September 2007

September 7, 2007

The Death of an Alliance, Part 67

[Update: As I had figured, only video really does it justice. Just watch the body language and Bush’s expression. And for that matter, Roh’s. Roh certainly has used his presidency to perfect a sublime aura of idiocy. It’s hard for me to imagine that South Korean voters will be impressed if their media ever decide to cover this story. There definitely isn’t much love in that room. Click the image. Update 1 continued below, with an AP report that does...

An Alliance?/Korean Politics/U.S. & Korea

September 5, 2007

The Shooting Starts Before the Whimpering Ends

I hope this will be the last post I do on the Korean-Afghan hostage story, at least until we start to see the proceeds of its resolution in bombs, mangled bodies, and the next round of kidnappings it will inspire. Koreans are still furious, but mostly at the victims rather than the terrorists. I admit to having thought, “better them than us.” The Korean street is a capricious thing. Consider all that the South Korean government was willing to do...

Appeasement/Terrorism/Iraq

September 3, 2007

In Lafayette Park Now: Reading the Names of 83,000 Abductees

[Update 3: This demonstration came up in a State Department news briefing today. From the comments of both the spokesman and Chris Hill, State is clearly backing away from calling these abductions acts of terrorism. After unambiguously calling the abductions terrorists acts in 2006, State is now airbrushing this issue out of the record. To a degree, you can understand this in the case of South Korea — tragic as that may be — because in the end, it is...

Abductions/Activism

September 2, 2007

What’s the Value of a North Korean Disclosure Anyway?

Update: Woohoo! They agreed to full disclosure again, for the second time in six months! Thanks to the brilliant diplomacy of our State Department, we can actually bask in the afterglow of the same breakthrough twice a year! It’s twice the feelgood for the price! At least, until someone leaks that we had to pay another price …. [Hill] said he and Kim had discussed a range of issues in their two days of talks...

Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks

September 1, 2007

Shot for Watching ‘Winter Sonata’

“There have been two or three reports of public executions of North Korean young people in major cities including Chungjin, as punishment for having illegally copied and distributed South Korean visual material,” said Kang Chul Hwan, vice-chairman of the Seoul-based Committee for the Democratization of North Korea. “It is not an overstatement to say that the Kim Jong Il regime is waging war on the South Korean TV drama,” he said, adding that the North Korean authorities have intensified surveillance...

Censorship/Human Rights/Inside NK

September 1, 2007

Ransom Is Material Support for Terror

[Updated, edited, and bumped, 9/1] With friends like these …. Thanks to the weakness of the South Korean government, it’s a great day to be a terrorist. I second what other Korea bloggers are saying about the Taliban’s victory over South Korea. The Nomad: “[W]hen Canada criticises you for being soft on terrorism, you’re in big trouble.” Andy Jackson quotes the Taliban thusly: “We will do the same thing with the other allies in Afghanistan, because we found this...

An Alliance?/Terrorism/Iraq

Monthly Archive: September, 2007