Search Results for: Obama not ready

July 26, 2010

Plan B Watch: Treasury Targets 100 Suspicious N. Korean Accounts Worldwide

According to multiple newspaper reports published since late last week, the Obama Administration’s new asset-freezing campaign against North Korea began in earnest in June. The Treasury Department, having identified about 200 accounts worldwide suspected of storing the proceeds of banned weapons sales, currency counterfeiting, counterfeit cigarettes and Viagra, proliferation, drug trafficking, and other things that all sovereign nations to do pay for yachts for their despotic rulers. Treasury focused on 100 accounts where its evidence was strongest and quietly persuaded...

Categories Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions
July 16, 2010

If This Isn’t the State Sponsorship of Terrorism, What Is?

Just what does a psychotic despot have to do to get on the list of state sponsors of terrorism?  Since President Obama’s inauguration, Kim Jong Il has — been caught twice shipping weapons — reportedly including man-portable surface-to-air missiles — to Iran, apparently for the use of its terrorist clients; sent a hit squad to assassinate a prominent defector in South Korea; threatened civilian air traffic to and from South Korea; threatened to turn the capitals of various neighboring states...

Categories Anju Links
June 28, 2010

A Good Week for Lee Myung-Bak, But What America Gained Isn’t So Clear

On balance, Lee Myung Bak seems to having a pretty good week — at least better than last week’s failure to secure a serious response to the Cheonan incident abroad or even at home. This week, Lee has already won a three-year delay in the dissolution of the U.S.-ROK Combined Forces Command, a/k/a OpCon transfer. He also secured a commitment by President Obama to push for an FTA that had faced strong opposition from some American labor unions and Max...

Categories An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea
June 23, 2010

On McChrystal and Petraeus

I can’t pass on the chance to say a few things about the firing of General McChrystal. I don’t think President Obama could have not fired him, leaving him in charge of our war effort in state where he clearly lacks the confidence of the President, his cabinet, the people, and quite probably his own soldiers. I knew few soldiers who had strong partisan views, but fewer who held much respect for conduct like this. More than a few must...

Categories U.S. Military
June 23, 2010

If You Want the U.N. to Fail, Then Ban Ki Moon Is Your Man

Let it never be said that Ban Ki-Moon’s U.N. can’t fail at more than one thing at the same time. While North Korea’s attack on a South Korean warship goes unanswered at the U.N. thanks to Chinese obstructionism and weak U.N. leadership, North Korea’s refugee crisis goes unaddressed due to … Chinese obstructionism and weak U.N. leadership. When it comes to North Korea, the U.N. has proved a highly effective instrument for China to prop up its puppet, and just...

Categories "United" Nations
June 16, 2010

A Nation in Denial: On South Korea’s Mid-Terms

I’ve taken a good long while to chew on the results of South Korea’s recent election, and while I’m ready to offer some unscientific speculation about what it didn’t mean, I really wish that I had some good, reliable polling numbers to give me a more concrete idea of what motivated people to vote, and what didn’t. With that said, my main interest in the results (below the fold for the winners) is the media consensus that it was rebuke...

Categories Cheonan Incident/Korean Politics
June 7, 2010

China’s Support for Kim Jong Il Undermines the U.N., Nonproliferation, and Regional Peace

Some of us, of course, have never really believed that the United Nations could play much of a useful role in restraining North Korea anyway, other than helping us enlist the support of Old Europe, which is almost alone in paying any heed to the U.N. After all, the institution is led by Ban Ki-Moon, who rose from local obscurity to international obscurity by appeasing Kim Jong Il, and who, by all outward appearances, suffers from a genetic testosterone deficiency....

Categories "United" Nations/Cheonan Incident/China & Korea/Diplomacy/Proliferation/Sanctions
May 27, 2010

State Department Fights N. Korea Terror Re-Listing With Half-Truths

[T]he Obama team is clearly signaling that it does not intend to do what many lawmakers want: put North Korea back on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. The calculation is that the listing, which administration officials see as having been overly politicized during the George W. Bush years, is more trouble than it’s worth. [WaPo, The Cable] Not worth the trouble? Are you joshing me? This, from the same crowd that went all the way to...

Categories Cheonan Incident/Terrorism (NK)
May 24, 2010

Overthrowing Kim: A Capitalist Manifesto

[Originally published at The New Ledger, May 2010; edited for brevity in October 2017] Within the next 48 hours, South Korea is expected to announce that North Korea torpedoed and sank the warship Cheonan and killed 46 of her crew. Among the evidence the multinational investigation will cite will be the North Korean serial number on the torpedo’s propeller, recovered from the ocean floor. The sinking of the Cheonan may be the most serious North Korean provocation since 1968 —...

Categories Capitalism/Regime Change
May 24, 2010

President Lee Announces Weak Response to Cheonan Sinking

We have always tolerated North Korea’s brutality, time and again. We did so because we have always had a genuine longing for peace on the Korean peninsula…. But now things are different. North Korea will pay a price corresponding to its provocative acts,” he said. “I will continue to take stern measures to hold the North accountable. — President Lee Myung Bak After this, President Lee explained that his government will adopt the following measures as a response to North...

Categories "United" Nations/Cheonan Incident/Diplomacy/U.S. & Korea
May 13, 2010

Cheonan conclusions will mean tougher N. Korea policies … for a while, anyway

It certainly looks like every government official outside Beijing who has seen the evidence now believes that North Korea sank the Cheonan and killed 46 members of its crew. Among those who have drawn their conclusions are the South Korean government, the Obama Administration, and the Republicans in Congress. The multinational investigation is now sufficiently advanced that the official Yonhap News Agency says that the findings could be released as early as next week. One interesting leak references a stray...

Categories Cheonan Incident/North-South/Sanctions/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
May 12, 2010

North Korea Arms Terrorists, State Department Dozes

The Foreign Minister of Israel has become the first government official to openly accuse North Korea of arming terrorists since the U.S. government removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in 2008: The Israeli foreign minister said on Wednesday that North Korean weapons seized in Thailand last year were headed for Islamist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. [….] “With huge numbers of different weapons … (it had the) intention to smuggling these weapons to Hamas and to...

Categories Axis of Evil/Proliferation/Sanctions/Terrorism (NK)/WMD
May 11, 2010

Cheonan Incident Updates

Andrei Lankov talks about China’s motives for supporting Kim Jong Il and predicts that in due course, it will be business as usual all over again: At all probability, this time we will see another repetition of the old game. Chinese will insist that North Korea should come back to the six-party talks (Beijing’s pet project), and also should restrain itself. Kim Jong-il will claim his sovereign rights to run his state as he pleases while inquiring how much aid...

Categories Cheonan Incident
April 6, 2010

Government Bungling Feeds Cheonan Conspiracy Theories and Frustrates National Unity (Updated)

More than a week after the mysterious sinking of the corvette Cheonan, the only certainties for the families of the missing are loss, tragedy, and confusion. In the last several days, the body of just one missing sailor was found. Divers have searched much of the sunken stern section of the ship, but did not find any bodies there. In addition to the diver who was lost trying to save the crew, nine more crew members of a fishing boat...

Categories Cheonan Incident/ROK Military
March 29, 2010

Latest North Korean Threat Directed at DMZ Tours

North Korea warned on Monday of unpredictable disaster unless the South and the United States stop allowing tourists inside a heavily armed border buffer that is one of the most visited spots on the peninsula. President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008 as a reward for giving up its nuclear weapons program. On February 3, 2010, President Obama decided not to restore North Korea to the list. An unnamed army...

Categories North-South
March 8, 2010

North Korea Re-Re-Declares War, Threatens “Merciless Physical Force,” Demands Peace Treaty

So Operations Key Resolve and Foal Eagle have started again. I boldly predict that this year, as has been the case for each year for the many decades we’ve had troops stationed in South Korea, the exercise will not end with an American invasion of North Korea. Just as predictably, North Korea is threatening the United States and/or South Korea. The challenge for North Korean propagandists is always how to make each year’s threat stand out from such previous-year classics...

Categories Diplomacy/ROK Military/Six-Party Talks/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Military/Useful Idiocy
March 1, 2010

Alejandro Cao de Benós Interview – Part 4

Surprisingly, my favorite Cao quote from the fourth and final installment isn’t even about North Korea: “In general, U.S. cities frighten me, after 7 p.m. all the white people go home, and black people and beggars take to the streets.” Cao also talks about Robert Park. Once again, thanks to Enzo Reale for allowing me to publish this. Please visit his blogs at 1972 and Asiaeditorni, or on Twitter.

Categories Interviews/Useful Idiocy