Although it seems to have genetic origins in plenty of other things I’ve read by Lankov, Noland, etc., combining and updating some already excellent works only makes the Asia Society’s / U.S.-Korea Institute’s final product even better. I’ll quote the executive summary and let you read the rest on your own:
- Current internal dynamics in North Korea suggest a growing need for international cooperation on contingency planning, led by policy coordination between South Korea and the United States.
- An effective response to potential instability in North Korea requires a whole-of government approach that integrates military and nonmilitary aspects of
contingency planning.
- Interagency cooperation within both Seoul and Washington will be increasingly important as instability unfolds.
- The United States and South Korea should affirm a common vision for the future of the Korean peninsula and coordinate strategies regarding how to attain the agreed-upon end state.
- U.S.-ROK planning should incorporate efforts to have dialogue with China with the purpose of reassuring China that any future scenario will not harm Chinese interests. Such a dialogue might focus initially on practical coordination to deal with specific shared concerns.
- Any response to instability in North Korea will depend on the stage of contingency and functional issue, and requires a clear understanding of the
appropriate form and sequencing of cooperation.
- Post-conflict stabilization tasks in North Korea include military disarmament, dismantlement of WMD and securing North Korea’s long-term economic
development in close collaboration with all stakeholders. [opens in pdf]
American insiders in Baghdad say the relationship between the top U.S. commander there, Gen. Raymond Odierno, and the top civilian official there, Amb. Christopher Hill, is deteriorating rapidly. Old hands say the chill between the two brings to the bad old days of Sanchez vs. Bremer, when those two unfortunates barely would speak to each other as the American position fell apart in early 2004, along with Iraq itself.
What I am hearing is that Odierno is profoundly frustrated with Hill, who despite knowing almost nothing about Iraq has decided after a short time there that it is time to stand back and stop influencing the behavior of Iraqi officials on a daily basis. In addition, I am told, the ambassador believes the war is an Iraqi problem, not something that really concerns Americans anymore, despite the presence of 125,000 American soldiers. [Tom Ricks, Foreign Policy Blog]
But hey, who is this Odierno guy, besides being Petraeus’s right hand in making The Surge work and doing what no one in Hill’s world thought could be done? Hill’s record, on the other hand, speaks for itself. Don’t miss the comment by Joel Wit.
The United States said Friday it was “very concerned” about human rights violations in North Korea, as President Barack Obama named an envoy to focus on the issue.
“We’re deeply concerned about the situation in North Korea, particularly the plight of North Korean refugees, and human rights in general,” State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said. [….]
If confirmed by the Senate, King will work as part of US special representative for North Korea Stephen Bosworth’s team and cooperate with other top State Department officials involved in Washington’s policy toward Pyongyang, according to Kelly.
He will also serve as the liaison with human rights groups and other non-governmental organizations “to try and highlight the problem of North Korean human rights and trying to promote a more transparent political system in North Korea,” said Kelly. [AFP]
That means that for the last eight months, North Korea has managed to misdirect our focus on its calculated and calibrated provocations and away from the pathology in which they originate.
The AFP story, apparently written by a reporter untrained in the use of Google, goes on to report that “[s]cores of North Koreans are believed” to flee North Korea each year, to escape “extreme poverty and malnutrition.” This manages to fit two inaccuracies into a single sentence. In fact, the number of North Koreans arriving in the South — almost certainly a pale shadow of the number fleeing the North — has been more than 1,000 a year since 2002 (page 54). At the end of 2004, there were 7,688 North Korean defectors in the South (page 53). Today, more than 3,000 arrive every year, and the total number of North Korean defectors in the South has more than doubled to more than 16,000.
To say that North Koreans are fleeing their homeland because of hunger and poverty is no more true than saying that Anne Frank died of natural causes. Many North Koreans are starving, and a few are riding in Mercedez sedans and yachts, or wearing Omega watches. When that happens in the world’s most centrally planned economy, it means that someone’s corn ration was written out of the central plan. Often, those written out of the plan were born into the lower regions of a system of hereditary political castes known as songbun and written off as expendable. In North Korea, your songbun is your destiny:
Getting a job in North Korea requires a certain family background and lobbying skills rather than desire and talent.
North Korean middle school graduates (high school in South Korea) have three choices for career after graduating 11 years of compulsory education. These are: to go to the army or college, or get a job. Only ten percent with background by birth can get to college and the rest must either enter the army or get jobs. Those without college or army entrance were transferred to labor department of Administration Committee, and they are assigned jobs. The problem is that the job assignments are decided without regards to an individual’s wish or talents. By so called ‘group assignment’, hundreds of graduates are assigned to one job location.
Therefore, middle school students who are about to graduate start lobbying in the labor department of Administration Committee with bribes and using connections. Those without any means have no choice but to go to coal mines or construction companies and end up with physical labor jobs that nobody desires. [
Open News]
Those state industries, however, are vulnerable places to be. When they shut down, the workers are effectively cut out of the rationing system and left with no means of survival. Even after the work, rations, and pay stop, workers must still report to “work” or be sent to a labor camp.
(For all of its faults, AFP’s article at least covers the story, and features what sounds a lot like the administration backtracking on bilateral talks, a subject about which I’m ambivalent.)
I don’t have strong feelings about Bob King because I know almost nothing about him. Few of those who have followed this issue closely do, either, including some of the most prominent activists working on this issue. It’s a plus that he worked for Tom Lantos, and his background is probably better than Jay Lefkowitz’s was coming into the job (though to be fair, Lefkowitz was a quick study). On the other hand, King’s lack of an established reputation puts him at a disadvantage to other rumored candidates, including Jared Genser and my good friend David Hawk.Stephen Solarz was my personal dark horse favorite because of his political stature and connections. King may be an easier figure to dismiss, as was the case with Lefkowitz.
The next question is whether Bob King will be more relevant to the Obama Administration’s North Korea policy than Jay Lefkowitz was to Bush’s. I challenge anyone to untangle all of the layers of vagueness in the State Department’s canned response, offered by Spokesman James Kelly:
In terms of what his role will be, he will be part of Ambassador Bosworth’s team in the Office of the Special Representative for North Korea Policy. He’ll work closely with bureaus within the State Department here, our human rights bureau – Democracy, Human Rights and Labor – and of course, with the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs. And of course, he’ll coordinate with his colleagues in the Korean office with Ambassador Kim and Ambassador Goldberg.
He’ll also have a very important role of being the liaison with the human rights community, with the NGO community, and will also engage with international human rights organizations in his efforts to try and highlight the problem of North Korean human rights and trying to promote a more transparent political system in North Korea. As you know, we are – we’re deeply concerned about the situation in North Korea, particularly the plight of North Korean refugees. And human rights, in general, for the State Department are a big priority, and this is another indication of that.
QUESTION: Will Bob King also participate in the possible U.S.-North Korea bilateral meeting? Because he is on the team of Ambassador Bosworth.
MR. KELLY: Well, I think first we have to make the decision we’re going to actually have the bilateral talks, and then we’ll see who actually participates in it. Yeah, go ahead.
QUESTION: Do you intend to be talking with North Korea specifically about human rights during these meetings that are often more geared towards the nuclear program, the Six-Party Talks?
MR. KELLY: Do we talk about human rights when we –
QUESTION: Will you be – I mean, before, you separated human rights out from the Six-Party Talks.
MR. KELLY: Yeah.
QUESTION: Will you be now bringing human rights back in to the Six-Party –
MR. KELLY: Yeah. You’re asking me to speculate on how – what the framework of the talks will be. I mean, human rights is in the center of all of our bilateral discussions, and I’m sure – although our priority, of course, is the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, human rights always plays an important role in our bilateral relations. [State Dep’t. Daily Press Briefing, Sept. 25, 2009]
When Lefkowitz had the temerity to link North Korea’s oppressive system to its then-unfolding renunciation of its last set of promises to disarm, Condi Rice publicly humiliated Lefkowitz in a manner that would have drawn a very public resignation from a man of greater pride, stature, and sense of mission. History has established, I think, that the Bush Administration’s talk about human rights in the North was just that, and in the end, it was Bush and Rice — with plenty of help from Christopher Hill — who ended up proving (again) the futility of appeasing North Korea.
If we have learned anything from this, it should be that North Korea’s pathology cannot be compartmentalized away from its diplomatic mendacity. Yet a diminishing few still believe that Kim Jong Il wants better relations and free commerce with Earth. These people either don’t understand, or haven’t grasped the significance of, North Korea’s domestic propaganda about how it games and extorts America. North Korea has hostility, isolation, xenophobia, and secrecy in its genes. It can’t exist without them and can’t be cajoled or forced into abandoning them. Richardson calls the diplomatic aspect of North Korea’s pathology “strategic disengagement.” The central idea of it is that sustaining a state of hostility with the outside world is an essential element of what makes North Korea what it is. Its removal necessarily means transforming North Korea into a place that would turn on Kim Jong Il faster than a centrifuge. The implications of those realities are unpleasant, which may be why so many people refuse to recognize them. But not to recognize them requires one to disregard decades of experience, including North Korea’s eventual renunciation of every diplomatic commitment it has ever made.
Oddly enough, these people have managed to get the news media to call them “realists.”
Consider all of the logical chasms one must cross to believe in the verifiable diplomatic disarmament of North Korea today. How can we believe in the verification of disarmament when we can’t even verify that our food aid is going to those in need, and where brief and closely-monitored meetings between elderly siblings are considered a newsworthy diplomatic accomplishment? How can we expect North Korea to meet internationally accepted verification standards when it demands to be excused from every other norm of humanity, civilization, and transparency? How can we expect its scientists and technicians to be truthful with us when they live in a society so opaque, so controlling, and so vindictive — not only against those perceived as even minimally disloyal, but against their parents, spouses, and their children? Who believes that North Korea shares our interests in peace and security — interests that are rooted in moral, humanitarian, and economic values — when its mass culling of its own people through famine, concentration camps, and public executions shows utter malice for the value of human life?
More specifically, recent reports from defectors suggest that North Korea’s underground nuclear test site was built by prisoners from Camp 16, which is adjacent to the test site’s eastern perimeter. The prisoners, it is said, never leave that tunnel alive. Who will ever give us a full accounting of North Korea’s nuclear test activities if the North isn’t prepared to let our inspectors go to Mount Mantap and hear the candid observations of its scientists and technicians? If there is one thing that unites North Koreans more than their hatred of us, it is the fear of some dark fate if they compromise betray the state that made the arsenal of terror. Let there be no mistake that North Korea’s disregard for human life means that it would not hesitate to arm terrorists with any weapon it has the capacity to make.
So far, the Obama Administration has demonstrated surprising strength in responding to Kim Jong Il’s nuclear and missile tests. The passage of UNSCR 1874, despite its flaws, has spurred international cooperation with sanctions. This has been useful, but Obama’s empowering of the Treasury Department to attack Kim Jong Il’s palace economy has probably done far more. After all, without the ability to engage in financial transactions, Kim Jong Il has no efficient means of recouping his profits from arms sales, drug dealing, insurance fraud, cigarette or pharmaceutical counterfeiting, or any other means he uses to support his regime. It’s likely that his cash reserves are declining.
But to what end? For Kim Jong Il, nuclear weapons are central to his national security and personal survival. They are a substitute for a massive conventional military whose equipment is degraded and whose troops are withering away physically. They are one of the last remaining sources of national pride for an otherwise miserable and discontented population. There are even reports that Kim has threatened his own military with nuclear force if it rebels against him. Finally, as Kim Jong Il’s health visibly declines what else can he claim for a legacy? His transformation of his cities into vast cemeteries? These factors, combined with two decades of failed diplomacy, all suggest that Kim Jong Il will never disarm voluntarily. For now, Kim Jong Il probably concludes that he can break sanctions by appearing to our fear and our gullibility, and that of other nations in the region. Financial sanctions may be building real pressure on Kim Jong Il’s regime and retarding the expansion of his arsenal, but they any agreement they secure will be illusory.
President Obama now offers Kim a “grand bargain,” but The Big Deal comes with an impossible condition — nuclear disarmament first. This offer will not sit on the table for long. Eventually — absent Kim Jong Il’s sudden death from natural or not-entirely-natural causes — North Korean provocations will force President Obama to either accept North Korea as a nuclear power or escalate the confrontation, either through more robust containment or by opting for constricting and subverting of the regime itself. Acceptance may take the form of taking North Korea’s word to verify complete disarmament at some future date, but no one could possibly take any such promises seriously now. And a nuclear North Korea is an unacceptable condition for U.S. national security. Within the next two years, we will know which path President Obama chooses.
North Korea’s new constitution gives even more power to Kim Jong Il. Unless it suspends the laws of physics, I’m at a loss as to what powers His Withing Majesty did not already possess. Does anyone believe that Kim Jong Il has spent the last ten years stewing about how people would be eating meat three times a day if only he had a line-item veto?
Kang makes a compelling argument for understanding the “root cause” of all of our problems with North Korea:
The silence of the international community on the barbaric massacres in the concentration camps committed by Kim Jong-il borders on the criminal. Some 17,000 North Korean defectors in the South are complaining about the atrocity, but no country pays any attention. Even the South Korean government and people do not realize how serious the problem is.
As a surgeon may kill a patient with a wrong diagnosis, so more and more North Korean citizens may lose their lives if the international community makes a wrong diagnosis of the North Korea issue.
Had the U.S. diverted a tenth of the effort it invested in freeing the two journalists imprisoned in the North on the concentration camp problem, the groundwork for resolving the North Korea issue would already have be done. Had the Seoul government demanded the elimination of the concentration camps in return for the massive economic aid it provided to the North a decade ago, the North would have long started on the path to reform and opening.
The closure of the concentration camps would end the reign of terror, and the public would be able to criticize the regime. This would lead to weakening the totalitarian system and forming a new leadership, resulting in reform and opening. [Chosun Ilbo]
I don’t agree with Kang’s statement that the camps are less like Stalin’s gulags than Auschwitz — they aren’t, either in methods or scale — but I can understand why a survivor like Kang would resort to some hyperbole when, years after the publication of his gulag memoir, South Korea’s moral outrage can only be averted from Tokdo by “news” of the unique vulnerability of “pure” Korean genes to Mad Cow Disease.
South Koreans will play little constructive role in their own reunification but will spend much time complaining about its cost and accusing their North Korean maids of stealing their Swarovski jewelry.
One day one of supervisors got drunk and cursed at some laborers taking a break. It caused an explosion of suppressed anger on the part of the laborers. A laborer named Cho Dong-Soo (alias) challenged the supervisor, “How come you people fill your stomachs with alcoholic beverage and pork while idling away time and yet shout at us? We feel so hungry and weak in this hot weather. Don’t we deserve some rest?” The supervisor’s response was, “Who do you think you are talking back to?” and he slapped the face of the laborer. It triggered a big fight between two supervisors and laborers. The supervisors were beaten badly by numerous laborers. The local headquarters found out about the fight, held a meeting and made a decision to punish the laborers. The laborers involved in the fight were criticized in public and placed in isolation for a week. The laborers felt that they were wronged because the supervisors caused the incident. The angry laborers protested for two days with work stoppage. [Good Friends, Sept. 25, 2009]
The same dispatch reports two other episodes of defiance against the authorities — one by a group of vendors at a market in the miserable corner called Onsung, and the other by a group of orphans press ganged into a labor unit.
I suspect there are a lot more incidents like this one that happen in North Korea that we never hear about, and I’ve certainly noted plenty more like it here and here. The problem with incidents like this is that North Korea’s internal isolation makes it like an ice cube tray — news can’t travel from region to region, or at least not before the authorities have already suppressed whatever has broken out. I have made and would make again the argument for arming and training the North Korean people to resist and ultimately replace the existing state, but at least initially, we’d likely get far better results by finding a way to saturate North Korea with cell phones than with AK’s.
… but when you pay a ransom, don’t you expect the hostage to be released? North Korea is an exception to every rule not written by Isaac Newton or Galileo, which is to say, every rule from which diplomats can’t grant exemptions:
North Korea wants South Korea to reward it for resuming reunions of families separated by the Korean War, an official said Sunday after the communist nation hosted the first such meetings in two years.
Hundreds of Korean families separated for more than half a century were reunited Saturday under a temporary reunion program. The North agreed last month to resume the Red Cross-arranged reunions in part of efforts to reach out to South Korea and the U.S. after months of tension over its nuclear and missile programs.
South Korean Red Cross chief Yoo Chong-ha told reporters covering the reunion at the North’s Diamond Mountain resort that his North Korean counterpart Jang Jae On asked him Saturday about Seoul rewarding Pyongyang for the family reunions.
According to South Korean media pool reports, Yoo quoted Jang as saying: “This reunion was (arranged) as the North offered a special amity. How about South Korea offering its amity in response to this?”
Yoo said the North Korean Red Cross chief didn’t say what reward his country wants from the South. But the pool reports, without citing any source, said the North appeared to be seeking resumption of food and fertilizer aid to the North, noting the country made similar demands in the past. [AP, Hyung-Jin Kim]
Or, asking for cash. I can think of no higher priority for the regime than to get South Korea to make cash payments without verifying the ultimate use of the funds. That’s the thin end of the wedge they want to drive into UNSCR 1874. President Lee Myung Bak sounds like a man who isn’t inclined to buy it:
“In the past, from experience, we know that negotiating with North Korea has always been a process whereby we make one step forward and we take two steps back, and we go back and forth and back and forth, without achieving much results,” Lee said.
It is difficult to determine what North Korea’s “true intentions” are, Lee said, but the world can be certain the country will not readily give up its nuclear weapons program. Negotiators, therefore, must work together closely to make sure North Korea has “no choice” but to disarm, Lee said. [AP, Foster Klug]
It isn’t really hard to determine North Korea’s true intentions, of course, and I suspect that privately, Lee has a fairly clear idea of what they are.
North Korea must be faced with “no choice” but to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions and it is “unthinkable” to accept the North as a nuclear-armed state, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak said on Friday.
“The North Koreans will not readily give up their nuclear program. What’s important then is for the international community to work very closely together so that North Korea will be in a position whereby they will have no choice but to give up all of their nuclear weapons,” he said. [Reuters, Paul Eckert, via N.Y. Times]
In this context, you have to suspect that Lee’s offer of a “grand bargain” is mostly a sweetener to show what a nice guy he really is. But “nice” guys have a well-established record of bringing out the worst in North Korea.
Rimjingang was recently established in Japan, and trains and equips North Koreans as journalists to go back into their homeland to cover the news that other media can’t:
The footage, taken surreptitiously from a speeding motorcycle, was jarring: It showed the Soonchun Vinylon factory, which many defectors claim has been secretly used to produce lethal chemicals, including nerve gas. But the video showed a deserted complex slouching forlornly on a weed-strewn stretch of countryside. The experts sat wide-eyed. They had heard rumors of the factory’s fate, but this was their first real evidence.
Not only is this newsworthy, it’s heroic. Courage is knowing that if you’re caught, Bill Clinton isn’t coming to get you, and his wife isn’t going to say a word on your behalf. Founder Jiro Ishimaru also reported from inside North Korea before realizing that here was only so much he could do to get the story:
“I realized that foreigners couldn’t really report on anything significant with so many eyes monitoring them,” he said. “The story is complex. It needs to be told by the people who live it.”
In time, Ishimaru met North Korean defectors in China who said they wanted to tell the story of their impoverished country. But none had the skills to do so. So Ishimaru started a journalist training program. Working with volunteers, he provided aspiring reporters with surveillance cameras and offered lessons on how to film without getting caught — often conducting exercises in crowded Chinese markets.
The students — ranging in age from 20 to 50 — learned how to approach people without raising suspicion, how to ask questions without appearing intrusive. Lessons in hand, they returned to North Korea, later stealing back to China only to deliver their stories. [L.A. Times, John M. Glionna]
I wish some of the South Koreans who are still chopping their fingers off in front of the Japanese embassy over the crimes of the past would do something as constructive this Japanese man is doing about the crimes of the present. Coming soon: an English edition. I can hardly wait for this. Of course, there are now a number of great services (see sidebar) providing reporting from inside North Korea, mostly from regular contacts and refugees who aren’t journalists and aren’t equipped with video cameras.
KCJ’s comment here, on the fawning Songs of Obama sung in a New Jersey classroom, inspired me to write a response that may warrant its own post. Here is the video KCJ is talking about:
This is creepy stuff, and I’d be livid if my kids ever come home singing something like this. Now, where is the evidence that this is the work of the Obama Administration, as opposed to that of one unintelligent Kool-Aid drinking teacher? WSJ blogger James Taranto notes that the teacher in question has since retired, and that there’s no evidence that this was orchestrated from any sort of Central Committee for Popular Enlightenment Und Freudediktat. We are still a long way from 150-day battles here, and anyone in the administration who was so inclined (Van Jones?) still faces such significant obstacles as a mid-term election that will almost certainly cost the governing party dozens of seats in Congress.
(This, on the other hand, is the work of the Obama Administration, and it only amplifies the disgust I’d first expressed here at the herd mentality of our “artistic community,” and the willingness of some in our government to make it a tool of state power. I like the way Iowa Hawk lampooned it here. This will give many of us a sense of unease that will outlast the memory of the overreach itself. It should.)
Still, let’s not overstate cycles that most of us are old enough to recognize as natural and recurring seasons in any democratic system of government. Political parties — and this is especially true of the Democrats, whose tent is much wider at the fringes — are dominated by activists who define “change” in revolutionary terms. Consider the simplistic genius of the very slogan, “Change.” It is ingenious for the same reason that it is so perilous for the politician who rides to victory on it: because it is void for vagueness. It means nothing more than whatever the hearer wants it to mean, up to the moment when the candidate is elected and must govern, and offer specific proposals that often turn out to be different from what voters may have imagined (or been led to imagine).
By now, you may be about to ask for examples. First, I’d cite Obama’s passivity about gay marriage. Obama the President is smart enough to know that the voters aren’t ready for it, but the activists want revolutionary change, even if the result is a series of consequential, long-term setbacks. Consider the administration’s retreat from its early promise to close Gitmo in a year. The Administration made that promise without giving much thought to the question of what are we to do with the terrorists there, terrorists whose plans could not have been disrupted if they had been captured or questioned in ways that conform to our domestic judicial rules of evidence. Yes, some imagined that they would be let go to kill again, but our President has enough sense not to propose that. He also learned that the American people aren’t ready to share their country with terrorists, and the clumsy initial efforts to shut Gitmo down, justified in part on appeasing our “allies,” — often, really the most inflexibly and irrationally anti-American citizens of nominally allied nations — ended up doing significant damage to our most important trans-Atlantic alliance. Now that the war in Iraq seems to be winding down with most key U.S. interests standing a good chance of being secured for at least a while after we leave, some on the far-left are dropping their past pretenses that Afghanistan was “the good war” from which Iraq was a distraction. Now, there is another war that must be lost. There certainly are legitimate debates about how the war there should be fought or can be won, but I don’t expect the far left to take much of a serious interest in those. They no doubt imagined that Obama’s election would mean an accession to their demands for unconditional withdrawal, something Obama can’t give them. That sets us up for the sort of rebellion among the unpatriotic left we haven’t seen since 1968, though probably on a much smaller scale.
For most voters, however, dissatisfaction with the status quo doesn’t translate into enduring support for any particular alternative, and that’s particularly so when the alternative bears a hint of radicalism. Voters are repelled by revolutionaries. Consider: isn’t it possible that dissatisfaction with Iraq in 2006 might have meant dissatisfaction with how the war was being fought, or that it hadn’t been won yet? Certainly most of that dissatisfaction has eased. Iraq is no longer among the most contentious issues in our country, and there is no great popular demand for the kind of calamitous helicopters-on-the-embassy-roof withdrawal that our most craven politicians, many of whom voted to authorize the war, had called for so recently. Nor did dissatisfaction with the economy necessarily equal popular support for the kind of overspending that both Presidents Bush and Obama supported, and which McCain would have. The Great Silent Majority’s imagined idea of “Change” turns out to be unlike the cultish socialist-realist hues of Shepard Fairey’s imagination. The voters’ mandate may have been nothing more than a mandate to manage things back to the halcyon days before 9/11, when the economy also happened to be pretty good. Activists have sharp-edged plans to change the world. Voters have gauzier directions to make the stuff that was good to be good again, and to make the stuff that’s good now better. And during elections, especially mid-term elections, voters tend to punish any sign activism furiously.
I’ll close with the most important point of all — voters think more strategically than we give them credit for, and they tend to display this in their affinity for divided government. Recall, after the 2006 mid-terms, I noted how voters tend to check the president’s party by giving victories to opposition parties:
1958: Republican President (Ike), second mid-term, Dems gain 16 in the Senate, 48 in the House.
1966: Democratic President (LBJ), second mid-term, Republicans gain 3 in the Senate, 47 in the House.
1974: Watergate. Republican President (Ford), sorta-second mid-term, Dems gain 4 in the Senate, 49 in the House.
1978: Democratic President (Carter), first mid-term, Republicans gain 3 in the Senate, 15 in the House.
1986: Republican President (Reagan), second mid-term, Dems gain 8 in the Senate, 5 in the House.
1994: Democratic President (Clinton), first mid-term, Republicans gain 2 in the Senate, 54 in the House.
2002: President’s party actually gains 2 in the Senate, picks up 8 in the House.
Today, we have a likely net switch of 26 House seats and 6 Senate seats. It’s a solid win, more so in the Senate, but not a blowout in light of the historical trends. Dislike of the governing party turns voters out for mid-terms, and governing parties tend to lose seats as a result. [link]
Events like 1994 and 2006 were mostly reactions to an excessive accumulation of power by one party. They were negative mandates, voter-directed terminations. In the broader historical context, they were inevitable reactions. We’re probably going to see the same thing in 2010, because the Democrats’ great accumulation of power isn’t reflected in broad popular support for their ambitious plans. The voters smell radicalism in the government’s excessive spending, its amorphous but too-ambitious health care schemes, and (somewhat unfairly, I think) its obsequious foreign policy. But if the policy in practice isn’t that different from Bush’s, its conciliatory tone certainly hasn’t done us any good with Iran or North Korea, and can’t persuade Europe to behave like an ally (something it ceased to be when it stopped needing us at the end of the Cold War).
Negative mandates tend to be of limited endurance because they’re mostly reactionary in nature. Once the governing party is duly rebuked, the sense of purpose is spent. Once in power, opposition parties typically fail to realize the visions they’ve sold to their voters. The Republicans didn’t close the deal after 1994, because Newt Gingrich was a superficially unappealing figure in the same ways Barack Obama is superficially appealing, and because he cultivated the sort of radical image that gave the voters unease. In this, he certainly had a strong assist from a hostile news media. Obama’s is a case of what I’d describe as vicarious hubris — hubris that’s mostly evident in the swooning of an adoring media, who are still smitten by the Obama of their imaginations in the same way a few of them are still smitten with John Kennedy, with all the erotic and sometimes homoerotic overtones that implies.
With a few obvious exceptions, however, Obama’s own policies have been marked by a cautious cognizance of the backlash to come and a certain calculated willingness to disappoint his base. But triangulation is a very easy thing to get wrong, because it tends to leave everyone disappointed. That can cause disgruntlement even among the supporters of a “stewardship” kind of president, but just imagine the bitterness of the jilted adorers who did not just vote for “Hope,” but who embraced their own imaginations of it.
John Kerry has no immediate plans to go to Pyongyang, despite months of rumors that he was trying to invite himself there. One can only hope that the Obama Administration sent a young White House staffer to sew Kerry’s trousers to his chair.
You might question whether helping a foreign enemy advance its tyrannical world view and sideline the U.S. government in negotiations is smart diplomacy, but for Kerry, it’s a well established practice. It could have been just like old times if Madame Binh flew to Pyongyang for a reunion.
There aren’t many elected politicians I deeply, deeply loathe, and John Kerry is one of the few.
A little before 1 p.m. today across the street from the Chinese embassy in Seoul 40+ people gathered to remind the Chinese government of a commitment it made 27 years ago today. On September 24, 1982, the PRC signed the 1951 U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol, the major international agreements which lay out how signatory governments say they will handle refugees.
Today’s demonstration in Seoul was one of approximately a dozen scheduled for September 24 around the world. They are being coordinated by the North Korea Freedom Coalition.
Though North Korean refugees in China face harsh interrogation, imprisonment, usually forced labor, and even sometimes execution — simply for the crime of leaving their country to search for a means to feed their family — the Chinese government systematically rounds them up and repatriates them anyway. When asked why they do not honor their international agreements related to protecting refugees, the PRC claims that North Korean refugees are economic migrants.
Below the fold are more photos from today’s event in Seoul, info on a group of 9 North Korean refugees who’ve entered an embassy in Hanoi, and a reminder about a major conference on NK Human Rights tomorrow in Seoul. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been skeptical of reports, most of them directly from the ChiCom propaganda mill, that China was cooperating with U.N. sanctions against North Korea. So after a brief flurry of displays of cooperation, here is what the statistical record tells us:
North Korea’s trade with China declined slightly during the first half of this year, likely due to falling prices of crude oil, a South Korean agency and officials said Wednesday.
Trade volume during the January-June period totaled US$1.1 billion, down 3.7 percent from a year earlier and the first decline since 1999, the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA) said in an emailed release that cited official Chinese data. The drop was in striking contrast with a 41 percent increase during the same period last year and a 16 percent gain in 2007. [Yonhap]
Got that? China halted the rate of growth in its support for North Korea, growth that was presumably designed to make up for what South Korea reduced since Roh Moo Hyun’s extinction. But overall, trade only declined by low single digits, most of that the result of North Korea actually getting a better deal on Chinese fuel. Most contemptible of all was China’s increased supply of food directly to the North Korean regime and army, which undercuts any multilateral pressure on North Korea to allow monitored food aid distributed on the basis of need, rather than loyalty.
China isn’t going to help us defang North Korea, and any president who believes they will is delusional. China wants North Korea to have nukes and helped North Korea get them. The only way to stop China from propping up Kim Jong Il is to begin methodically sanctioning Chinese entities that do business in or with North Korea, using a tool such as Executive Order 13,382. Then, other Chinese companies with substantial investments in the United States will have to choose between doing business with us, and doing business with Kim Jong Il. Most will make the choice themselves without having to be prodded.
The photos are worth seeing, though I see no other evidence to support the photographer’s contention that the regime is relaxing its suppression of religion. A photograph of what are probably Peoples’ Safety Agency agents “praying” at a sham church in Pyongyang is not evidence that supports that contention.
On the other hand, there are numerous reports emerging from North Korea which support the contention that this year’s harvest will be way down from recent years, which themselves have been poor.
North Korea’s corn yield this year is expected to fall by 40 percent due to a fertilizer shortage and bad weather, the head of a Seoul-based aid group said Tuesday after a survey in the North. The North’s corn crop for this year is estimated to be less than 1.5 million tons, considerably down from the 2.5 million to 3 million tons it usually garners, said Kim Soon-kwon, a leading corn biologist and head of the International Corn Foundation. The forecast yield portends a severe food shortage in the country where corn is believed to make up 40 percent of the total food supply.
“Of all the corn harvests I’ve seen while visiting North Korea over the past 12 years, this year’s crop was the worst,” Kim said over the telephone from China where he was staying after last week’s trip to the North. [Yonhap]
That evidence is consistent with Open News’s alarming August report on a recent spike in corn prices.
I’ve noticed that North Koreans have learned to hoard food year by year, and that one bad harvest isn’t enough to plunge the country into famine because people somehow find a reserve on which to sustain themselves. But last year was also a bad year, and peoples’ stocks may well be replenished.
Now, private aid groups in South Korea are criticizing their government for not allowing them to provide aid to North Korea. To the extent they say that humanitarian aid should not be conditioned on the regime’s nuclear disarmament, they are right. We should be treating North Korea’s downtrodden as allies to be cultivated. But to the extent they want to embark on breakaway aid programs with insufficient controls on where the food goes, they’re wrong. Their intentions are good, but they’re only contributing to the problem.
The unavoidable conclusion about North Korea’s food situation is that the regime wants some people to eat, but either doesn’t care if the rest eat or simply wants them to starve. If so, then giving aid to the regime only allows it to feeds its military and members of the loyal castes, removing all of our bargaining power to monitor the aid and get it to those in greatest need. We’ll only have the bargaining power to get food into the bellies of the hungriest North Koreans when donors band together and demand, as one, sufficient monitoring controls, including nutritional surveys. Unilateral aid by breakaway NGO’s and governments is counterproductive to that greater good and only sustains the misery of the majority.
Interestingly, Jimmy Carter observed the same thing about Kim Il Sung in June of 1994, when he thought he’d brought back Peace In Our Time and prevented North Korea from going nuclear. Wrong and wrong, Jimmy. It would take a few more years of Carterian presidential drift before North Korea tested its first nuke, but it wasn’t even a month before all that sam-gyop-sal and child-flesh finally got The Great Leader wheeled off to the Great Meat Locker. But then, politicians say those things when they’re being diplomatic, and we all know how carefully Jimmy Carter chooses his words. Especially in his bitter dowager years.
Similarly, I don’t put much stock in the powers of observation of any man who, while in a state of apparent sobriety and while being the most powerful man on earth, also thought Monica Lewinsky was hot enough to justify adultery, scandal, perjury, and impeachment.
Clinton even engaged in the subterfuge of bringing his own doctor to give Kim the onceover, something His Withering Majesty seemed quite cognizant of. How strong an opinion a doctor can form about a person’s health without the use of a syringe and a rectal thermometer, I will let you decide on your own.
President Obama publicly accepts Clinton’s assessment at face value, but also boasts — and with some justification, I think — about the success of sanctions at building pressure on North Korea.
My assessment: Kim Jong Il seems to be keeping a fairly busy schedule and didn’t look significantly worse in early September than he did in the spring. This doesn’t prove that he’s not dying, it just strongly suggests that for the time being, he’s a fully functional democidal tyrant. Which, to some, is a good thing.
For a dissenting view, see this report from Open News, which has it that Kim Jong Il is being driven to desperation by the reaper’s shadow.
