Monthly Archive: January, 2006

On North Korea, President Bush said very little: “The demands of justice require their freedom as well [specifically naming the people of North Korea, Syria, Burma, and Zimbabwe, among others].” The rhetoric was no more soaring, and certainly no more specific, than anything I’ve heard him say before. I can live without soaring rhetoric for public diplomacy’s sake, but what I can’t forgive is that this president has frittered away six years without forming a forceful or even a particularly...

If you can’t actually defend Kim Jong Il’s counterfeiting of the dollar, and you can’t deny that the evidence is strong enough to convince even the Chinese, what’s a dedicated appeaser to say? The talking point appears to be “Why now?” Meaning, why did the United States cruelly dash our high hopes of progress in the nuclear talks with North Korea now, as opposed to cruelly dashing similar hopes at any other time during the last decade or so of...

Kim Jong Il’s son-in-law has been rehabilitated. I don’t even have enough reliable facts to speculate about what this means.

Here.

Not a very ambassadorial thing to say, perhaps, but there are plenty of reasons to justify Washington’s harder new line toward North Korea of late. Leave aside the decade-plus of North Korean cheating and defiance of any standards followed by the rest of humanity. Although evidence of a policy shift is still inconclusive, it’s arguable that several developments last fall strengthened the hand of hard-liners (me, for one) seeking the abandonment of negotiation from weakness in favor of the economic...

Hat tip to the Nomad for this one. You can be sure that if these guys had caused this accident, it would be a major news story, and possibly an international incident. Hopelessly skewed coverage of this kind causes me to conclude that our soldiers won’t be appreciated until they’re gone, and when Korean taxpayers are doing what American taxpayers have done for far too long.

What sort of moral shallowness transforms murderers into fashion icons? Sometimes, there’s no serious answer for unserious consumers of the radical chic pablum that twelve year old Cambodian girls stitch together for affluent suburban college kids.

If true, this could be a tangible sign of sincere Chinese annoyance with its North Korean viceroy. Via Daily NK, then Yonhap: SEOUL, Jan. 28 (Yonhap) — A local Internet news site reported Saturday that a top aide to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il was arrested in Macao earlier this month. Citing Japanese diplomatic sources, DailyNK claimed Kang Sang-choon, a secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea and chief of staff to Kim, was detained in connection to circulation of...

Long-time readers of this blog know that for nearly two years, I’ve advocated aggressive economic measures against the North Korean regime that would force international finance to choose between doing business in the North and in the United States. Such sanctions would wring the most knowledgeable and best-financed investors out of North Korea until it made signficant and irreversible steps toward comporting itself with the rules by which humanity lives. Until now, the Bush Administration has failed to take strong-yet-practical...

The Donga Ilbo reports that North Korea has banned fishing from motorboats.

Sunni tribes claim to have arrested 270 al-Qaeda, and those harboring them. The next test is whether they will hand the prisoners over to someone who can exploit their intelligence value.

The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, whose goons most recently gained infamy with an anti-anti-North Korean protest that blocked the U.S. Ambassador from attending a media interview, will now represent South Korean government workers. The KCTU has a long history of violent and thuggish protests, reflexive anti-Americanism,* and sympathetic dealings with the North Korean regime. The KCTU is the more radical of South Korea’s two largest labor organizations, the other being the Federation of Korean Trade Unions. The Korean Government...

How did I miss this? I’d normally hang on every word of a Hitchens article about British cuisine; this time, he nails the human rights issue in North Korea, drawing unfavorable comparisons to history’s most infamous oppressions: To call a set of actions “genocidal,” as in the case of Darfur, is to invoke legal consequences that are entailed by the U.N.’s genocide convention, to which we are signatories. However, to call a country a slave state is to set another...