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April 20, 2007

Rhetoric and the Record on North Korean Human Rights

[Update:   video of the event and full text of the speech below]   So I went to this  yesterday, thanks to the kind invitation of the organizers, and left with the usual sense of  guilt I feel every time I meet Jay Lefkowitz.  Lefkowitz has acquired  an understandable “Oh sh*t, not that guy again” expression whenever he sees me.  If I were him, so would I.  Even when I’ve been critical of him, I’ve said that  Lefkowitz is sincere,...

Categories Human Rights/Washington Views
April 8, 2007

N. Korea gets a U.S. green light to sell arms, and six months after its unanimous passage, UNSCR 1718 is a dead letter

That resolution may have been the only potentially effective U.N. action in my living memory, and the hand that held the dagger belonged to none other than our own State Department.  The United States ignored an apparent violation of the international sanctions against North Korea by turning a blind eye to an arms shipment that Pyongyang sent to Ethiopia earlier this year, according to a story in Sunday’s edition of The New York Times. North Korea has been subject to...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Terrorism (NK)/Washington Views/WMD
March 21, 2007

‘Peace in Our Time!’ Updates

[Updated below] As I write, diplomats from five nations have decided to stick around at a resort somewhere near Beijing for a couple more days, probably for many exciting hours of CNN International, while North Korea decides whether it’s interested in talking about uranium. Contrary to reports I’d read yesterday, no one is flying home just yet, but no one expects anything to get done this week, either. The holdup — which U.S. negotiator Chris Hill and the New York...

Categories Six-Party Talks/Washington Views/WMD
March 5, 2007

Maybe He Should Have Called It a ‘Slam Dunk’

[Update: John Bolton weighs in at the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. Bolton reads Joseph DiTrani’s remarks similarly to how I read them, although those of an “Anonymous Senior Official” are much more nefarious. Do not miss. Bolton continues to do great public service as a private citizen by focusing on the essential issues of inspection and verification, and then nails why all pieces of this framework join at that point, with pneumatic strength and precision: [I]t is precisely this...

Categories Washington Views/WMD
March 4, 2007

How a U.S. Consul Helped Send Six North Korean Refugees to Kim Jong Il’s Gulag

[Update: The Shenyang Six were freed from a Chinese jail in August 2007.] The Secretary of State shall undertake to facilitate the submission of applications [] by citizens of North Korea seeking protection as refugees …. (Title 22, United States Code, Section 7843) Back in January, I told you the story of the Shenyang Six, a group of six North Korean refugees who sought refuge from persecution and starvation in their homeland, and how the Chinese authorities, following their long-standing...

Categories China/China & Korea/Diplomacy/Human Rights/Refugees/Washington Views
March 1, 2007

Why You Have to Read this Blog: Yonhap Gets Lefkowitz’s Testimony Wrong

Standing amid a crowd of journalists today, a thought entered my mind at such velocity that it shattered  a tumor of remorse forming around the idea that any of them has a thousand times my audience.  True, I thought.  But unlike them,  every word I write will be published.  Oh, the power!   It fills and swells my cranium!   And no sooner do I see the stories they’ve filed, the frustrated resignation hits me all over again.  Because they’re...

Categories Activism/Human Rights/Media Criticism/Uncategorized/Washington Views
February 28, 2007

Chris Hill Testifies at the International Relations Foreign Affairs Committee

Headlines now, details later: Hill was firm that North Korea had purchased items that had no other use but highly enriched uranium. He said that a failure to resolve the HEU issue would be a deal-breaker. Committee members of both parties also seemed to believe that North Korea must come clean on HEU. Hill left open the possibility that North Korea will still be denying the existence of its HEU program 60 days from now without breaking the deal. He...

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views
February 27, 2007

Joe DiTrani on the Not-Quite-Agreed Framework and N. Korea’s Uranium Program

[Update: Welcome Think Progress readers.  If you believe that our suspicions about highly-enriched uranium all  rest on slender  aluminum tubes, see also, and see also also.] Ambassador Joseph DiTrani, formerly a member of Chris Hill’s negotiating team and now the North Korea Mission Manager at the Directorate of National Intelligence, piped up in the Senate today when Sen. Jack Reed asked a fairly obvious question — what has changed since HEU was a deal-breaker in 2002?   His answer, though not earth-shaking,...

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views/WMD
February 19, 2007

It’s Time for Jay Lefkowitz to Resign

I recently wrote a piece for publication on North Korea’s finances, the rumors of the then-prospective deal with North Korea,  and how to increase the pressure so that we could get a truly verifiable dismantlement of their nuclear program and a real and fundamental movement toward transparency.   If no favorable agreement could be achieved,  our financial strategy  showed real promise in  collapsing  the regime’s palace economy, and maybe even the regime  itself, something for which my aspiration is no secret. ...

Categories Diplomacy/Human Rights/Refugees/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views
February 4, 2007

So Much for a DPRK-Friendly Congress

They’re only bills, so I wouldn’t make too much of them yet …. WASHINGTON, Feb. 4 (Yonhap) — U.S. legislators resubmitted resolutions to the new Congress demanding the return of an American naval vessel seized by North Korea and imposition of higher tariffs on imports from non-market economies, including the communist country. Rep. John Salazar (D-Colorado) introduced House Resolution 91 dated Jan. 23 that calls for the return of the U.S.S. Pueblo, a 906-ton naval intelligence ship which was attacked...

Categories Washington Views
February 2, 2007

Jay Kim’s Irreconcilible Differences

With some Americans disturbing calm waters with the suggestion of an “alliance at risk,” Korea thinks it has found a man — a “former Korean congressman” — who can quietly bridge our widening differences: A former Korean-American congressman launched on Thursday a forum led by first-generation figures like himself to help advance Korea-U.S. relations. Chang-jun “Jay” Kim said the Washington Korea-U.S. Forum will start with 16 participants who are professionally active in political, economic, judicial and academic fields and have...

Categories America/An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
January 25, 2007

Lawless Will Stay

No link, because I’m passing along informed gossip from after-dinner conversation (no names, and no, this was NOT from  a certain  off-the-record event).  Indeed, his portfolio there will reportedly be enhanced to add Afghanistan and Pakistan to his area of interest. If this is in fact the case, it suggests that USFK restructuring will proceed as previously planned. The other informed gossip is split:  on the question of whether we are at the cusp of some kind of graceful-exit deal...

Categories Washington Views
January 24, 2007

What Jim Webb Should Have Said

[Welcome Instapundit readers.]   My fellow  Americans,  We  have  have a long  and glorious history that I join you in celebrating here tonight.  Let me share with you this deguerrotype of my great great great great grandfather, a penniless drunkard and street-corner pugilist  who sat in a Dublin jail,  until he  was paroled and came to Virginia in 1724, just in time to join in the massacre of the peaceful Massapequasimolie Indians.  I would hope you draw strength  from this...

Categories Terrorism/Iraq/Washington Views
January 22, 2007

Phoney War (I)

It is a natural tendency of people to accomodate themselves emotionally to conditions they cannot change. At its most extreme, accomodation can explain an abused child’s seeming acceptance of an abuser’s predations. At its most benign, it can be a mostly beneficial tendency to compromise with opposing views. But there is a difference between being open-minded and fooling one’s self. I’m still leaning against belief that a Democratic Congress with a narrow margin is going into an election year with...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views/WMD
January 22, 2007

So I Guess Charlie Rangel Is Voting for the FTA, Then

United States Congressman Charles B. Rangel received the Distinguished Order of Diplomatic Service from the Korean government on Korean-American Day (January 13) at the Colden Center for the Performing Arts theater, Queens College, New York. Congressman Rangel said that he was honored to receive the award and that his achievement is the achievement of all his Korean friends. The medal was awarded to him by the consul general in New York, Moon Bong-ju. It is given to non-Koreans who have...

Categories U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
January 22, 2007

Ban Ki Moon Orders Review of U.N. Programs

Update 2:  Reuters reports that Ban is now backtracking and saying that the new audits will focus only on  programs where the financial practices are shady.  Monday’s U.N. statement said Ban would assign auditors only to U.N. funds and programs “in countries where issues of hard currency transactions, independence of staff hiring and access to reviewing local projects are pertinent.”  Audits would be “simultaneously carried out in select cases of countries” identified by the funds and programs, it said.  Funding...

Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid/Washington Views
January 19, 2007

The Death of an Alliance, Part 64: Thank You, Secretary Obvious!

The first Democratic-controlled hearing of the International Relations Foreign Affairs Committee has met.  No bold intiatives, brilliant proposals, or clear theme  emerged.  Instead, it was  a dizzying variety of views and  partisan mutual cancellation  that rendered the entire excercise inconclusive and confusing.  One could expect little else:  both parties are advocating more talks  backed by threats that North Korea does not fear.  Both sides fail to grasp,  or at  least to admit,  that North Korea will not disarm  for  any...

Categories An Alliance?/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views