Anju Links for 4 May 2007: Foot-and-Mouth Strikes North Korean Cattle and American Politicians

1. The latest outbreak of disease in North Korea is foot-and-mouth among the cattle, and presumably the oxen that would be used as draft animals for spring plowing. That’s very bad news for a country with a declining food situation and no margin of survival. The U.N., which generally takes pains to avoid offending North Korea, says that the outbreak is “under control.”

2. New, Improved, and Completely Failed! It has now been 20 days since North Korea violated all of the denuclearization commitments to which it agreed last February, and it’s still fair to blame “Kim Jong” Bill Richardson, the guy who spuriously claimed credit for an awful deal he actually had next to nothing to do with. The latest Christian Science Monitor op-ed on North Korea must have been written by someone who has been in monastic seclusion for the last month; you can’t connect its grudging praise of Bush’s “new and improved” North Korea policy to reality until you get to the only part you really need to read. It’s buried in the middle of a long, dull tract of no real substance.

(In the interests of full disclosure, it needs to be said that early in his career, Richardson was on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while this writer was chief of that staff.)

So he’s job-hunting, then.

This time, after Richardson reached South Korea on his way home, he said that North Koreans had told him that as soon as they got their $25 million from Banco Delta Asia they would stop work on their reactor and invite inspectors from the International Atomic Agency to return. In this kind of diplomacy, one is well advised not to count promises in advance of delivery, but if all of this works out as it now seems it might, it could be a considerable boost to Richardson’s presidential campaign.

Why not to George W. Bush, too, then?

Since none of it could have happened without at least the acquiescence, if not the approval, of Bush, the question arises of why the president did it. Was he seeking to level the Democratic playing field? To muddy the Democratic waters? Or did he (or Karl Rove) have an even more devious objective?

So the guy who wants Chris Hill’s job isn’t following the news and can’t construct a logically consistent argument. But then again, if he did, he wouldn’t want the job.

3. The Enemy Isn’t Cynicism, It’s Our Own Tendency to Elect the Shallow and Unqualified. “Nobody’s suffering more than the Palestinian people.” Hel-lo? Politicians pander, and politicians weasel about their pandering, but when do we expect them to know the first thing about the world they want to lead? I question Barack Obama’s qualifications for the Presidency. Perhaps reading what these people are telling us will help him gain some perspective and prepare him for prime time.

At the press conference, Kim Kwang Soo (pseudonym, 44, entered Korea 2004) shared his experiences. He said, “During the time I was confined at Hoiryeong Safety Agency’s prison, I was beaten up, all my teeth were broken and my head was smashed. I looked so hideous as my original weight 75 kg dropped to about 38kg.

Kim spoke of “underground prisons” which were different to the normal prisons experienced by the common defector. He said, “No matter how much you cry of distress in the underground prisons, no one can hear you. No one knows of your pain and so you inevitably face the horrors of death. [Daily NK]

So might the experience of actually spending some time in a Palestinian village. Having had that experience myself, it convinced me that the Palestinians’ problems are no greater than those of Lebanese, Algerians, Iraqis, Kurds, or Coptic Christians, and almost entirely self-inflicted.

4. Al Qaeda Wanes in Ramadi. This must-see is the latest remarkably optimistic assessment from the N.Y. Times on the Sunni Triangle. By pretty much universal agreement, the Sunni tribes seems to be shifting against Al-Qaeda, something you could attribute to (a) the fact that Al-Qaeda has nothing to offer them, (b) Al-Qaeda brutality toward the civilian population, (c) the fear that Sunnis will be marginalized in an area that produces little wealth, and (d) the fear of Iran’s increasingly brazen efforts to dominate Iraq through Shiite radicals.

Those are smart calculations in a region not known for making them, although the yields so far are both fragile and unclear. We still don’t have confirmation that either of the two top men in Al-Qaeda’s Iraq wing — Masri and Baghdadi — are in fact dead, in part because the latter may be a completely fictional character. We do seem to have killed two other men who badly needed killing, men accomplished in kidnapping, murder, and incitement to more murder. If it can be sustained, the Sunni-Qaeda split will be the most positive development of the whole war, but it won’t be sustained if the decisions on which our safety depends are made by people who feel, but do not think.