Open Sources: The Next Provocation
More from Bradley Martin — a few months old, but worth reading:
Appeasement doesn’t work with North Korea.
In the short-term it may yield diplomatic agreements, but in the longterm it only makes the country’s political and military leaders increasingly arrogant, determined to be even more provocative so that they can extort still-larger concessions from their adversaries abroad and portray themselves at home as giant-killers.
The above statement, in rough outline, would now draw agreement from the majority of serious North Korea watchers — including quite a few of us who used to caution that it was important to give negotiations a reasonable chance before turning to a hawkish solution. The country’s current series of provocations is a textbook illustration that the leadership wants and needs expanding confrontation and is not likely to decide on its own to reverse its militaristic thrust.
Martin goes on to advocate info ops against North Korea, and I agree. I also think we need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that North Korea will react violently, perhaps by shelling a balloon launch. As the events of last year teach us, more North Korean aggression is probably an inevitable consequence one way or another, as the regime becomes unstable and vulnerable under the weight of its own internal contradictions and blames outsiders for not paying enough tribute, and for the hunger of its subjects for knowledge about life on Earth.
When this comes to pass, the usual suspects will assuredly blame the victims first, including those who were driven from their homeland by Kim Jong Il’s oppression and refuse to be victims anymore. One lesson of the Muslim cartoon controversy was that too many of us would sacrifice our own freedom to appease the intolerant. For some, it is just too tempting to make the easy choice to become proxy censors for foreign tyrants, but that only sends them out in search of the next excuse to take offense. What we need instead is a swift and effective deterrent that will do serious harm to something Kim Jong Il values (his palaces?) with the lowest possible risk of escalation.
Maybe this is why Kim Jong Il sounds so desperate:
“North Korean soldiers have developed a way to determine whether the food that got carried over to North Korea along with propaganda leaflets from South Korea is poisoned by digging the ground a little bit, putting the food there, and waiting to see whether ants congregate around the food or not,” the source said.
The Washington Post remembers Jaehoon Ahn, a North Korean defector who ended up founding Radio Free Asia’s Korean-language service. Ahn, a perfect gentleman whom I met on a number of occasions, passed away last week at age 70.
Why I can’t support the FTA until Kaesong closes (redux):
One Korean-Chinese man engaged in business in Pyongan and Hwanghae Provinces told The Daily NK on June 11th, “They’re cracking down hard on products from the Kaesong Industrial Complex in the jangmadang, and are reacting more strongly than before to South Korean products, too. There are no South Korean goods on sale openly.
Sources say that in many cases this means that traders are being told to remove tags indicating South Korean origin.
The same trader explained, “Community watch guards come to the jangmadang and tell us to remove tags written in Chosun then sell them. They are thoroughly cracking down on things saying “˜Made in Korea’. Even though the clothes are of good quality, and therefore clearly South Korean, if there is no tag, then they are not prohibited.
So the tags from Kaesong still say “Made in Korea?” Great. And to make matters worse, they’re also putting “Made in China” tags on garments made in North Korea from Chinese fabric. In other words, the whole region’s garment industry is steeped in country-of-origin fraud.
Newly released satellite photos show track North Korea’s most recent surge of construction activity at Yongbyon.
China is still blocking that U.N. report that implicates China in allowing North Korean missile technology to pass through its territory on its way to Iran.
Strategy Page has a roundup of rumors about the goings-on inside North Korea. Among the rumors is one that holds that China is exerting more pressure on the North. Believe that if you must; to me, it’s just so much Chinese disinformation. I don’t doubt that China puts pressure on North Korea, but I’d bet good money that the pressure is only designed to secure Chinese economic interests or promote people who are beholden to China. I strongly doubt that the objectives of Chinese pressure coincide with U.S. political or diplomatic interests.
From The Onion: “Pakistani Intelligence Announces Its Full Cooperation With U.S. Forces During Upcoming Top Secret June 12 Drone Strike On Al-Qaeda At 5:23 A.M. Near Small Town Of Razmani In North Waziristan.”