September 2007

September 24, 2007

The Rangoon Autumn

Updates below: 9/21: Original post, background of the protests. 9/22: Monks march to Aung San Suu Syi’s home in record downpour; 10,000 protest in Mandalay. 9/23: Protests hit 8 cities; Rangoon turnout at 20,000; World leaders speak out against use of force to quell protests, but the U.N. is silent. 9/24: Rangoon protests draw 100,000; Their hold on power seriously threatened, junta generals threaten to use force; Bush to announce new sanctions before U.N. General Assembly; Burmese entertainers join the opposition....

Democracy/Southeast Asia

September 24, 2007

Some USFK Stats and History

A few days ago, a reader asked me how much the presence of the USFK cost American taxpayers. This is a research project I’ve taken on before, only to be confronted by few answers from credible sources. You’re about to see what I mean here. Writing for the Nautilus Institute, Selig Harrison claimed in 2001 that the annual cost was $42 billion per year. Another Nautilus alum, Doug Bandow, claimed in his recent Korea book that withdrawing from the...

An Alliance?/History/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military

September 22, 2007

Sunday Times: Israelis Seized N. Korean ‘Nuclear Material’ in Syria

I wonder how Chris Hill is going to talk his way out of this one: Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month, according to informed sources in Washington and Jerusalem. The attack was launched with American approval on September 6 after Washington was shown evidence the material was nuclear related, the well-placed sources say. They confirmed that samples taken from Syria...

Axis of Evil/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks

September 20, 2007

We must be smoking what they’re growing

North Korea was dropped from the U.S. list of countries producing illicit drugs, a sign of further relief of tensions between the two countries. “North Korea is not affecting the United States as much as the requirements on the list,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Christy McCampbell said on Sept. 17 in Washington, according to a transcript of her speech on the State Department Web site. [Bloomberg] And that decision is based on what? On absolutely nothing but the interests...

Appeasement/Axis of Evil/Drugs & N Korea/Six-Party Talks

September 19, 2007

Have Fun Spending That $20 Million in Hell

Mullah Abdullah Jan, the Taliban commander who led the kidnappings of 23 Korean hostages in Afghanistan, was killed in an air strike by U.S. forces. U.S. forces launched an airstrike on a house in Ghazni province where a council of Taliban commanders was meeting on Monday night, the Associated Press reported. Twelve Taliban leaders were killed including Abdullah, the commander of Qarabagh district in Ghazni, AP said on Tuesday, citing Ghazni provincial police chief Ali Shah Ahmadzai. Abdullah was believed...

Islam/Terrorism/Iraq

September 18, 2007

Q&A With Professor Andrei Lankov: On Changing North Korea

[OFK: This post is a follow-up Q&A to my review of Professor Andrei Lankov’s new book, “.” Prof. Lankov is a lecturer at the Australian National University, now on leave and teaching at Kookmin University. You can see more of Prof. Lankov’s books here, and you can find plenty more of his work linked on this blog. Two of his more notable recent articles include “The Natural Death of North Korean Stalinism” and “How to Topple Kim Jong Il.”] Q....

Books & Films/Deprogramming

September 18, 2007

Chaos Conquers North Korea

I had really wanted to publish a Q&A with Professor Andrei Lankov this morning, but since Yahoo’s e-mail service has gone from bad to worse, it’s simply not possible for me to even open up my e-mail to pull up his responses. So spread the word: Yahoo! mail stinks. Meanwhile, there’s a wave of fresh evidence, most of it via the Daily NK, to support Lankov’s thesis that North Korea can’t control the spread of chaos or the erosion of...

Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK/NK Economics

September 17, 2007

The Orchard File: What are North Korea and Syria up to?

In the wake of the first reports about a reported Israeli air strike in Syria, a new crop of reports has considerably muddied facts that initially had seemed much clearer. Journalistic politics is certainly a part of the problem. Some of the reports are alarming, while others seek to downplay, and anyone who claims to be objective about war, diplomacy, and WMD today is lying. You probably know where I stand on Agreed Framework 2.0 by now. If the more...

Axis of Evil/Proliferation/WMD

September 16, 2007

Review: ‘North of the DMZ,’ by Andrei Lankov

[Update: I’ve since received some responses to specific questions I asked Prof. Lankov, so the discussion should begin either later tonight or tomorrow AM, depending on other stuff I need to do first.] I first read Andrei Lankov’s work when both of us were blogging on NKZone, through his columns in the Korea Times, and through his more recent scholarly works. I imagine that most readers have also read something of those works. The first time I met Prof. Lankov...

Books & Films/Inside NK

September 14, 2007

My Kind of Spy Scandal

Tired of hearing about South Korean officials leaking our secrets and technology, or about North Korean agents gradually pulling a smothering blanket of juche over the South? Had enough Robert Kim already? Take heart. The bad guys have troubles of their own: For years, Ambassador Li Bin was China’s go-to diplomat for the tense Korean Peninsula. After studies in North Korea, Li had served several tours in the Chinese embassies in Pyongyang and Seoul. Fluent in Korean and gregarious in...

China/China & Korea/Diplomacy

September 13, 2007

Is North Korea Selling Nukes to Syria?

Update: North Korea may be cooperating with Syria on some sort of nuclear facility in Syria, according to new intelligence the United States has gathered over the past six months, sources said. The evidence, said to come primarily from Israel, includes dramatic satellite imagery that led some U.S. officials to believe that the facility could be used to produce material for nuclear weapons. The new information, particularly images received in the past 30 days, has been restricted to a...

Proliferation/Six-Party Talks

September 13, 2007

What the Bush Administration Really Thinks About ‘The Spat’

Commenter Michael Sheehan dropped a link to a must-read by former senior NSC advisor Michael Green, on Roh’s bumbling open-air negotiation with President Bush last week. Green also thinks that Roh knew what he was doing, that he did it for domestic political reasons, and that he set his own goals back in the process. In other words, typical Roh: Watching the exchange later on YouTube.com, I felt great sympathy for my former national security colleagues in both countries, since...

An Alliance?/Diplomacy/U.S. & Korea

September 12, 2007

Anju Links for 9/12/07

* Canadian Oil-for-Food scandal figure Maurice Strong, who took $1 million from Saddam Hussein as a senior U.N. official and confidant of Kofi Annan, has resurfaced in China. You’ll remember that Strong was also Kofi Annan’s Special Envoy to North Korea, and that the North Korean-born Tongsun Park, now serving a five-year prison sentence, was his bag-man and informal advisor on North Korea. All of which may go far to explain why the U.N. stood around performing a colonoscopy...

Anju Links

September 11, 2007

Noland and Haggard: Kim Jong Il’s Palace Economy Is Broken

North Korea is a land made in the vision of John Edwards: to a greater extent than almost anywhere, there are two North Koreas. That division is even preserved by a semi-official, hereditary caste system. That’s why it wouldn’t be completely accurate to say that North Korea’s economy is near collapse; one of the North Korean economies — the peoples’ economy — collapsed a dozen years ago. What was left of it was severely disrupted by the Great Famine, when...

Money Laundering/NK Economics

September 11, 2007

Newsweek Reports on Son Jong Nam, North Korea’s Only (Possibly) Living Dissident

A new Newsweek piece about North Korea’s underground movement reports on the plight of Son Jong Nam. If Son still lives, he sits on death row in Pyongyang for spreading his faith. You will recall that I previously wrote about him here, and told you how you can join in a campaign to save his life. Newsweek estimates that there are between 20,000 and 100,000 underground Christians in North Korea. You can’t bring Christianity to such a place on a...

Inside NK/Religion/Resistance

September 10, 2007

What General Petraeus Said

Read for yourself and decide for yourself. Deepest thanks to the reader who forwarded these documents. petraeus-slides.pdf petraeus-testimony.pdf Update: Here’s Amb. Crocker’s statement: crocker-testimony.pdf

Terrorism/Iraq

September 9, 2007

North Korea Is Losing Control of Its Border

[Update: Someone “Dugg” this post –thanks — and it’s climbing fast. The digg permlink is here. Page one of “Digg” gets far more attention than just about anything out there, so your diggs are greatly appreciated and are a great way to spread the word. Thank you.] Last week, North Korea announced that several “spies,” possibly including a foreign national, had been caught. The Daily NK informs us that North Korea’s National Security has claimed credit for the arrests. The...

Deprogramming/Inside NK/NK Military