Search Results for “The Death of an Alliance, Part”

July 24, 2008

Anju Links for 24 July 2008

CONDI RICE WAS NOT AVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: A South Korean NGO reports that North Korea carried out 901 public executions last year. Don’t expect to see this in State’s human rights report next year. Boy, talking to the North Koreans really is changing them, isn’t it? JUST KILL YOURSELF NOW IF YOU ACTUALLY BELIEVE THIS: The protocol has to be one “that can give us confidence that we’re able to verify the accuracy of the North Korean declaration,” she said....

Anju Links

July 1, 2008

Oops, We Changed the Wrong Regime

People can differ about the merits of overthrowing noxious regimes and the various ways that can be pursued, but I’m guessing this is one item Condoleezza Rice wasn’t pursuing for her legacy showcase: Rice’s sudden turnabout on de-listing North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism may soon plunge the Japanese government into crisis. Japan must now decide whether to join the United States in providing aid to a country that kidnaps and refuses to account for unknown numbers of...

Abductions/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Japan/Japan & Korea/Six-Party Talks

June 16, 2008

B.S. Stands for ‘Bovine Spongiform’

At this time a year ago, I thought by now that I’d be writing about the restoration of an alliance that Roh Moo Hyun had just about managed to destroy. Although I’ve long felt that a large U.S. military presence in South Korea was an anachronism no longer justifed by any North Korean threat, I saw benefits to having a healthy military, diplomatic, and economic alliance between South Korea and the United States. Also, I think it would be nice...

An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/U.S. & Korea/Uncategorized

May 26, 2008

Of Hollow Men: Obama Flip-Flops on Removing N. Korea from Terror-Sponsor List

In March of 2005, I blogged about this letter from the Illinois congressional delegation to the North Korean government, in which all members of the delegation warned Kim Jong Il that they would firmly oppose removing North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism unless North Korea accounts for the fate of the Reverend Kim Dong Shik, a lawful permanent resident of the United States who had resided in Illinois. In 2002, Rev. Kim was in northeast China...

Japan/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Politics

May 7, 2008

The Venerable Pomnyun, the New Famine, and the Regime’s Stability

Update: SAIS just cancelled Friday’s presentation. Sorry. It is not the nature of famines to make heroes of men, but if a hero emerged from North Korea’s last Great Famine, it is the Buddhist monk the Venerable Pomnyun. I first heard of this man’s humanitarian work in Andrew Natsios’s “The Great North Korean Famine,” a book that, sadly, is must-reading once again. The Ven. Pomnyun, who leads the charity Good Friends, was one of the few South Koreans to speak...

Famine & Food Aid

April 13, 2008

Kim Won Ung: A Most Joyous Political Obituary

Imagine an America in which Cynthia McKinney chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and holds regular meetings with Osama Bin Laden, and you can be begin to grasp the national embarrassment of Kim Won Ung’s tenure as leader of the Korean National Assembly’s Unification, Foreign Affairs and Trade Committee. Perhaps this analogy will also illustrate the depth of my ambivalence at confirming that Kim has lost his bid for reelction. Kim Won Ung at Kim Il Sung’s Birthplace in North...

An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics

March 19, 2008

“Most of the film had to be kept secret for the past years.”

So says the director of a new South Korean film about a North Korean orphan living secretly in China. “Crossing,” a story directed by Kim Tae-gyun and starring Korean TV star Cha In-pyo, depicts an 8,000 km arduous and lonely journey made by an 11-year-old North Korean boy in search of his coal-miner father who ended up defecting to South Korea. [….] “I had to be very cautious in making this film because of the political sensitivity of the defector...

Censorship/Refugees

March 18, 2008

Rule of Law or Rule By Law?

The Hanky has the vapors over President Lee’s plans to let the police use a bit more force against violent protestors. The plans include detailed rules on the use of force, and plans to arrest people who engage in violence and cross police lines. To this, the Hanky reacts with hyperbolic charges of a return to dictatorship: President Lee seemed to have been encouraging the police when he said, “If foreign television programs show the nation’s unlawful, violent demonstrators wielding...

Censorship/Korean Law/Korean Politics/Korean Society

February 19, 2008

S. Korea’s Next Unification Minister Denounced as “Collapsist” and “Neocon”

The left-wing Hankyoreh is predictably disgruntled about the new Unification Minister: Nam [Joo Hong] is your typical member of the “school of collapse. He has consistently claimed that there are signs that a sudden situation could arise in the North, saying that it has problems in five major areas, including food, energy and succession. Immediately after the February 13 agreement was made, he said that the crisis management ability of the leadership in Pyongyang was reaching a breaking point. Naturally...

An Alliance?/Korean Politics/Reconstruction/Regime Change

February 11, 2008

S. Korea Still Denies Paying Ransom to Taliban; Larry Craig Still Not Gay

After months of wildly inconsistent estimates ($2 million? $20 million?) of just how much ransom the South Koreans paid for their two dozen-odd hostages in Afghanistan, the Taliban is saying the actual amount was “at least” $4 million. This final, authoritative answer is brought to you by an unidentified “senior Taliban commander,” so we need not ever speak of this again. Until the next time it happens: If we were going to free them without any payment, [the hostage taking]...

An Alliance?/Appeasement/Terrorism (NK)

February 4, 2008

USFK Commander Against Further Troops Cuts (Update: USFK Denies)

General Burwell B. Bell III, commander of United States Forces Korea, expressed his wish to keep the status quo at a meeting last month, the sources said. South Korea and U.S. officials met for talks in Washington on Jan. 23. According to the sources, Bell asked Korean officials to back his proposal to hold force levels at the current 28,500 troops. As a part of a plan to realign US. troops around the world, Washington and Seoul have agreed to...

An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military

January 11, 2008

Time running out for the FTA?

Here. Americans sometimes observe that South Korea shouts for equal treatment while actually expecting to be treated like a coddled infant, and I’d cite the handicaps it demanded on the imports of cars and agricultural products as a good example to support that. Based on the two-faced behavior and unreasonable demands of the South Koreans throughout the FTA talks, the U.S. Trade Representative should have had the guts to walk away and wait for Roh’s clock to run out. Sadly,...

NK Economics

January 1, 2008

2007: A Lost Year

[Update 2 Jan 08: “North Korea failed to fulfill its October promise to declare all its nuclear programs by the end of 2007 — and the United States did not make a big deal out of it.” — WaPo, Blaine Harden] SO ENDS THE YEAR 2007, with this terse statement from the State Department spokesman: In September 2005, the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea agreed on a Joint Statement with North Korea that charted the way forward...

Appeasement/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks

November 30, 2007

Henry Hyde, R.I.P.

I last saw Henry Hyde at the final hearing at which he presided as Chairman of the International Relations Committee. Months later, despite the passage of control to another party, a larger-than-life portrait of Hyde still hangs in hearing room of the re-named Foreign Affairs Committee. Nearly all that has been written about Henry Hyde after his passage yesterday has focused on his role in Whitewater or his steadfast opposition to abortion — in other words, things about which the...

U.S. Politics/Washington Views

November 28, 2007

How Times Have Changed!

I’ve very much enjoyed the first installment of reviews of World War Two-era Korean films at Gusts of Popular Feeling, and look forward to the next ones. The first film reviewed was made in 1941, a pro-Japanese propaganda film called “The Volunteer,” surprising not only for its cinematic technique and moments of artistry, but also for its mention of discriminatory treatment of Koreans by the Japanese. The Japanese character (the one who told Choon-ho about the opening of the military...

History/Korean Society

November 26, 2007

Impervious to Evidence: State’s Appeasement Express Arrives at the Koryo Hotel

[Update: Richardson links to State’s quasi-denial: why, yes, we have stationed a State Department employee in Pyongyang, but he’s strictly there to supervise the equipment for the technical process of disabling North Korea’s nuclear programs. That’s peculiar. If this employee’s job is strictly scientific or technical, why not avoid giving people the wrong idea and send someone from the Department of Energy or Defense instead? At best, this is a trial balloon. More likely, we’ve just seen the camel’s...

Appeasement/Diplomacy/Proliferation

November 19, 2007

Beyond the U.N. Experiment

What serious thinker still believes the United Nations still reflects the values of its own charter, much less contributes to seeing them realized? Much has been said about what was unexpectedly not found in Iraq, much less so about what was unexpectedly found: proof of just how completely the U.N. had been corrupted by arguably the second-worst dictator on earth. Not that all of the U.N.’s corruption is monetary: Recall what Churchill told the audience at Fulton about the United...

"United" Nations

November 13, 2007

Korean Election Update: Lessers Versus Evils

Just over a month before South Korean presidential election, Lee Hoi Chang has announced that he’s running as an independent candidate. I have now seen it all. So can he win? Hell if I know. To an observer of long American political campaigns, it’s hard to see how anyone could enter a race so late and have a chance of winning it, but this most definitely is not American politics. Korean politics is famously mercurial; it’s about as exact, empirical,...

Korean Politics

Search Results for: The Death of an Alliance, Part