2 June 2010

Japan’s unendurable Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, has resigned over his unfulfillable promise to close the Futenma U.S. Marine Corps Base on Okinawa. Good riddance. Although the Futenma issue was the direct cause of Hatoyama’s fall, North Korea’s sinking of the Cheonan forced Hatoyama to climb down on Futenma, which means that Hatoyama’s political career was the one casualty of the Cheonan Incident I won’t mourn.

Jay Solomon of the Wall Street Journal writes that big changes may be coming for the South Korean military. In addition to slowing down the dissolution of Combined Forces Command, South Korea understandably wants to acquire better weapons to deter North Korea. As a firm believer in a strong and independent South Korean defense, I certainly support the latter move. Ten years of leftist rule resulted in defense cuts that hollowed out the South’s defenses, leaving it to American taxpayers to take up the burden. Solomon tries to explain the inexplicable:

Many in South Korea have viewed North Korea’s million-man military as largely targeted at the U.S. South Korea’s late President Roh Moo-hyun successfully pushed for the U.S. to lower it military profile in his country and to transfer control of the joint military command to South Korea’s defense department.

Hello out there in the Treasury Department! Aminex, the Anglo-Irish consortium that wants to drill for oil off the North Korean coast and give Kim Jong Il’s regime all the money it needs to buy baby formula build nukes, upgrade its military, and thwart international sanctions, turns out to be owned in part by America’s own JP Morgan Chase. For Chase to let its money be used in this way is simply unpatriotic, and it should hear from its shareholders.

At True Slant, Nathan Epstein has written a must-read post raising serious questions that prominent lefty bloggers were taken in by ChiCom propaganda portraying the Chinese land clearances as examples of the state’s beneficence. Picking up on this, Chris Badeaux writes in the New Ledger:

What’s sad is that Yglesias and Klein are simply going to feed a torrent of uncritical, uncomprehending commentary about a China on the rise, missing the human dislocation, misery, and instability being cemented into that base; what’s sadder is that most people, right and left, won’t pick up on it, and our political class, which may be even thicker than the useful idiots they read, will miss the truth of China that’s there to read, right before everyone’s eyes.