안주 Links for 3 March 2009

LiNK’S LATEST NEWSLETTER is here.

THE MOST RECENT GOOD FRIENDS UPDATE is also online, reporting a hemorrhagic fever outbreak in Chongjin, more mixed news on the food situation, and the ongoing decay of the command economy’s control over food supplies. Even in Pyongyang, more state workers are turning to the black market in pilfered state commodities to survive. One dispatch describes a man who survived 20 years in a reeducation camp; another reports on the theft of weapons from some cops in Wonsan. The narration of the drunks talking in Pyongyang was so interesting that I almost forgot to question its authenticity. After some of Good Friends’s wild predictions failed to pan out last year, how do I assess Good Friends as a source? Generally, I think they’re a fine source of anecdotal information you won’t find anywhere else, but Good Friends clearly has an agenda — to encourage more private and governmental aid to North Korea. I tend to suspect that this incentive biases any statistical information Good Friends puts out.

IS THE UNITED NATIONS the feckless laughingstock of tyrants or a pernicious metastasis within free societies? Personally, I see no reason why both can’t be true, and in either case, it’s the interests of the tyrants — both great and petty — who are served.

THEY WARNED US THAT IF McCAIN were elected president, our intelligence agencies would be politicized by ideological hacks. So I suppose the bright side of having our intelligence communities run by hacks like Leon Panetta and Charles Freeman, Obama’s nominee to head National Intelligence Council, is that no one will bother to accuse Joe Biden of trying to politicize their analysis. Here’s Freeman’s leaked defense of the Tienanmen Square massacre. Yes, you read that right:

“[T]he truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud, rather than — as would have been both wise and efficacious — to intervene with force when all other measures had failed to restore domestic tranquility to Beijing and other major urban centers in China. In this optic, the Politburo’s response to the mob scene at ‘Tian’anmen’ stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership, not as an example of rash action. . . .

“I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be. Such folk, whether they represent a veterans’ ‘Bonus Army’ or a ‘student uprising’ on behalf of ‘the goddess of democracy’ should expect to be displaced with despatch [sic] from the ground they occupy.” [Jon Chait, Washington Post]

You see? It’s all a matter of how you balance the so-called individual rights to free expression and peaceable assembly against the long-established traditional right of unelected, unrepresentative, repressive regimes to machine-gun their discontented citizens. Freeman represents an ideology whose adherents firmly believe that China means us no harm, that it will help us disarm North Korea, that North Korea will play along this time, that Gaza is capable of self-government but Iraq isn’t, and that appeals to reason alone can dissuade Iran from going nuclear. The punchline is that adherents of this ideology are called “realists.” And like all faddish ideologies, its basic truths will soon be disastrously overextended until those basic truths are thrown out with the excesses.