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May 14, 2008

N. Korea Human Rights Bill May Have Passed in House

[Update: I can’t confirm the final outcome, but I’m led to believe that the vote on these bills was put off at the last minute.] Someone supplied me (thanks) with this press release from Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s office, dated yesterday: (WASHINGTON) ““ The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to approve two North Korea-related bills today coauthored by U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), including an initiative to improve procedures for resettling refugees and funding programs to promote human rights. Separate...

Categories Appeasement/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Politics
May 9, 2008

Leaked to OFK: Internal House Memo on N. Korea’s Support for Terrorism

Update: Link fixed, sorry. A reader and friend has provided me with an unclassified memo (thank you) summarizing a more detailed report by Larry Niksch of the Congressional Research Service (CRS).  The memo is addressed from Ranking Member Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to fellow House Republicans.  The memo reveals details that do not appear in this December 2007 CRS Report.  Although the links  to the Japanese Red Army are old news, there  is some alarming information...

Categories Appeasement/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
May 8, 2008

Growing Congressional Opposition to De-Listing North Korea as a Terror Sponsor

Well, other than the omission of North Korea’s nuclear weapons, uranium enrichment, proliferation to other terror-sponsoring regimes, and an oddly low figure for fissile material, North Korea’s disclosure is a full disclosure. Other than the nearly complete 50-megawatt reactor and an unfinished 200-megawatt reactor, it (sort of) caps North Korea’s ability to produce one kind of fissile material.  Other than the unknown quantity of completed nuclear weapons left in Kim Jong Il’s hands, it’s a breakthrough for disarmament.  And other...

Categories Appeasement/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics
May 5, 2008

Out With a Whimper: Scholars and Policymakers on Bush’s Legacy of Indecision and Weakness on North Korea

Last week, I attended a program at the American Enterprise Institute about Bush’s new North Korea policy, in which we are reduced to negotiating against our positions of last year, while the North Koreans observe with a mixture of arrogance and befuddlement.  The sum total:  the Administration has lost all will and all backbone.  Don’t expect any policy changes toward accountability or reciprocity.  Instead, expect the lesson to be that you can proliferate nukes to anyone and not just get...

Categories Appeasement/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views
May 1, 2008

House Republican Leaders Denounce Bush Administration for Withholding Syria Intelligence

Between the Stephens nomination and this, I’d say the Bush Administration has a congressional relations problem on its hands when it comes to Korea policy: The Bush administration’s failure to fully brief Congress on North Korea and Syria has done more than jeopardize the relationship between our two branches of government. It has denied the administration the benefit of congressional support that could have ensured an agreement with North Korea that avoided needless risks, instead of one that may be...

Categories Appeasement/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics
April 30, 2008

State Dep’t Releases Annual Terrorism Report

And North Korea clings to it by a hair: The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987. The DPRK continued to harbor four Japanese Red Army members who participated in a jet hijacking in 1970. The Japanese government continued to seek a full accounting of the fate of the 12 Japanese nationals believed to have been abducted by DPRK state entities; five...

Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Six-Party Talks/Terrorism (NK)
April 29, 2008

You Mean Like in 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2006, 2007, and 2008?

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says the Bush administration should have sought direct dialogue with North Korea earlier. The Illinois senator said Sunday he felt disturbed to hear the North is likely to have helped Syria pursue a covert nuclear program. He said such suspected activities took place while the U.S. suspended direct talks with Pyongyang.  [KBS] Which would distinguish those suspected activities  from these suspected activities, which took place during  The Gilded Age of Peace in Our Time,...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
April 27, 2008

Chris Hill Resignation Watch: National Review on Agreed Framework 2.0

Our long national  slumber is  ending with a very cranky awakening, and  editorialists are starting  to  transform  Chris Hill into a political liability for the Bush Administration:  We still have no idea whether North Korea engaged in or is engaging in surreptitious uranium enrichment to complement the plutonium processed at Yongbyon. And we have not even asked Kim to dismantle his existing nuclear arsenal. Exactly what is it about this picture that has convinced Christopher Hill, the State Department’s top...

Categories Appeasement/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
April 26, 2008

Chris Hill Resignation Watch: Lord and Gelb in the Washington Post

Winston Lord and Lawrence Gelb are two senior members of Washington’s foreign policy establishment,  a constituency that has  been pushing, conditionally, for  Agreed Framework 2.0 ever since the death of Agreed Framework 1.0.  The establishment has supported, in principle, the idea of  making a deal  and sacrificing adjectives to get one, but  they’ve always kept  one eye on the exits in case the North Koreans just wouldn’t play along.  Maybe the flaw for which they can be most faulted is...

Categories Appeasement/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
April 25, 2008

Sen. Sam Brownback Puts Hold on Kathleen Stephens Nomination

Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.  — The Talmud, Sanhedrin 4:8 (37a) Let me be first nice Jewish boy to say it:   “G-d bless Sam Brownback.”  One of the Senate’s oldest traditions  is the nomination  “hold.”  For judicial appointments,  holds are the exclusive prerogrative of home-state senators.  For ambassadors, senate custom allows  any senator  to place a...

Categories Appeasement/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics
April 24, 2008

Chris Hill Resignation Watch: Nuke Disclosure Starts a Category 3 Sh*tstorm

[Update: Watch the CIA’s video on the al-Kibar reactor: I’d love to know how they got those photographs of the reactor’s interior, and I can only guess that some trusted person who is now in a much safer place took them.] How stupid and how evil does Kim Jong Il have to be to get the attention of Congress in an election year?  This stupid and this evil: The United States on Thursday released an intelligence document with photographs of...

Categories Appeasement/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics
April 23, 2008

More Senate Republicans Rebel Against Bush’s North Korea Policy

Fourteen Republican  senators have signed  a letter to President Bush opposing his agreement to let the North Koreans off the hook on full disclosure, disarmament, money laundering, terror sponsorship, concentration camps, abductions — you  name it —  before we lift sanctions.  An excerpt: We are … concerned  about the present course of action on North Korea’s nuclear program being pursued by representatives of your Administration.  It cannot be said that North Korea has complied with its commitments.  From all appearances,...

Categories Appeasement/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics
April 23, 2008

State Will Tell Congress that N. Korea Was Helping Syria Build a Reactor

Reuters and the Wall Street Journal are both reporting that State is about to give Congress that briefing that it’s long been demanding about what exactly the Israelis bombed in Syria last September.  A senior congressional aide and a former Bush administration North Korea specialist said they believed the briefings were designed to persuade members of Congress that removing those sanctions was justified. Latest word, by the way, is that when State publishes its new list of state sponsors of...

Categories Appeasement/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea
April 18, 2008

Rice: Lift Sanctions Now, Disarm and Verify Someday

[Scroll down for a highly significant update.]   U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Thursday that verifying any North Korean nuclear declaration would take time and suggested Washington may drop some sanctions on Pyongyang before this is complete. Separately, a senior U.S. official said an American team would visit North Korea next week to discuss how to verify the “complete and correct” accounting of its nuclear programs that Pyongyang was due to deliver by Dec. 31.  [Reuters, Arshad...

Categories Appeasement/Six-Party Talks
April 17, 2008

John Bolton Condemns Bush’s “North Korea Capitulation”

I think “Singapore Surrender” has a more alliterative ring, but I take no issue with Bolton’s argument: Last week in Singapore, U.S. chief negotiator Christopher Hill and his North Korean counterpart Kim Kye Gwan reached a deal that rests on trust and not verification. According to numerous press reports and Mr. Hill’s April 10 congressional briefing, the U.S. will be expected to accept on faith, literally, North Korean assertions that it has not engaged in significant uranium enrichment, and that...

Categories Appeasement/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics
April 16, 2008

The Death of an Alliance, Part 68

Here is a delicious pairing of cause and effect: The U.S. has notified the South Korean government it will withdraw one squadron of some 20 F-16 fighters by the end of this year. [….]   The Defense Ministry is reportedly busy working out a response. They take the view that the abrupt notice of the withdrawal has something to do with the U.S.’s demand that Korea bear more upkeep cost for the USFK. [Chosun Ilbo] If you happen to believe...

Categories An Alliance?/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea
April 15, 2008

The Six Two One Party Talks, or Masturbatory Diplomacy

[Update: The White House accepts this stinker. Remember what Chris Hill said last year? “We cannot have a situation where (North Korea) pretends to abandon their nuclear program and we pretend to believe them.” That sure sounds like that Hill wants us to do.] So have you heard that Kim Jong Il will celebrate his removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism … by firing off more missiles? U.S. military authorities have been closely watching the North Korean...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics
April 11, 2008

All Quid, No Quo: How Agreed Framework 2.0 may soon become immeasurably worse

I declined to do  a posting on Chris Hill’s latest meeting with the North Koreans — the latest in a long series of last chances — because it was pretty clear that North Korea wasn’t going to admit to having a uranium enrichment program or to having engaged in nuclear proliferation to Syria.  Here, I was right.  I had also concluded that lacking any political room to make further concessions to the North Koreans, State wouldn’t agree to water down...

Categories Appeasement/Six-Party Talks