It certainly looks like every government official outside Beijing who has seen the evidence now believes that North Korea sank the Cheonan and killed 46 members of its crew. Among those who have drawn their conclusions are the South Korean government, the Obama Administration, and the Republicans in Congress. The multinational investigation is now sufficiently advanced that the official Yonhap News Agency says that the findings could be released as early as next week. One interesting leak references a stray North Korean torpedo the ROK Navy recovered several years ago. The investigators are now comparing it to aluminum fragments recovered near where the Cheonan sank, and which don’t appear to be pieces from the ship.
The South Korean government’s comments are not exactly, but tantamount to, a conclusion of North Korean guilt:
“The sinking of the Cheonan has shown the world the cruel reality of division” on the Korean Peninsula, Unification Minister Hyun In-taek said in a speech to a forum in Seoul. His comments came hours after a presidential aide for political affairs said “an external attack was highly likely” to have sank the 1,200 corvette, the Cheonan, in the Yellow Sea.
“From such a standpoint, this is a grave situation concerning national security,” Park Hyung-joon told a radio interview. [Yonhap]
Coming from the Unification Minister, whose traditional role has consisted of obsequious kowtowing toward North Korea, those comments are even more meaningful.
The Joongang Ilbo reports that the Obama Administration and its semi-autonomous subsidiary, the U.S. State Department, also agree:
The U.S. government has concluded that North Korea sank the South Korean warship Cheonan in March and has begun discussing possible measures to be taken in response, according to a source here.
Another diplomatic source said the Obama administration is also preparing a joint U.S.-South Korean statement condemning the North Korean action and strengthening the two countries’ military alliance. The statement, the source added, would be issued after the findings of the Cheonan probe are announced sometime next week.
“About a dozen officials handling East Asia and the Korean Peninsula at the State Department, the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency held a closed-door meeting [Monday, Washington time] to talk about responses to the Cheonan sinking for the first time,” the source said. “They discussed measures to take in case North Korea attacked the ship, and they didn’t bring up any other possibility [that some other cause may have been responsible].”
What the Administration is prepared to do about this isn’t nearly as clear. The only specific response mentioned, a new round of military exercises, certainly would not be a complete response, and hopefully isn’t meant to be. The Mainichi Shimbun adds that the U.S. and South Korean plan to hold more high-level military and diplomatic meetings between now and July.
Needless to say, the Obama Administration’s North Korea policy is about to face its most important test so far. North Korea’s nuclear test in 2009 was more effective than its 2006 test, but the probably premeditated sinking of a South Korean warship is an entirely level of provocation, and quite possibly the first in a series that’s intended to provoke a limited conflict. How President Obama responds now could be very important to the lives of plenty of people on both sides of the DMZ. And while a direct military response is probably unwise, Obama has to choose options that are at once restrained, principled, and which will genuinely deter Kim Jong Il’s next bad decisions.
One important (but also incomplete) response would be to re-add North Korea to the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Via the Chosun Ilbo, it appears that a bill to do just that is now percolating among the Republicans in Congress. It’s interesting that the South Korean embassy doesn’t seem opposed. One wonders whether John Kerry will block this attempt to re-list North Korea, just as he blocked the last one, by a very close vote. Certainly Kerry would not do this against the will of the White House. We’ll soon have a much better idea of who is running this administration’s North Korea policy. But one wonders what negotiating atmosphere Kerry would be afraid of spoiling today, when even the State Department has said that it can’t be business as usual if North Korea sank the Cheonan.
Some would tell you that re-listing is mostly a symbolic gesture, but they’re wrong. First, a terror-sponsor listing effectively blocks North Korea’s access to international loans, something we’d likely do anyway in times like these, but this measure would also send an important signal of political risk and bad creditworthiness to other potential lenders and investors. Second, it’s important for reasons of principle — since it was de-listed, North Korea has been caught arming terrorists at least twice, has attempted to assassinate a dissident in exile, and has repeatedly used its official state media to terrorize the populations of other states. These actions meet the statutory definition of international terrorism, and we can’t deter state-sponsored terrorism if it doesn’t have consequences. Third, the de-listing was originally a quid-pro-quo for nuclear disarmament, a condition that North Korea decisively repudiated when it tested a nuclear weapon in May 2009.
While re-listing itself would not be symbolic, a congressional resolution would be. The legal procedure for listing a state as a sponsor of terrorism leaves that decision entirely within the discretion of the Secretary of State and the President. But then, this is an election year, and Obama is already under attack for having a weak North Korea policy:
Ironically, Obama’s negotiating posture with the North is, so far at least, somewhat less objectionable than that of the Bush administration’s last years. Bush’s negotiators were, in effect, negotiating with themselves, making unforced concessions to create the illusion of diplomatic progress, while North Korea did little or nothing.
By contrast, the Obama team, at least optically, has seemed more prepared to have China make the grease payments necessary to persuade Kim’s regime to resume the long-stalled six-party talks.
But beneath the optics is a disturbing reality. Obama’s underlying strategy remains fixed in the belief that once everyone returns to the bargaining table, progress on denuclearizing North Korea is still possible. It is a major article of faith, closely linked to Obama’s view that negotiations with Iran might actually divert the mullahs from their determined pursuit of nuclear weapons. [John Bolton, N.Y. Daily News]
Bolton is one of the few conservatives who carries over enough consistency from the Bush Administration to be a credible critic of Obama, who has at least recognized the power of financial constriction to affect North Korea (if not its behavior). Speaking of sanctions, I also liked this quote from the Heritage Foundation’s Bruce Klingner on this:
What is Obama’s Plan B? The Obama administration’s two-track policy of pressure and negotiations is an improvement over earlier approaches that veered to either extreme. However, “strategic patience” is insufficient as a long-term strategy. Simply containing North Korea in a box is problematic for several reasons. First, it allows Pyongyang to expand and refine its nuclear and missile delivery capabilities. This not only further undermines the security of the U.S. and its allies but also sends a dangerous signal of de facto acceptance to other nuclear aspirants. Members of Congress, the media, and think tanks who excoriated the Bush administration’s policy of “benign neglect” are now hypocritically silent against Obama’s similar strategy. [Bruce Klingner, Heritage Foundation]
Read that one in its entirety.
If no sane person still thinks that North Korea can be talked out of its nukes — and that’s only a very slight exaggeration in this town — then the question becomes what the point of sanctions really is. Is it to get North Korea back to the six-party talks to stall us for a few more years while it keeps proliferating nukes to Syria, Iran, Burma, and God-knows-who-else?
As Klingner argues persuasively, sanctions, like talks, are not an end in themselves. Both need to be part of a more comprehensive policy with a concrete goal. To me, the policy ought to be to weaken the regime’s grip on its population by damaging its capacity to oppress. The Great Confiscation and the backlash it created are good illustrations of how this works in practice. So for the moment, Obama’s sanctions happen to advance us toward the same goal I envision, even if it’s probably not the same goal that Obama’s people envision. To me, the concrete goal is a regime so subverted, destabilized, weakened, and lacking in the means to maintain order and control that China (along with a critical mass of the North Korean military) has a fundamental change of attitude and decides that perpetuating Kim Jong Il’s misrule impedes, rather than advances, the objective of stability in North Korea. Maybe then, China will have an incentive to join in forcing North Korea into a negotiated and controlled abdication. That’s not in the cards now, and it won’t be until the North Korean people acquire the means to organize against the state.
Dear People of both South and North Korea, Members of the North Korea Freedom Coalition, Ms. Scholte of the Defense Forum Foundation, Members of the NGO Human Rights Community, Pastors, North Korean Defectors, Abductee Families, Members of the Korean-American Community and Friends of Korea:
It is particularly fitting and proper that this year’s annual North Korea Freedom Week will be held for the first time on the Korean peninsula. This week of events also comes at a particularly critical time as we seek answers to the tragic sinking last month of the South Korean naval vessel, Cheonan, and look forward to honoring veterans during the upcoming sixtieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War in June.
I have joined with Representative Sam Johnson as a co-sponsor of legislation commemorating the anniversary of the commencement of that tragic war, due to North Korean treachery, which nonetheless formed an unbreakable bond between two allies, the United States and the Republic of Korea. As a friend and ally, I also wish to state that I fully agree with President Lee Myung-bak’s recent statement of the need for a resolute response once the cause of the South Korean ship’s sinking is determined. The families of the forty-six dead South Korean sailors deserve no less than a full accounting.
North Korea’s refusal to allow a transparent and thorough verification regime for inspection of its nuclear program led to a complete breakdown of the Six-Party Talks last year. This followed the premature and unwise decision by the United States in 2008 to remove North Korea from the State Department list of state sponsors of terrorism. Read the rest of this entry »
Here is President Obama, talking about North Korea, nukes, and sanctions yesterday:
“I think it’s fair to say that North Korea has chosen a path of severe isolation that has been extraordinarily damaging to its people,” Obama told a news conference at the end of a summit on nuclear security.
He said that as pressure builds, Pyongyang will want to break out of its isolation and “we’ll see a return to the six-party talks and … we will see a change in behavior.” [Reuters]
I don’t advocate that Obama’s North Korea policy is perfect, but it’s good enough to remove North Korea as a foreign policy issue for conservatives. Obama’s policy isn’t much milder than Bush’s in its semantics, and is clearly superior to Bush’s in its tangibles. I said when UNSCR 1874 passed that it would be as good as its implementation, and that the President’s directions to Treasury would matter most. On both counts President Obama deserves good marks from any objective observer. I’m even willing to give him a pass on his relative silence about human rights. What will his words really mean anyway? Nothing short of the regime’s collapse will change anything anyway, and financial sanctions have brought us much closer to that than any of George W. Bush’s hollow words.
If conservatives have a more practical and appealing policy to offer, I haven’t seen what that is. I know what it could be, but I don’t see any conservatives or Republicans advocating it. On the contrary, the Republican voice on North Korea is often Richard Lugar, whose policy is much closer to Bill Clinton’s than Barack Obama’s. That will be more true than ever when Sam Brownback retires this year.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) issued the following statement in response to the conviction of American Aijalon Gomes by a North Korean court. Senator Kerry called on the DPRK to release Mr. Gomes immediately on a humanitarian basis:
“This is a mother’s worst nightmare and a horrific situation. This young man belongs in Massachusetts with his family, and I join with them in expressing my hope that North Korea will do the right thing and send him home. I will do all I can, in concert with our government and Aijalon’s family, to see him released safely.”
I really wish I could say this was an April Fool’s hoax or a Mensa audition gone horribly awry. Actually, it’s a hearing in the House Armed Services Committee:
Which seems like a good time to mention that Senator Carl Levin is filled with angst over all the wise on-the-spot guidance our general officers are missing out on because of a Republican parliamentary stall tactic somehow related to health care collectivization reform:
“Lives are at stake here. American lives and Afghan lives,” said Levin, who would have led the hearing on US national security in Asia. “It’s unconscionable.” [….] Defiant Republicans rolled their eyes, with one leadership aide asking “Do they really believe that a hearing is the difference between life and death? Seriously?” [….]
The Michigan lawmaker said he had hoped to question them about “pressing national security topics such as North Korea’s nuclear program, Chinese military capability and the threat of cyber-warfare.” [AFP]
The government is best that governs least, and that’s never more true that when your national brain trust is comprised of pompous, talentless buffoons like John Kerry and the shallow waters of the Foreign Relations Committee. I’ve given kind reviews to President Obama’s North Korea policy, but the current Congress — and the Democrats in particular — represents an intellectual vacuum whose collective impulse always defaults to the Sisyphean diplomacy of appeasement and agreed frameworks. Are we really missing anything by having 40% less of that?
Now, these diplomatic efforts have also strengthened our hand in dealing with those nations that insist on violating international agreements in pursuit of nuclear weapons. That’s why North Korea now faces increased isolation, and stronger sanctions –- sanctions that are being vigorously enforced. That’s why the international community is more united, and the Islamic Republic of Iran is more isolated. And as Iran’s leaders continue to ignore their obligations, there should be no doubt: They, too, will face growing consequences. That is a promise. (Applause.)
Now, I suppose you detect sarcasm, but don’t take this as criticism. If candidate Obama’s campaign rhetoric was sincere, then I credit him with being a quick study, with an assist from Kim Jong Il. I don’t deny that President Obama’s North Korea policy leaves much to be desired — it’s really just a continuation of the same paradigm of the last 20 years, only with more sanctions. It’s ultimately headed toward an agreement that won’t make our country more secure. Still, the pressure is hastening the Kim Jong Il’s Untergang, and it’s far, far better than my initially low expectations.
The United States said Friday it was “very concerned” about human rights violations in North Korea, as President Barack Obama named an envoy to focus on the issue.
“We’re deeply concerned about the situation in North Korea, particularly the plight of North Korean refugees, and human rights in general,” State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said. [….]
If confirmed by the Senate, King will work as part of US special representative for North Korea Stephen Bosworth’s team and cooperate with other top State Department officials involved in Washington’s policy toward Pyongyang, according to Kelly.
He will also serve as the liaison with human rights groups and other non-governmental organizations “to try and highlight the problem of North Korean human rights and trying to promote a more transparent political system in North Korea,” said Kelly. [AFP]
That means that for the last eight months, North Korea has managed to misdirect our focus on its calculated and calibrated provocations and away from the pathology in which they originate.
The AFP story, apparently written by a reporter untrained in the use of Google, goes on to report that “[s]cores of North Koreans are believed” to flee North Korea each year, to escape “extreme poverty and malnutrition.” This manages to fit two inaccuracies into a single sentence. In fact, the number of North Koreans arriving in the South — almost certainly a pale shadow of the number fleeing the North — has been more than 1,000 a year since 2002 (page 54). At the end of 2004, there were 7,688 North Korean defectors in the South (page 53). Today, more than 3,000 arrive every year, and the total number of North Korean defectors in the South has more than doubled to more than 16,000.
To say that North Koreans are fleeing their homeland because of hunger and poverty is no more true than saying that Anne Frank died of natural causes. Many North Koreans are starving, and a few are riding in Mercedez sedans and yachts, or wearing Omega watches. When that happens in the world’s most centrally planned economy, it means that someone’s corn ration was written out of the central plan. Often, those written out of the plan were born into the lower regions of a system of hereditary political castes known as songbun and written off as expendable. In North Korea, your songbun is your destiny:
Getting a job in North Korea requires a certain family background and lobbying skills rather than desire and talent.
North Korean middle school graduates (high school in South Korea) have three choices for career after graduating 11 years of compulsory education. These are: to go to the army or college, or get a job. Only ten percent with background by birth can get to college and the rest must either enter the army or get jobs. Those without college or army entrance were transferred to labor department of Administration Committee, and they are assigned jobs. The problem is that the job assignments are decided without regards to an individual’s wish or talents. By so called ‘group assignment’, hundreds of graduates are assigned to one job location.
Therefore, middle school students who are about to graduate start lobbying in the labor department of Administration Committee with bribes and using connections. Those without any means have no choice but to go to coal mines or construction companies and end up with physical labor jobs that nobody desires. [
Open News]
Those state industries, however, are vulnerable places to be. When they shut down, the workers are effectively cut out of the rationing system and left with no means of survival. Even after the work, rations, and pay stop, workers must still report to “work” or be sent to a labor camp.
(For all of its faults, AFP’s article at least covers the story, and features what sounds a lot like the administration backtracking on bilateral talks, a subject about which I’m ambivalent.)
I don’t have strong feelings about Bob King because I know almost nothing about him. Few of those who have followed this issue closely do, either, including some of the most prominent activists working on this issue. It’s a plus that he worked for Tom Lantos, and his background is probably better than Jay Lefkowitz’s was coming into the job (though to be fair, Lefkowitz was a quick study). On the other hand, King’s lack of an established reputation puts him at a disadvantage to other rumored candidates, including Jared Genser and my good friend David Hawk.Stephen Solarz was my personal dark horse favorite because of his political stature and connections. King may be an easier figure to dismiss, as was the case with Lefkowitz.
The next question is whether Bob King will be more relevant to the Obama Administration’s North Korea policy than Jay Lefkowitz was to Bush’s. I challenge anyone to untangle all of the layers of vagueness in the State Department’s canned response, offered by Spokesman James Kelly:
In terms of what his role will be, he will be part of Ambassador Bosworth’s team in the Office of the Special Representative for North Korea Policy. He’ll work closely with bureaus within the State Department here, our human rights bureau – Democracy, Human Rights and Labor – and of course, with the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs. And of course, he’ll coordinate with his colleagues in the Korean office with Ambassador Kim and Ambassador Goldberg.
He’ll also have a very important role of being the liaison with the human rights community, with the NGO community, and will also engage with international human rights organizations in his efforts to try and highlight the problem of North Korean human rights and trying to promote a more transparent political system in North Korea. As you know, we are – we’re deeply concerned about the situation in North Korea, particularly the plight of North Korean refugees. And human rights, in general, for the State Department are a big priority, and this is another indication of that.
QUESTION: Will Bob King also participate in the possible U.S.-North Korea bilateral meeting? Because he is on the team of Ambassador Bosworth.
MR. KELLY: Well, I think first we have to make the decision we’re going to actually have the bilateral talks, and then we’ll see who actually participates in it. Yeah, go ahead.
QUESTION: Do you intend to be talking with North Korea specifically about human rights during these meetings that are often more geared towards the nuclear program, the Six-Party Talks?
MR. KELLY: Do we talk about human rights when we –
QUESTION: Will you be – I mean, before, you separated human rights out from the Six-Party Talks.
MR. KELLY: Yeah.
QUESTION: Will you be now bringing human rights back in to the Six-Party –
MR. KELLY: Yeah. You’re asking me to speculate on how – what the framework of the talks will be. I mean, human rights is in the center of all of our bilateral discussions, and I’m sure – although our priority, of course, is the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, human rights always plays an important role in our bilateral relations. [State Dep’t. Daily Press Briefing, Sept. 25, 2009]
When Lefkowitz had the temerity to link North Korea’s oppressive system to its then-unfolding renunciation of its last set of promises to disarm, Condi Rice publicly humiliated Lefkowitz in a manner that would have drawn a very public resignation from a man of greater pride, stature, and sense of mission. History has established, I think, that the Bush Administration’s talk about human rights in the North was just that, and in the end, it was Bush and Rice — with plenty of help from Christopher Hill — who ended up proving (again) the futility of appeasing North Korea.
If we have learned anything from this, it should be that North Korea’s pathology cannot be compartmentalized away from its diplomatic mendacity. Yet a diminishing few still believe that Kim Jong Il wants better relations and free commerce with Earth. These people either don’t understand, or haven’t grasped the significance of, North Korea’s domestic propaganda about how it games and extorts America. North Korea has hostility, isolation, xenophobia, and secrecy in its genes. It can’t exist without them and can’t be cajoled or forced into abandoning them. Richardson calls the diplomatic aspect of North Korea’s pathology “strategic disengagement.” The central idea of it is that sustaining a state of hostility with the outside world is an essential element of what makes North Korea what it is. Its removal necessarily means transforming North Korea into a place that would turn on Kim Jong Il faster than a centrifuge. The implications of those realities are unpleasant, which may be why so many people refuse to recognize them. But not to recognize them requires one to disregard decades of experience, including North Korea’s eventual renunciation of every diplomatic commitment it has ever made.
Oddly enough, these people have managed to get the news media to call them “realists.”
Consider all of the logical chasms one must cross to believe in the verifiable diplomatic disarmament of North Korea today. How can we believe in the verification of disarmament when we can’t even verify that our food aid is going to those in need, and where brief and closely-monitored meetings between elderly siblings are considered a newsworthy diplomatic accomplishment? How can we expect North Korea to meet internationally accepted verification standards when it demands to be excused from every other norm of humanity, civilization, and transparency? How can we expect its scientists and technicians to be truthful with us when they live in a society so opaque, so controlling, and so vindictive — not only against those perceived as even minimally disloyal, but against their parents, spouses, and their children? Who believes that North Korea shares our interests in peace and security — interests that are rooted in moral, humanitarian, and economic values — when its mass culling of its own people through famine, concentration camps, and public executions shows utter malice for the value of human life?
More specifically, recent reports from defectors suggest that North Korea’s underground nuclear test site was built by prisoners from Camp 16, which is adjacent to the test site’s eastern perimeter. The prisoners, it is said, never leave that tunnel alive. Who will ever give us a full accounting of North Korea’s nuclear test activities if the North isn’t prepared to let our inspectors go to Mount Mantap and hear the candid observations of its scientists and technicians? If there is one thing that unites North Koreans more than their hatred of us, it is the fear of some dark fate if they compromise betray the state that made the arsenal of terror. Let there be no mistake that North Korea’s disregard for human life means that it would not hesitate to arm terrorists with any weapon it has the capacity to make.
So far, the Obama Administration has demonstrated surprising strength in responding to Kim Jong Il’s nuclear and missile tests. The passage of UNSCR 1874, despite its flaws, has spurred international cooperation with sanctions. This has been useful, but Obama’s empowering of the Treasury Department to attack Kim Jong Il’s palace economy has probably done far more. After all, without the ability to engage in financial transactions, Kim Jong Il has no efficient means of recouping his profits from arms sales, drug dealing, insurance fraud, cigarette or pharmaceutical counterfeiting, or any other means he uses to support his regime. It’s likely that his cash reserves are declining.
But to what end? For Kim Jong Il, nuclear weapons are central to his national security and personal survival. They are a substitute for a massive conventional military whose equipment is degraded and whose troops are withering away physically. They are one of the last remaining sources of national pride for an otherwise miserable and discontented population. There are even reports that Kim has threatened his own military with nuclear force if it rebels against him. Finally, as Kim Jong Il’s health visibly declines what else can he claim for a legacy? His transformation of his cities into vast cemeteries? These factors, combined with two decades of failed diplomacy, all suggest that Kim Jong Il will never disarm voluntarily. For now, Kim Jong Il probably concludes that he can break sanctions by appearing to our fear and our gullibility, and that of other nations in the region. Financial sanctions may be building real pressure on Kim Jong Il’s regime and retarding the expansion of his arsenal, but they any agreement they secure will be illusory.
President Obama now offers Kim a “grand bargain,” but The Big Deal comes with an impossible condition — nuclear disarmament first. This offer will not sit on the table for long. Eventually — absent Kim Jong Il’s sudden death from natural or not-entirely-natural causes — North Korean provocations will force President Obama to either accept North Korea as a nuclear power or escalate the confrontation, either through more robust containment or by opting for constricting and subverting of the regime itself. Acceptance may take the form of taking North Korea’s word to verify complete disarmament at some future date, but no one could possibly take any such promises seriously now. And a nuclear North Korea is an unacceptable condition for U.S. national security. Within the next two years, we will know which path President Obama chooses.
KCJ’s comment here, on the fawning Songs of Obama sung in a New Jersey classroom, inspired me to write a response that may warrant its own post. Here is the video KCJ is talking about:
This is creepy stuff, and I’d be livid if my kids ever come home singing something like this. Now, where is the evidence that this is the work of the Obama Administration, as opposed to that of one unintelligent Kool-Aid drinking teacher? WSJ blogger James Taranto notes that the teacher in question has since retired, and that there’s no evidence that this was orchestrated from any sort of Central Committee for Popular Enlightenment Und Freudediktat. We are still a long way from 150-day battles here, and anyone in the administration who was so inclined (Van Jones?) still faces such significant obstacles as a mid-term election that will almost certainly cost the governing party dozens of seats in Congress.
(This, on the other hand, is the work of the Obama Administration, and it only amplifies the disgust I’d first expressed here at the herd mentality of our “artistic community,” and the willingness of some in our government to make it a tool of state power. I like the way Iowa Hawk lampooned it here. This will give many of us a sense of unease that will outlast the memory of the overreach itself. It should.)
Still, let’s not overstate cycles that most of us are old enough to recognize as natural and recurring seasons in any democratic system of government. Political parties — and this is especially true of the Democrats, whose tent is much wider at the fringes — are dominated by activists who define “change” in revolutionary terms. Consider the simplistic genius of the very slogan, “Change.” It is ingenious for the same reason that it is so perilous for the politician who rides to victory on it: because it is void for vagueness. It means nothing more than whatever the hearer wants it to mean, up to the moment when the candidate is elected and must govern, and offer specific proposals that often turn out to be different from what voters may have imagined (or been led to imagine).
By now, you may be about to ask for examples. First, I’d cite Obama’s passivity about gay marriage. Obama the President is smart enough to know that the voters aren’t ready for it, but the activists want revolutionary change, even if the result is a series of consequential, long-term setbacks. Consider the administration’s retreat from its early promise to close Gitmo in a year. The Administration made that promise without giving much thought to the question of what are we to do with the terrorists there, terrorists whose plans could not have been disrupted if they had been captured or questioned in ways that conform to our domestic judicial rules of evidence. Yes, some imagined that they would be let go to kill again, but our President has enough sense not to propose that. He also learned that the American people aren’t ready to share their country with terrorists, and the clumsy initial efforts to shut Gitmo down, justified in part on appeasing our “allies,” — often, really the most inflexibly and irrationally anti-American citizens of nominally allied nations — ended up doing significant damage to our most important trans-Atlantic alliance. Now that the war in Iraq seems to be winding down with most key U.S. interests standing a good chance of being secured for at least a while after we leave, some on the far-left are dropping their past pretenses that Afghanistan was “the good war” from which Iraq was a distraction. Now, there is another war that must be lost. There certainly are legitimate debates about how the war there should be fought or can be won, but I don’t expect the far left to take much of a serious interest in those. They no doubt imagined that Obama’s election would mean an accession to their demands for unconditional withdrawal, something Obama can’t give them. That sets us up for the sort of rebellion among the unpatriotic left we haven’t seen since 1968, though probably on a much smaller scale.
For most voters, however, dissatisfaction with the status quo doesn’t translate into enduring support for any particular alternative, and that’s particularly so when the alternative bears a hint of radicalism. Voters are repelled by revolutionaries. Consider: isn’t it possible that dissatisfaction with Iraq in 2006 might have meant dissatisfaction with how the war was being fought, or that it hadn’t been won yet? Certainly most of that dissatisfaction has eased. Iraq is no longer among the most contentious issues in our country, and there is no great popular demand for the kind of calamitous helicopters-on-the-embassy-roof withdrawal that our most craven politicians, many of whom voted to authorize the war, had called for so recently. Nor did dissatisfaction with the economy necessarily equal popular support for the kind of overspending that both Presidents Bush and Obama supported, and which McCain would have. The Great Silent Majority’s imagined idea of “Change” turns out to be unlike the cultish socialist-realist hues of Shepard Fairey’s imagination. The voters’ mandate may have been nothing more than a mandate to manage things back to the halcyon days before 9/11, when the economy also happened to be pretty good. Activists have sharp-edged plans to change the world. Voters have gauzier directions to make the stuff that was good to be good again, and to make the stuff that’s good now better. And during elections, especially mid-term elections, voters tend to punish any sign activism furiously.
I’ll close with the most important point of all — voters think more strategically than we give them credit for, and they tend to display this in their affinity for divided government. Recall, after the 2006 mid-terms, I noted how voters tend to check the president’s party by giving victories to opposition parties:
1958: Republican President (Ike), second mid-term, Dems gain 16 in the Senate, 48 in the House.
1966: Democratic President (LBJ), second mid-term, Republicans gain 3 in the Senate, 47 in the House.
1974: Watergate. Republican President (Ford), sorta-second mid-term, Dems gain 4 in the Senate, 49 in the House.
1978: Democratic President (Carter), first mid-term, Republicans gain 3 in the Senate, 15 in the House.
1986: Republican President (Reagan), second mid-term, Dems gain 8 in the Senate, 5 in the House.
1994: Democratic President (Clinton), first mid-term, Republicans gain 2 in the Senate, 54 in the House.
2002: President’s party actually gains 2 in the Senate, picks up 8 in the House.
Today, we have a likely net switch of 26 House seats and 6 Senate seats. It’s a solid win, more so in the Senate, but not a blowout in light of the historical trends. Dislike of the governing party turns voters out for mid-terms, and governing parties tend to lose seats as a result. [link]
Events like 1994 and 2006 were mostly reactions to an excessive accumulation of power by one party. They were negative mandates, voter-directed terminations. In the broader historical context, they were inevitable reactions. We’re probably going to see the same thing in 2010, because the Democrats’ great accumulation of power isn’t reflected in broad popular support for their ambitious plans. The voters smell radicalism in the government’s excessive spending, its amorphous but too-ambitious health care schemes, and (somewhat unfairly, I think) its obsequious foreign policy. But if the policy in practice isn’t that different from Bush’s, its conciliatory tone certainly hasn’t done us any good with Iran or North Korea, and can’t persuade Europe to behave like an ally (something it ceased to be when it stopped needing us at the end of the Cold War).
Negative mandates tend to be of limited endurance because they’re mostly reactionary in nature. Once the governing party is duly rebuked, the sense of purpose is spent. Once in power, opposition parties typically fail to realize the visions they’ve sold to their voters. The Republicans didn’t close the deal after 1994, because Newt Gingrich was a superficially unappealing figure in the same ways Barack Obama is superficially appealing, and because he cultivated the sort of radical image that gave the voters unease. In this, he certainly had a strong assist from a hostile news media. Obama’s is a case of what I’d describe as vicarious hubris — hubris that’s mostly evident in the swooning of an adoring media, who are still smitten by the Obama of their imaginations in the same way a few of them are still smitten with John Kennedy, with all the erotic and sometimes homoerotic overtones that implies.
With a few obvious exceptions, however, Obama’s own policies have been marked by a cautious cognizance of the backlash to come and a certain calculated willingness to disappoint his base. But triangulation is a very easy thing to get wrong, because it tends to leave everyone disappointed. That can cause disgruntlement even among the supporters of a “stewardship” kind of president, but just imagine the bitterness of the jilted adorers who did not just vote for “Hope,” but who embraced their own imaginations of it.
At times, reading about the life of Kim Dae-jung made me think I was reading the brief for a blockbuster movie in the making. His struggles and accomplishments read like the stuff films are made of and it’s true, no matter what you thought of him, DJ leaves behind a legacy in South Korea full of successes and failures.
But during my readings, a statement about his death’s impact on the future of North-South relations caught my eye (see page 2):
Analysts said Kim’s death may help bring the rival Korea back to dialogue, especially following conciliatory moves by the North in recent days that included a promise to reopen its border with the South, suggesting to some that tension may be subsiding.
I recall they said the same thing about the U.S. after Clinton’s visit to North Korea, as well as the visit of Hyun Jung-eun, chairwoman of South Korea’s Hyundai Group. Headlines such as this seem to hint at optimism when dealing with the DPRK.
And you could argue that relations have appeared to have warmed for now we are hearing of a meeting coming up between Bill Richardson and DPRK envoys in addition to talks about the reopening of North Korea resort tours for South Korea citizens.
But are these truly “conciliatory moves” made by North Korea? It depends on what will be proposed at the Richardson meeting, but as for warming ties with South Korea, money seems to be a driving force behind North Korea’s willingness to open up; the North’s behavior may be perceived as being conciliatory but the regime definitely has another agenda on its mind. The release of Yoo Seong-jin, the detained Hyundai employee, came at a price with the agreement to restart cross-border tourism, although it was also an agreement Hyundai probably couldn’t afford to pass up, literally.
It’s worth noting that despite these developments between Hyundai and the DPRK, Seoul has distanced itself from the agreement.
Still, it seems analysts are eager to point to signs of warming ties between North Korea and South Korea, as well as with the U.S., and Kim Dae-jung’s death seems to be the latest opportunity for such optimism to shine. As for me, I’ll opt to go the cautious route before declaring that North Korea has shown interest in cooperating with the international community. I still think it’s too early to describe these latest moves as part of an “improved relationship” as I see the motive behind these developments more along the lines of survival on North Korea’s part, rather than a sincere effort to engage with the international community toward achieving shared interests. (For instance, I don’t believe North Korea will ever agree to disarm itself.)
It’s also hard to get too excited about such developments after years of riding North Korea’s roller coaster. Months ago I thought we were seeing the end of Kim Jong Il only to see he has outlived both Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Dae-jung in a turn of events reminiscent of Boris Yeltsin’s longevity in the 1990s. My point being, when it comes to North Korea, it’s better to go the cautiously optimistic route before jumping on every opportunity to declare improvement.
How far has Kim Jong Il’s skillful use of two American hostages set back our efforts to disarm him? Assuming, as we safely can, that President Obama made some concessions for their release, all now depends on whether the President is willing to let himself be upstaged by the Clintons, be cornered into making concessions under the duress of an implicit threat to the safety of two American hostages, and give needlessly fastidious honor to a deal between two men with undistinguished records for keeping promises of their own.
It’s no coincidence that this comes just as President Obama has done what neither President Clinton nor President Bush before him managed to do — design and implement a more-or-less pragmatic and coherent North Korea policy. Will Obama discard that promising start for the sake of Clinton’s deal? For the sake of the country and his own political interest, he should not.
Unfortunately, that will require him to ignore much bad advice from some who are constitutionally incapable of learning a damn thing from North Korea, including some who are actually recognized as North Korea “experts.” Take Jack Pritchard, to name one:
I think from my point of view – from a policy point of view – you take a look at the situation and say, we understand how this will play out and the two women can come home. Now let’s look at it from a security point of view – from a relationship point of view – is something positive – will something positive come out of that? And the answer in, at least in my advice would be, I think that there is a signal here that the North Koreans don’t like the direction for which the relationship is heading. And they can’t control it. They need a very face-saving way to change this dynamic. I think they are signaling that they want to do something differently. I would recommend that we take this opportunity. Let’s see if this message comes out from the North Koreans. [Jack Pritchard, Interviewed by Jake Tapper]
That’s funny, Jack. So you think that North Korea didn’t like the way “the relationship” was heading way back on March 19th, before they launched an ICBM and tested a nuke? Knowing as they must have that those high-profile provocations would draw the inevitable watered-down U.N. resolution and force President Obama to reimpose sanctions? Did the North Koreans engage in those provocations because they just assumed that Obama would … take your counsel? Or was it Kim Jong Il’s original, principled intent to send these two young women to labor camps, until he saw the political value of having two U.S. hostages, and only after engaging in all these provocations? Do you mean to suggest that a decision to hold two Americans has hostages — which would be terrorism, as the statute defines it — is really fortuitous in the greater scheme of things?
The great policy question this raises, of course, is this: Do these people ever learn? Why, as a matter of fact, some of them do. Look who’s a neocon now!
For many years, based on five visits to North Korea and its border areas, I’ve argued for an “engagement” approach toward Pyongyang, but now I’ve reluctantly concluded that we need more sticks. [Nicholas Kristof, N.Y. Times]
Huh. And just six months into a Democratic president’s administration. Do tell:
The truth is that North Korea doesn’t want to negotiate away its nuclear materials. It is focused on its own transition, and this year it has declined to accept a visit from the Obama administration’s special envoy, Stephen Bosworth. The North isn’t interested in “six-party talks” on nuclear issues; instead, it seeks talks with the U.S. conditioned on accepting North Korea’s status as a nuclear power — which is unacceptable.
Kristof’s bill of particular particulars includes North Korea’s recent provocations, its suspected proliferation to Burma, and its dismantling of those “engagement” showpieces from the Sunshine Policy era. It all makes him sound at least 20% smarter than the editors of his paper.
You may now insert your own “neocon-manufactures-shoddy-WMD-evidence” conspiracy theory.
I’m still waiting.
The speculation about what President Clinton gave the North Koreans for the freedom of Ling and Lee is worrying Japan and South Korea, which have both marched in formation alongside us despite having hostages of their own held in the North. Both have sought assurances from Obama that we’re not going to fold, cut them out, and go directly to bilateral talks. (I’ll just let you soak that in for a moment — the people who ran on a platform of not alienating allies? Double-cross our allies to pursue our own interests unilaterally? Perish the thought.) Not to worry, says the Chosun Ilbo — America is not going soft. I don’t share their confidence, unfortunately. And with yielding to terrorism duly legitimized, South Korea is keeping its options open. The Chairman of Hyundai Asan wants to go to North Korea to negotiate a ransom payment plead for the freedom of a South Korean man held by the North Koreans at Kaesong.
Frankly, my greatest source of optimism in this regard is President Obama’s political shrewdness and his fear and loathing of the Clintons. I’ve never doubted that Obama’s plan for Hillary was to put her in this little gilded cage, and that the Clintons’ plan for Obama was to upstage the Young Turk who overthrew her. If Obama shifts his North Korea policy now, the Clintons beat him at his own game and (as Bill plays coy while basking in the spotlight) let their surrogates laud Bubba’s Great Diplomatic Opening that broke our impasse with North Korea. As The Telegraph’s Ron Coughlin points out, that would be quite an irony; after all, President Clinton is the one who missed our last real chance to keep North Korea from going nuclear in the first place.
Some point out, of course, that this almost certainly would not really be a Great Diplomatic Opening; rather, it would be a stall tactic that would legitimize and holding American citizens as hostages and end with de facto U.S. recognition of North Korea as a nuclear power:
The impulse to save two young women from 12 years of hard labor in a North Korean gulag is powerful. Yet now that this goal has been achieved, we need to balance the emotions of the moment against the precedent for the future.
It is inherent in hostage situations that potentially heartbreaking human conditions are used to overwhelm policy judgments. Therein, in fact, lies the bargaining strength of the hostage-taker. On the other hand, at any given moment, several million Americans reside or travel abroad. How are they best protected? Is the lesson of this episode that any ruthless group or government can demand a symbolic meeting with a prominent American by seizing hostages or threatening inhuman treatment for prisoners in their hands? If it should be said that North Korea is a special case because of its nuclear capability, does that create new incentives for proliferation? [….]
At the end of a negotiation, North Korea will either destroy its nuclear arsenal, or it will become a de facto nuclear state. So far, it has used the negotiating forums available to it in a skillful campaign of procrastination, alternating leaps in technological progress with negotiating phases to consolidate it.
We seem to be approaching such a consolidating phase now. North Korea may return to its well-established tactic of diverting us with the prospect of imminent breakthroughs. This is exactly what happened after the last Korean nuclear weapons test in 2006. Pyongyang undoubtedly will continue to seek to achieve de facto acceptance as a nuclear weapons state by endlessly protracted diplomacy. The benign atmosphere by which it culminated its latest blackmail must not tempt us or our partners into bypaths that confuse atmosphere with substance. Any outcome other than the elimination of the North Korean nuclear military capability in a fixed time period is a blow to non-proliferation prospects worldwide and to peace and stability globally. [Henry Kissinger, Washington Post]
Brian Myers doesn’t see any Great Breakthrough here, either. What Brian Myers has to say is always worth reading, though in my view, Myers seems to overestimate the effectiveness of North Korean propaganda on an audience that — to the extent it can be surveyed (opens in pdf) — probably isn’t as easily fooled as Myers thinks. Although North Koreans probably tend to revere Kim Il Sung to some residual degree and may hate America almost as much as college students in Seoul, that doesn’t mean that they revere Kim Jong Il or juche ideology as much as college students in Seoul. Myers is incorrect (which is a rare event) when he says that North Korea maintains a stable population when a country with such a low standard of living ought to be experiencing a high birthrate and population growth. Instead, North Korea’s population has either held steady or declined in the last two decades, which would make it almost unique among the world’s poorest countries. Despite tightened border fencing and the threat of public execution for fleeing North Korea, large numbers of North Koreans still vote with their feet for a life in South Korea, or as fugitives in China.
Still, some good is sure to come of all of this. If anyone is still dumb enough at this point to stray into North Korean territory, either as a journalist, a tourist, or as an employee of Hyundai Asan, we may now possess the clarity of judgment to leave them there. At some point, you have to just resign yourself to the fact there’s only so much you can do to rescue the unfit from Darwin’s maw so that they can go on bringing down the average I.Q. of our collective gene pool. That helps our policy goal of isolating North Korea and constricting its Palace Economy.
And for those so lacking in a conscience that they’re contemplating one of those tyranny tourism ventures to the Arirang Festival, maybe these incidents will be just the discouragement they need. Granted, if I were the Treasury Department, I’d block all of the accounts of Koryo Tours and the Korean Friendship Association, but it wouldn’t bother me much to see a few of those people stop-lossed in Pyongyang for a few weeks of crunching down tol-pi-bim-pab.
I’d have to say that this is the nastiest thing I’ve read yet about Laura Ling and Euna Lee. And that said, it contains much interesting information that may or may not be at all true. This, for example:
Kim Jong Il has ruled it with absolute authority since 1994. He was born in the Forties, but his exact birthday is asecret. He wears platform shoes and a teased hairdo and is reputed to have had a string of lovers, both male and female.
I only regret that Outweek did not live to see this day. And this:
As of last night, the bidding war for the first interview with the two heroines had reportedly reached ‘the mid six figures’. Book publisher HarperCollins is said to have offered a cool $1million for a ‘warts and all’ account of their life during 140 days ‘behind enemy lines’.
A movie deal will surely follow. Laura’s Scottish husband Iain Clayton, a 35-year-old mathematician turned financial analyst, told The Mail on Sunday from the steps of their modest ranch-style home in the less than salubrious suburb of North Hollywood: ‘I’m afraid I can’t say anything. No one is allowed to talk. We are in the process of doing deals and I don’t want to mess anything up. Everything is being handled by our media adviser.’
Funny, because the bidding for the bounties on the women whose faces appeared in Ling and Lee’s video probably capped out at 1,000 yuan.
The Mail on Sunday has spoken to a long-time Democratic Party insider, who is a confidant of Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary, now President Obama’s Secretary of State.‘Laura is sweet but not very street-smart,’ said the insider. ‘She was sent to China to make a routine programme about refugees crossing the border from North Korea but, according to Kim Jong Il’s people, she was walking across the border and leaping about.
‘The official North Korean report said Euna was holding the camera. Of course, there was speculation they were working for the CIA. Forget that. This has been a farce. It couldn’t be more embarrassing for Obama and the agency. No one hired these girls. No one in Washington had ever heard about them until they were captured by the North Koreans.
‘From everything I have heard about Laura, she is a Valley girl who wanted to play in the big league.
I think she did this as a stunt to compete with her sister. Lisa Ling works with people like Oprah. Laura earns peanuts at a network no one has heard of. This was her big chance.’
The reporters weren’t kind to the Clintons, either:
The Clinton confidant said: ‘This wasn’t about the women – this was about a PR coup.Barack Obama may have defeated Bill’s wife but this is the Clintons’ revenge. The North Koreans are talking about nuclear disarmament but they say they will talk only to Bill. It’s a win-win situation for everyone except Obama.
Me, I’ve already wearied of the bloodsport about these two. They did something dumb, and I pray to God that it didn’t get anyone killed or sent to a labor camp. The damage they did to our foreign policy depends on how willing Obama is to take his promises (made under the duress of a hostage-holder, after all) as seriously as Kim Jong Il takes his. I’ll say in no uncertain terms that we should renege on any promises or concessions we made to get these women home. As for Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee, they can still redeem themselves, if they just get over the idea that this is all about Laura Ling and Euna Lee.At the end of the day, what do I take from this? That Euna Lee’s daughter is cute. Her mom is a fool, and I’m still glad she’s back with her little girl again. And I don’t see the contradiction in that.
In a world fully possessed of its senses, Lanny Davis would have marked himself indelibly as a national laughingstock by now. It worries me that as one, the “artistic community” has wheeled from near-unanimous opposition to the state to near-unanimous opposition to any dissent against it. And now that I mull it some, it may be the very term “artistic community” that scares and confuses me the most:
Consider the recent flurry of debate over the Obama “Joker” posters that have been appearing in Los Angeles. This image represents the only substantial counterpoint to Obama’s current agenda from the art community. What’s been the response?
One writer from the LA Weeklydeclared of the image, “The only thing missing is a noose.” Philip Kennicott of The Washington Poststated, “So why the anonymity? Perhaps because the poster is ultimately a racially charged image.” Bedlam magazine, the first to comment on the poster back in April, argued, “The Joker white-face imposed on Obama’s visage has a sort of malicious, racist, Jim Crow quality to it.” [….]
To give some perspective, remember that the “noose” comment came from a publication that once presented a cover image of George W. Bush as a bloodthirsty vampire. [Reason, Patrick Courrielche]
It’s time to revisit our usage of the word “liberal” when it becomes associated with ostracizing and suppressing dissenting thought. I can hardly imagine a more pernicious and potentially effective way to intimidate dissenters in our society than to label them as racists for no better reason than the race of the sitting president. By definition, is the coddling infantilization of the President of the United States ever a necessary thing, notwithstanding the fact that he is of African descent? If the mandatory infantilization of our president means that he’s above criticism, then we must suspend this acquired reflex. If we can’t do even this, can we say that his election represents meaningful progress for our society?
The power of art, in combination with the suppression of free speech or a free press, has been used as a tool by authoritarian governments to control their citizens. From Hitler, Stalin, and Mao to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il, art has been used to deify leaders while preserving the position of the ruling class. Most artists would not want to be referred to as tools of the state, but in the case of Obama’s administration, that’s exactly what they’ve been so far.
“Hope” to me is a modest thing — it means having a president with the maturity to be a heart-breaking disappointment to those who worship him as a post-spiritual deity. For the record, I’m hopeful that Obama is fundamentally much more practical and self-interested than ideological, and that he knows that embracing this cult’s basest Trotskyist impulses would cost him reelection.
So intricately forked is Lanny’s tongue that he’s apparently capable of performing analingus on three subjects at the same time:
The release of the two journalists by the North Koreans on Tuesday night D.C. time was the result of a tour-de-force, trifecta combination of the three most talented and truly great political leaders of our times — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; her husband, former President Bill Clinton; and President Barack Obama. [Lanny Davis, The Hill]
He forgot to mention Obama’s ten holes-in-one the first time he played golf, Hillary’s power to paralyze her quarry with her icy stare, or Bill’s supernatural ability to deposit the DNA of political enemies on the clothing of otherwise inconsequential women.
John Choe, personifying the appellation “useful idiot” as pictured here, won’t shift U.S. foreign policy if he’s elected to represent a district in Queens in the New York City Council. Technically, Choe is correct when he evades questions about his sympathies with North Korea’s regime and demurs,
“I’m not running for secretary of state—I’m running to represent the 20th district in the City Council,” Choe said.
That is true in the same sense that David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana, not Chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. When Duke ran, he accused his opponents of unfairly raising his previous leadership of Ku Klu Klan and Neo-Nazi organizations, which he claimed were a part of his past (though Duke continued to operate an organization called the National Association for the Advancement of White People).
I make this comparison because John Choe, who has the endorsement of the Queens Democratic Party, is the co-founder of a group called Nodutdol, which, in rhetoric indistinguishable from North Korea’s, says:
The danger of war is real - during both the Clinton and Bush administrations, U.S. pre-emptive strikes were threatened over the issue of North Korea’s potentially having nuclear weapons. Currently, the U.S. has been reconfiguring its presence in South Korea, increasing the size and capabilities of bases like Camp Humphreys in Pyongtaek, south of Seoul, while the U.S., South Korea, and Japan have stepped up joint military exercises to “maintain regional stability”. The most recent just ended this March, as 26,000 U.S. forces joined the R.O.K. forces in an enormous war game, “Key Resolve/ Foal Eagle”, exercises aimed at North Korea, who condemned the actions as provocative. Then, North Korea launched a satellite in early April, which the U.S., South Korea and Japan denounced as provocative. [Nodutdol]
The mission of DEEP is to bring activists and socially concerned Korean Americans to the northern part of our homeland, in the only such program in this country. Because of the biased and negative portrayal of north Korea by the US government and mainstream media, most of us [even Koreans who are already committed to social justice], are poorly informed about the DPRK. This program helps to demystify the DPRK, and build person to person understanding. To organize in this collective, socialist society. Each year, DEEP organizes a fundraising drive to support the people of north Korea and uses the proceeds to bring medical supplies, books, and other materials to the DPRK. [Nodutdol]
Even this appears to be a sanitized version of what a New York Times reporter found several years ago, and you know you’re far afield when even the New York Times looks at you askance for your far-left sympathies:
It is not hard to see the worries. Nodutdol’s Web site, which is in English at www.nodutdol.com, includes a journal and photographs by Yul San Liem, 24, who presents North Korea as a harmonious place, full of happy people free of Western advertising. There is plenty of praise for the former dictator Kim Il Sung.
North Koreans, Ms. Liem writes, ‘’have built a nation from nothing when the Western Imperialists would have had them fall, have constructed a society in which people actually desire what is best of each other, rather than what is best for the individual self, who resist the clutches of global capitalism, who have survived such hardships and risen up alive, united and strong.'’
The site doesn’t mention that North Korean citizens can reportedly be sent to the gulag for watching television. There is only a passing reference to the famine that killed an estimated 2.5 million North Koreans in the mid-1990’s, a result, many observers say, of the government’s policies. [N.Y. Times, Robert F. Worth]
If I am not questioning the patriotism of Nodutdol’s members, it’s because the authors of the group’s web site have saved me the trouble by repeatedly referring to them not as Korean-Americans or Americans of Korean descent, but as first- to fourth-generation “Koreans living in the U.S.,” and referring to Korea as their homeland. And while one can certainly question the Marxist bona fides of any supporter of an oligarchy that wallows in luxury while the proletarian classes cover acres of land with the graves of their loved ones, there is one identifiable consistency in Nodutdol’s agenda — its advocacy of a defenseless America and a defenseless South Korea.
The graves of Hamhung
But do these views still reflect Choe’s own? Choe, who volunteers that he spent part of his honeymoon in North Korea, is non-responsive when asked of the North’s atrocities toward its people:
“I believe in productive and constructive criticism. There is also criticism that is meant to undermine a peaceful process. I believe if you’re gonna build a relationship you have to engage in constructive criticism.[…] You can’t be holier than thou, saying why aren’t you fixing this, or fixing that?[…] That part of U.S. policy is currently being reviewed by the Obama administration. The unilateralism that the U.S. has pushed around the world hasn’t been very productive,” said Choe. [….]
In regards to human rights violations, Choe criticized the former military government of South Korea, especially their National Security Law, which he said led to the “restricted free speech and freedom of conscience, [and] allowed the authorities to detain, torture and sometimes kill their political opponents whether they were professors, poetry, labor activists.” “If a similar system is in place in North Korea, I would also oppose it,” said Choe. [Queens Tribune]
It is a strange variation of Holocaust denial that “opposes” what it still refuses to acknowledge. But the horrors that are there for anyone to see, or to hear the victims describe. The number of people murdered or allowed to starve by North Korea’s regime exceed by at least a hundredfold the worst abuses of South Korea’s old right, to which Choe attempts to redirect his response.
Barracks huts at Camp 22
Choe wasn’t so circumspect in a 2006 speech, which he has not repudiated:
Korea is at the front line of the liberation struggles against imperialism,” Choe was quoted as telling a conference here in May 2006 on “Preparing for the Rebirth of the Global Struggle for Socialism.”
“From the very beginning, when the US intervened and occupied Korea, the Korean people have been resisting and struggling. And I urge all of you here to help us in our dark days trying to win back freedom and independence from the United States and its military.” [David Seifman, New York Post]
If a moral distinction can be made between the Nazi regime and North Korea’s, it certainly isn’t in degrees of cruelty so much as the number of victims the regimes could access. When David Duke sought and won the Republican primary while running for governor of Louisiana in 1988, Ronald Reagan recorded radio spots to endorse his corrupt Democratic opponent. That is because we have made the national decision to drive those who sympathize with the perpetrators of genocide from polite society. Yet too many “progressives” seem untroubled by sharing their movement with those who traffic in one of the world’s most illiberal ideologies. Perhaps the Queens Democratic Party endorsed Choe while ignorant of his views, but by now, it cannot be unaware of them. If the Democratic Party has made the decision to create a space within its ranks for the advocates of genocide, then by all means, it should stand by that endorsement.
In our second great WTF moment of this week, the Republican Party just called me asking for money to buy ad space to condemn Barack Obama’s weak Jimmy Carter-style foreign policy.
Set aside the fact that the major premise of the pitch just doesn’t square with the truth. How the hell can anyone make that claim with a straight face in light of George W. Bush’s North Korea legacy? Did these people, in the name of a strong foreign policy, just seriously ask me to help them turn the keys to our foreign policy back over to … Colin Powell and Condi Rice? And for that matter, who can name a major political party that isn’t sure to install Chris Hill to “manage” some spectacularly dangerous foreign policy crisis by feeding whatever beast growls at us, slipping the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a rufie, and sodomizing its entire membership live and unpixelated on C-Span 2?
Fuck these people.
Is it any wonder that the Republicans are a minority? There are precious few politicians in either party worthy of our support today, and I can easily count them on my digits — Brownback, Royce, Lieberman, Bayh sometimes, Ros-Lehtinen, Frank Wolf, McCain, and … and that’s about it. That leaves 14 more digits to count with, including the finger I’m holding up now.
Dear People of both South and North Korea, Members of the North Korea Freedom Coalition, Ms. Scholte of the Defense Forum Foundation, Members of the NGO Human Rights Community, Pastors, North Korean Defectors, Abductee Families, Members of the Korean-American Community and Friends of Korea:
I’d have to say that 
In a world fully possessed of its senses, 
John Choe, personifying the appellation “useful idiot” as pictured here, won’t shift U.S. foreign policy if he’s elected to represent a district in Queens in the New York City Council. Technically, Choe is correct when he evades 
