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October 23, 2006

Ban Ki-Moon’s Image Makeover?

Already, Ban can see that what was popular in Seoul won’t cut it in the General Assembly.  In the rest of the world, North Korea is a pariah.  Besides, the man is highly sensitive about what bloggers say about him. “Taking the advantage of the U.N. Secretary-general’s authority and the U.N.’s functions, I plan to make the utmost efforts to actually improve the human rights situation in North Korea,” he said. Citing reports from U.N. human rights envoys and related...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
October 21, 2006

Condi Rice Saves Thirty Minutes of My Life

[Update:   Senior State Department official Victor Cha flat-out says it aint so.] … by raising serious doubts about the hearsay report that Kim Jong Il had apologized to a Chinese envoy for his recent nuclear test, or promised not to do it again. I don’t think apology and regret are components of the emotional vocabulary of a psychopath or a malignant narcissist, except as a means of manipulating others.  Kim Jong Il had his reasons.  I don’t know what...

Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Russia/Russia & Korea/WMD
October 17, 2006

Of Tin-Pot Crises, and Real Ones

U.N. Resolution 1695, passed after North Korea’s missile tests, demanded that countries exercise “vigilance” to be certain that their money wasn’t paying for more missiles.  South Korea adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach and continued as if nothing had changed.  It even had another illegal payments-to-North Korea  kerfuffle (“I apologize for the illegal remittance issue, which was caused by mismatch between law and reality” — a real classic).  The focii of all these legal and ethical evasions are Kumgang...

Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/NK Economics/U.S. & Korea/WMD
October 16, 2006

NRO on Ban Ki-Moon and the Alliance

It reads like an autopsy. The choice of Ban Ki-moon should have been good news. South Korea and the United States are formal treaty allies. We have about 30,000 troops in South Korea, who train alongside the South’s army, and a headquarters meant to take operational control of all of them in the event of a crisis…. Yet the author, Mario Loyola,  thinks that South Korea  is  fully  capable of self-defense.  He thinks Roh and Ban really see the alliance...

Categories "United" Nations/An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea
October 16, 2006

Axis, Schmaxis, Part 4

Iran reacts to U.N.S.C.R. 1718: “Some Western countries have turned the U.N. Security Council into a weapon to impose their hegemony and issue resolutions against countries that oppose them,” Ahmadinejad was quoted by the state-run television as saying Monday. “They use the council for threats and intimidation,” the television quoted Ahmadinejad as saying. But Iran “won’t be intimidated,” he said. “Mounting threats and pressures against Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities won’t cause even one iota of hesitation in the will of...

Categories "United" Nations/Axis of Evil/Iran/WMD
October 15, 2006

U.N.S.C.R. 1718: Who Won, Who Lost (Kim Jong Il Unplugged, Part 13)

John Bolton: Winner. I’d like to hear John Bolton’s critics deny that, as with Resolution 1695, he has wrung far more effectiveness from the U.N. than we had come to expect. Not only should we confirm this man, pronto, we should clone him. Madeleine Albright never got results like these. The United States: Winner. We got everything we really wanted here: help constricting Kim Jong Il’s financial arteries the right to search his ships and planes. an embargo on the...

Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/China & Korea/Counterfeiting/Diplomacy/Drugs & N Korea/Geopolitics/Japan/Japan & Korea/Money Laundering/U.S. & Korea/WMD
October 14, 2006

U.N. Security Council Resolution Takes Shape Passes Resolution 1718

Update: Too good to be true? Looks like the vote will be delayed … probably so that the Chinese and Russians can water this thing down. —– Update 2:   On again.   Supposedly, there will be a vote today. —– Updated 3:   It passed; analysis below, and the full text at the bottom of this post.   Naturally, the North Korean delegate walked out and denounced everyone for being “gangster-like. This is what the psychologists refer to as “projection.” ...

Categories "United" Nations/NK Economics/NK Military/WMD
October 13, 2006

The Kaesong ‘Collision Course’

Whatever the U.N. is  about to do about North Korea  won’t matter to South Korea’s government:  South Korea and the U.S. look set for a clash over the inter-Korean Kaesong Industrial Complex and tourism to Mt. Kumgang in the North. President Roh Moo-hyun and the government have stressed the importance of joining hands with the international community in addressing Pyongyang’s nuclear test claim, but they add the industrial park in the North and the package tours have nothing to do...

Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/WMD
October 10, 2006

U.S. to Propose Arms Embargo on North Korea

I’d proposed it two days before July’s missile tests, because of the rising danger of another preventable famine, but  it now looks as if John Bolton is circulating  this concept  as part of what he’d tried to get from the U.N. after the July missile tests: The United States circulated a draft U.N. resolution late Monday that would condemn North Korea’s nuclear test and impose tough sanctions on the reclusive communist nation for Pyongyang’s “flagrant disregard” of the Security Council’s...

Categories "United" Nations/China/China & Korea/Famine & Food Aid/Money Laundering/NK Economics/WMD
October 3, 2006

Too Late to Stop Ban Ki-Moon

Unfortunately, it looks like he has the Secretary General position all locked up. Sadly, he seems to have bought a significant amount of the support the made the difference. One wonders whether the U.N.’s next scandal will be the story of Ban’s accession.  Sadder still, he did it with the support of our own State Department, which smells (my raw suspicion; no evidence asserted) like a behind-the-back handshake between the “pro-engagement” faction and  the U.N.  This means that when it...

Categories "United" Nations
October 1, 2006

Is the Bush Administration Backing Ban Ki-Moon?

Jim Hoagland thinks so, and he thinks we may regret that: That warning of the dangers of answered prayers applies particularly to President Bush and his support for Ban Ki Moon, South Korea’s reliably stolid foreign minister, in the highly competitive race to succeed Kofi Annan at year’s end. Bush — pilloried by Third World radicals at last week’s General Assembly opening — may be picking up a lightning rod instead of a shield. Hoagland isn’t very clear in his...

Categories "United" Nations/U.S. & Korea
September 29, 2006

Ban Ki-Moon: He’s Already Screwing Up the U.N.!

If it’s still possible, that is.  Add corruption to the list of U.N.’s fatal  flaws and  despotic  tendencies,  of which Ban Ki Moon is already an accomplished practitioner. The Times said Friday the Korean government “has pledged millions of dollars in aid and offered other incentives to members of the United Nations Security Council to secure its candidate as the next UN secretary-general. Under the sardonic headline, “Millions of dollars and a piano may put Korean in UN’s top job”...

Categories "United" Nations/Uncategorized
September 28, 2006

What, Me Wimpy?

“Sometimes I may look like a weak, soft leadership,” Ban said in an interview Wednesday with The Associated Press. “You may look at me as a soft person, but I have inner strength. This is what normally people from the outside world would have some difficulty in seeing — people from Asia particularly, when we regard humility, a humbleness, as a very important virtue.” Ban spoke to reporters after being reached at a  Manhattan salon, where he was receiving a...

Categories "United" Nations/An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea
September 22, 2006

The Case for Blocking Ban Ki-Moon

The United Nations is facing new denunciations for being feckless, ineffective, and corrupt. The sun also rose, obituaries were published, children went off to school, and leaves in the northern latitudes began to change color. There was something different about the latest criticism, however: despite its general similarity of content, it came from The Guardian, the flagship of the British left, and The Hudson Institute, virtually the Jesuit order of Washington neoconservatism. That’s a stunning convergence from two groups with...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
September 7, 2006

Lugar Fails to Get Bolton Voted Through His Committee

Despite a second impressive success on Darfur at the U.N. Security Council, and following an even more impressive victory on the North Korea sanctions resolution — a resolution I predicted he’d never get — John Bolton has again been denied a vote before the full Senate. There is no honest basis to dispute the excellence of Bolton’s performance at carrying out the President’s policies. That is why George Voinovich and Chuck Hagel are supporting him, despite earlier reservations. Standing beside...

Categories "United" Nations/Washington Views