Monthly Archive: July, 2005

North Korea’s industrial sector is now so broken and looted that it’s trucking its raw iron ore to China. Having worked in a few mines myself, all I can say is how ridiculously inefficient it all is. Simply milling, crushing, and smelting the ore vastly improves its value and saves millions on transportation (not to mention wear-and-tear on roads and trucks). Indeed, moving iron ore over any significant difference is almost always done by rail in a normal economy. The...

Demonstrations in Iran: But how big, and for how long? Publius has details and a photo, along with encouraging signs of White House support. Now, someone please tell me what our government is doing to improve conditions in Uzbekistan.

Payoff With a Proviso: South Korea is promising to rebuild North Korea’s electricity grid and juice up the wires, but that would require South Korean control over the fuse box. I’m actually lukewarm on (as opposed to adamantly against) projects that give the outside world more leverage on North Korea. There are two problems with this: first, Kim Jong Il won’t allow it for that very reason; and second, who will exercise leverage over South Korea when it insists on...

How profitable is China’s slave labor industry? More than previous studies have suggested, according to this.

Demonstrations in Iran: But how big, and for how long? Publius has details and a photo, along with encouraging signs of White House support. Now, someone please tell me what our government is doing to improve conditions in Uzbekistan.

Gateway Pundit has a must-see post, with BBC video, here, featuring Kang Chol-Hwan and Michael Horowitz. The British press has done a far better job of covering this issue than its American counterpart. I suspect that the Nelson Report is at least a partial explanation for this. North Korea recognizes that talk about human rights is a mortal threat to the survival of its system; such talk has likely been responsible for its new flexibility on nuclear talks. There is...

In the unlikely event it’s caught on tape, a scapegoat will have to be found and punished.

This is a Saturday, at 2 p.m. The Chinese Embassy is at 2300 Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. The sponsor is the North Korean Freedom Coalition. This is in coordination with the Korean American Church Coalition’s prayer vigil, scheduled for Sunday, August 21. The subject of the protest will be China’s forced repatriation of North Korean refugees back to North Korea, sometimes with cables through their noses. Past Chinese treatment of these refugees has also included using electric cattle prods...

Two cheers for the Human Rights Commission! I’m absolutely stunned to see this post by on The Marmot’s site. The HRC is actually talking to the South Korean people about racial discrimination against mixed-race Koreas. It is a subject that demands introspection, change, and the questioning of long-held prejudices. After all of the lost oxygen over diaries, Iraq, and haircuts–in short, everything except serious human rights deficiencies–I’m stunned to see signs of the HRC’s relevance, much less a flirtation with...

South Korean anti-Americanism appears to be more than a passing fad, although I note that much of the reaction here is not unlike public anger we’ve seen in the United States recently. Nobody likes eminent domain. But being that this is South Korea, those with other motives decided to join the festivities. Judging by the photographs, the violence does not appear to have been the work of a small fringe element, either. I will long remember my seven months at...

South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun, who recently lost his parliamentary majority, has some very novel ideas about power-sharing. The idea that this is meant to forestall the gridlock that sometimes comes from divided government is about as plausible as any that comes to mind, which means “not very.” He’s now revealing the specifics of his plan for “coalition government,” but I can’t make a whit of sense of this: Bringing specifics to President Roh Moo-hyun’s recent talk of “coalition government,”...

Nicholas Kristof’s sympathetic writings about North Korea have won him a ticket to Pyongyang. I’m not optimistic about what he’ll say when he gets back, either. He will assuredly see no evil.

The member of our missing Special Forces team has been found. Reports of his capture and beheading appear to be untrue; he went down fighting.

During the last five years of utterly ineffectual talks and not-talks, the North Korean regime (to the best of our knowledge) built four of five more nukes, sold uranium to the A.Q. Khan network, transferred nuclear technology to Iran, and bought itself some Tomohawkskis. While I can’t excuse the duration of this delay, I’ve still considered the Bush policy marginally better than the Clinton policy because I presumed we were going to insist on a deal that was in fact,...

Diplomacy and Rhetoric. Meanwhile, more proof of how easily Pyongyang’s rhetorical demands fall by the wayside: The report also said, “The U.S. side clarified its official stand to recognize the DPRK as a sovereign state, not to invade it and hold bilateral talks within the framework of the six-party talks. The DPRK side interpreted the U.S. side’s expression of its stand as a retraction of its remarks designating the former as an “˜outpost of tyranny’ and decided to return to...

Won Joon Choe kindly forwarded the following essay, which was published in The Wall Street Journal just before the Roh-Bush meeting at the White House. Because it mainly deals with long-term trends in the alliance, I don’t consider it dated. Obviously, I don’t agree with everything Won Joon says, but he makes his case thoughtfully and cogently. The Wall Street Journal June 10, 2005 COMMENTARY The Decay of the U.S.- South Korean Alliance By WON JOON CHOE June 10, 2005...

First, I’d like to start by saying that the penultimate paragraph is so dead-on right that it redeems any flaws that I subjectively see in the rest of the piece: All that can be countered by engaging the Roh government in a struggle for the hearts of the South Korean people. The Bush administration can seek to speak directly to ordinary South Koreans about the horrors of Kim Jong Il’s gulag state, explain why the world cannot allow it to...

Won Joon Choe kindly forwarded the following essay, which was published in The Wall Street Journal just before the Roh-Bush meeting at the White House. Because it mainly deals with long-term trends in the alliance, I don’t consider it dated. Obviously, I don’t agree with everything Won Joon says, but he makes his case thoughtfully and cogently. The Wall Street Journal June 10, 2005 COMMENTARY The Decay of the U.S.- South Korean Alliance By WON JOON CHOE June 10, 2005...