chosun Ilbo]

I’m hoping to have a guest post from a reader who was there.  Warning:  this post will now enter a stream of consciousness.
You can already see a divergence between the image Lee wants to project and what he’ll actually do in practice.  Yes, the prize is an indication that the new South Korean government is more willing to confront this issue when it it helps Lee build constituencies in America, but at the same time, his government is asking civic groups to stop sending leaflet balloons into North Korea.  Lee’s rough handling, thus far, of speech he doesn’t agree with suggests that he’ll take more “decisive” action if asking nicely doesn’t suffice.  And if Obama wins, something that looks inevitable right now, don’t expect Lee to openly defy Obama and demand a harder line in the same way Roh that openly defied Bush and demanded a softer line.

Lee is inherently much more practical and less ideological than Roh, and will put South Korea’s interest in better relations with the United States ahead of his views about North Korea.  What Lee will likely do instead is to gradually shift the leadership of the Korea Society, Korea Foundation, Korea Economic Institute, and other Korean lobby groups so that their considerable influence reflects more closely, and supports more subtly, Lee’s policy goals in Washington.

One significant accomplishment Lee can already claim is forestalling the final phase of U.S. troop reductions in the South, and securing a U.S. promise not to cut force levels further for the next several years.  Unfortunately, there was no corresponding Korean commitment to increasing the share it pays for the cost of keeping those Americans in Korea.

Still, we’ve made progress since the time, not long ago, when the Unification Ministry covered up the presence of counterfeit $100 bills at the Kumgang Resort in North Korea.  It had been doing this since at least 2005.  What’s not specified is that the bills were the high-quality variety known as “supernotes.”  For years, it had been South Korean policy to subsidize North Korea’s worst behavior with our money.  The use of dollars at Kumgang is also an interesting choice in light of North Korea’s 2002 announcement that it would no longer accept dollars.  And I suppose if I lived in Newcastle, I wouldn’t want to be paid in coal, either.

So what will Obama do about North Korea?  Pretty much what Bush did.  He’ll react to North Korean provocations with empty tough talk.  He’ll make occasional cryptic references to North Korea’s atrocities against its people at moments of convenience.  Behind the scenes, the State Department will be firmly in charge, and State will continue — even accelerate — a policy of unilateral concessions.  After Obama wins, expect the North Koreans to declare themselves open to some kind of “new beginning” with America … if only we’d drop all of our sanctions and ease up on verification.  We’ll agree, and this will start a whole new renegotiation of a deal that had already ceased to pretend to disarm.  Come February, the Groundhog will see his shadow, and so will you.  The most Lee will do to oppose this is to work quietly through friends in Washington and allow a few carefully timed leaks to slip out.  Obama may not be able to deliver significant economic benefits to the North because the North will need to keep up a state of hostility with the United States, thus giving Republicans reasons to oppose him.  Also, all of the Republicans who kept quiet during Bush’s second term will suddenly realize that appeasement is a bad thing after all.  They will then run against Obama’s “weakness” — the charge will happen to be accurate — to make gains in Congress in 2010, as is typical of mid-term elections.

None of this will matter in the end, because eventually, North Korea will collapse for its own reasons, largely because Lee Myung Bak and Kim Jong Il would both have to agree for there to be any kind of “soft landing” or reform, and neither of them does agree.  When the collapse comes, America will be unprepared.  The Chinese will estimate Obama as unwilling to confront them and will seize the opportunity to take control, through friendly generals, over an Outer Koguryo Autonomous Zone, which of course has “historically” been a part of China.

How Many Divisions Does Ban Ki Moon Have?

October 7, 2008 "United" Nations, NK Military, Proliferation One comment

Since October 2006, U.N. Security Council resolution 1718 has prohibited North Korea from trafficking in major weapons systems or WMD techonology.  So sit down for this one:

“The Middle East remans on the receiving end of the DPRK’s reckless activities,” Israeli delegate David Danieli told the meeting, referring to North Korea by its acronym.

“At least half a dozen countries in the region … have become eager recipients” of the North’s black market supplies of conventional arms or nuclear technology, he said _ mostly “through black market and covert network channels.”

While he did not name any of the suspected countries, he appeared to be referring in part to Iran and Syria, which are both under IAEA investigation, and Libya, which scrapped its rudimentary weapons program after revealing it in 2003.

U.S. officials have said that North Korea’s customer list for missiles or related components going back to the mid-1980s also include Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.  [CBS News]

The Israeli delegate didn’t specify the types of weapons systems the North Koreans have been peddling, but one hint is that this came up at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

On a related note, South Korean lawmaker Kwong Young-Se of the GNP says North Korea has spent $65 million to import weapons systems since 2003, which convinces me of little except the shortcomings in South Korean intelligence about the North.  Spread out over a period of five years, this would be a far smaller amount than one would expect, given that a single Su-25 attack plane probably costs at least $10 or $15 million. 

By comparison, the North had received just under $200 million in food aid from the World Food Program annually at the peak of WFP operations in 2005. Â For more context, the USA Today link above estimates North Korea’s “national income,” which I suppose means something similar to GDP, at about $26 bilion; however, Nicholas Eberstadt would tell you that the actual figure would be about twice that if it included the North’s illicit income.  I have seen various experts estimate that North Korea spends about 30% of its budget on the military, although no one can claim to have an authoritative figure or source for it.  See also ROK Drop.

Funny, the General Assembly’s resolutions aren’t getting much respect in Pyongyang, either.  Still, Ban must feel the occasional need to say things like this:

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has accused North Korea of failing to achieve ”tangible” progress in responding to a U.N. resolution last year calling for improvements in its human rights situation. 

”The secretary general is seriously concerned at the lack of tangible progress made by the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in other respects to safeguard fundamental rights and freedoms,” Ban said in a 17-page report to the General Assembly on North Korea’s human rights situation.  [Kyodo News]

Obligation discharged. Â This probably constitutes Ban’s full and final response to the updated “Failure to Protect.”

The Lewinsky Effect

October 7, 2008 ROK Military, The Fifth Column 3 comments

NORTH KOREA SPY WON JEONG-HWA, who exchanged sexual favors for information from South Korean officers and who plotted to assasinate South Korean officials with poisoned needles, is awaiting sentencing.  The L.A. Times covers the story in considerable detail and publishes photographs of Won and her passport. 

On a personal note, I realize that standards of beauty are subjective in any culture, but if there’s apparently not much to be said for Ms. Won’s personality, I remain unable to explain her hypnotic effect on physically fit, gainfully employed, uniformed men.  Let us call it “the Lewinsky Effect.”  To make matters even more curious, one South Korean source says this is only “the tip of the iceberg.”

Well, That Settles Nothing

October 7, 2008 Kim Jong Il No comments

Numerous international press reports say that Kim Jong Il made a public appearance at a soccer game, thus ending a long absence from public view.  The problem with those reports is that all of them are sourced back to Radio Pyongyang and KCNA, which provided no details on where or when, and were not accompanied by photographs or video.

Did They or Didn’t They?

October 7, 2008 Appeasement, Diplomacy, Six-Party Talks 2 comments

I took a few days off from blogging and figured by today I’d know if Chris Hill had succeeded in giving away the store to the North Koreans, but the reporting today is ambiguous. Â 

The New York Times says that Hill left Pyongyang with the main “issues unresolved“ but quotes or cites no hard authority to substantiate this. Â The Chosun Ilbo quotes “observers” who see “signs” that Hill’s visit ”produced some results,” and also quotes or cites no hard authority to substantiate its version. 

The impression this leaves is that the North Koreans told us what the deal was going to be — the pro-North Korean mouthpiece Chosun Sinbo called it an “ultimatum” — and we’re still thinking it over.  Reuters reports that the North Korean terms included a demand for more (wait for it) “compensation.” 

Expect a decision from the Bush administration the first week of November.

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