It’s nice to see Koreans calling China on its P.R. blunders with greater frequency these days:
In its feature on the 60th anniversary of the start of the 1950-53 Korean War, the International Herald Leader, a newsweekly of the Xinhua News Agency, said the North Korean army launched the war by crossing the 38th parallel and seizing South Korean capital Seoul in three days.
The article immediately drew attention, with some placing significance on China’s first admission of military aggression by North Korea at the start of the war.
However, the article was soon removed from the weekly’s Web site as well as the sites of Xinhua and other portals. It is suspected that the Beijing government had a hand in removing the pieces, fearing the repercussions from North Korea. But the fiasco leaves us feeling bitter, as our two states could form a constructive and mature partnership based on an accurate acknowledgement of historical events. [Joongang Ilbo]
We apologize for the fault in the subtitles. The persons responsible for sacking those who were just sacked, have been exiled to the countryside.
President Obama, speaking at the G-8 summit recently, sounded very much like his predecessor, saying that “shying away from ugly facts on North Korea’s behavior is, in his words, “a bad habit we need to break.” I don’t know if the similarity should gratify or worry me more, or whether those two sentiments are really mutually exclusive.
The problem for President Obama is that China, Kim Jong Il’s financial backer and sponsor, is shielding North Korea from even the slightest imaginable consequence for sinking the Cheonan and murdering 46 of her crew, not counting those who died trying to rescue them. Apparently, a watered-down “presidential statement” from the U.N. Security Council is more than they can bear.
So our President — having himself just declined a perfect opportunity to at least put North Korea back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism — is in fact sounding vaguely like John Bolton, who is, after all, the architect of two of the cornerstones of Obama’s North Korea policy today — the Proliferation Security Initiative and UNSCR 1718. But thank goodness Bolton himself is no longer in a place of real influence or consequence, because he said nasty things to people, and Smart Diplomacy means you mustn’t say nasty things:
U.S. President Barack Obama criticized China, Sunday (local time), for turning a blind eye to North Korea’s belligerent behavior, saying Beijing should recognize Pyongyang’s torpedo attack on the South Korean Navy ship Cheonan in March.
In blunt comments at the end of the Group of 20 Summit here, Obama said that Chinese President Hu Jintao should recognize that North Korea crossed a line in that incident, in which 46 sailors died.
“I think there’s a difference between restraint and willful blindness” by China to the North’s military provocation, Obama said, answering questions from reporters.
It’s not quite “axis of evil,” but it’s still shockingly truthful.
“Now, I’m sympathetic to the fact that North Korea is on China’s border. They have a security interest in not seeing complete chaos on the Korean Peninsula, or a collapse that could end up having a significant impact on them.
“If they adopted a posture of restraint, I understand their thinking. But my hope is that President Hu will recognize that this is an example of Pyongyang going over the line in ways that just have to be spoken about, seriously,” he said.
The U.S. President indicated that he would link the Cheonan case to the resumption of the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program, saying, “We are not going to be able to have serious negotiations with the North Koreans” if China fails to deal resolutely with the incident. [Korea Times]
Now China, for its part, is a newly matured emerging world power, so it responded with characteristic class and restraint:
The English-language Global Times hit back at the US leader, saying he should have taken Beijing’s concerns into consideration before “making irresponsible and flippant remarks about China’s role in the region”.
The Global Times being the Chinese equivalent of the Volkische Beobachter.
The newspaper, noting Beijing’s role as host of the on-off six-nation talks on North Korea’s nuclear disarmament, said: “It is thus not China that is turning a blind eye to what North Korea has done and has not done.”
“Instead, it is the leaders of countries such as the US that are turning a blind eye on purpose to China’s efforts,” said the commentary in the paper, which is run by the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, the People’s Daily. [AFP]
Now, if I were a Korean, I’d be even more concerned about this statement from the Chinese Foreign Ministry:
Asked about those comments, Chinese foreign-ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a news briefing on Tuesday: “China borders on the Korean peninsula, and we have our own feeling on the issue, different from that of the countries tens of thousands miles away.…We have more direct and intense concerns.” [Wall Street Journal, Brian Spegele]
Translation: The Korean Peninsula is within our sphere of influence, not yours.
You know, it astonishes me endlessly how similar this President’s policies and behavior are to those of the last one, except for those lucid moments when I realize that we’re really in the third Clinton Administration. The only thing that astonishes me more is total polarity reversal in the reaction of the news media, the Human Rights Industry, and the Foreign Policy Industry to each president’s actions. Even the schizophrenia is the same. Honestly, calculating the trajectory of this administration’s policy is a lot like it was during the days of Bush’s 2001 “policy review,” and pretty much ever since.
On a related note, the President reminds us that the concepts of speaking softly and carrying a big stick are each sold separately, so now, we’re about to have dueling naval exercises with the Chinese, too:
In response to the sinking of the Cheonan in March, in which 46 sailors died, the U.S. is planning joint naval exercises with South Korea designed to signal strong support for its ally. China, North Korea’s chief international supporter, has condemned the exercises as destabilizing to the region.
A U.S. military spokesman said on Tuesday that the drills could take place next month. U.S. Navy spokesman Cmdr. Jeff A. Davis said the drills weren’t meant to intimidate China or destabilize the region, but “are designed to ensure we have the ability to maintain peace and defeat aggression on the Korean peninsula.”
China has announced it will conduct its own drills in the East China Sea beginning Wednesday. Chinese state media have suggested those exercises are a direct response to the planned U.S. operations. Mr. Qin denied this, saying the Chinese drills have “nothing to do with the situation on the Korean peninsula.” [WSJ]
Far be it for me to criticize this President for finally grasping that the ChiComs’ support for North Korea is cynical and malicious, or at least for not pretending otherwise. It’s just that I’m not sure how having a public argument with China advances us toward our goal of leaving it face-saving room to execute a policy shift, even if I happen to believe it’s going to take a good deal of quiet coercion to achieve that goal. For now, either China still doesn’t “get” that sinking a South Korean warship isn’t business usual, or it has concluded that President Obama doesn’t have the spine to do anything about it but bitch. I’m not against a little strategic bitching public diplomacy, but it’s going to take more than bitching to change policy in Beijing.
Let me posit, humbly, that it would be far more effective to publish some innocuous notices in the Federal Register about a couple of Chinese mining companies whose assets are about to be frozen for their “investments” in North Korea. And then, for good measure, we could quietly let the Chinese know that we’ll be actively destabilizing North Korea both economically and politically until China makes an immediate good faith effort to bring its regime to heel with a complete (and if necessary, prolonged) closure of its border with the North. We might even let a few more refugees into our consulates in China. We all know by now that China doesn’t want the chaos and refugees along its border. If we want to change China’s behavior, we should leverage that fear and link it to China’s support for Kim Jong Il.
The Obama administration ridiculed North Korea on Friday for claiming $65 trillion from the United States in Korean War damages, saying the communist nation is an economic “basket case” due its own failed policies.
Have the North Koreans actually looked at our balance sheets lately? While it’s probable that the Congressional Budget Office has been working nights to recompute our deficit projections ever since Robert Byrd died, I still don’t think we’re going to find this kind of change in our sofa cushions.
It’s a few days old, but this Daily NK piece is a fascinating insight into how North Korea’s state trading companies put revenue in Kim Jong Il’s coffers, how they’re adapting to the politics of succession:
Ri, who is in his mid-40s and living in Dalian, says he enjoys extravagance which he could never have imagined in North Korea. “The Cheonan incident and other issues are complicated,” he explains, “I now believe here (China) is my hometown and where I will live.” He drives two foreign cars and says he owns two houses, each worth $300,000, in an economic development zone in the city. He says he plays golf and is able to send his children, who he says have a talent for art, to Europe to study.
To his acquaintances, he advises, “When trying to export North Korean commodities, there are no alternatives to minerals or marine products. Try to mediate the importation of necessities for the Cabinet, military authorities or the Ministry of Light Industry, and avoid other industrial goods.”
In the process of supplying goods to North Korea, these men commonly obtain additional money illegally. North Korea’s light industries are not well developed, which means that there are a lot of opportunities to import daily necessities. There are countless traders who have accumulated considerable wealth by conspiring with North Korean officials during the process.
Of course, Kang admits that he has exaggerated his costs when delivering goods to North Korea, and that he has lived until now thanks to the power of the military authorities and his background with Kim Jong Nam. He regards it is inevitable for a merchant, asking, “If I did not use such a method, how could I afford my $2 million house?” [Daily NK]
Posted by Joshua on June 29, 2010 at 7:00 am · Filed under WTF?, Africa
It is fairly common knowledge that Kim Jong Il deprives and starves his people to buy luxuries for himself and build monuments to his rule, but I did not know how many more luxuries and monuments he can now afford by selling luxuries and monuments to other statist tyrants.
Only in Africa or the Middle East can Kim Jong Il still serve as a role model for great governance.
According to the source, North Korea has earned $66.03 million from Namibia alone thanks to the construction of the Presidential Palace ($49 million); the Cemetery of National Heroes ($5.23 million); a military museum ($1.8 million); and Independence Hall ($10 million).
It has also earned almost $55 million from Angola via the António Agostinho Neto culture center ($40 million); Cabinda Park ($13 million); and the Peace Monument ($1.5 million).
Additionally, the North has constructed a basketball stadium ($14.4 million) and an athlete academic center ($4.8 million) in the Congo, earning almost $20 million dollars in total.
Thanks to the Monument to the African Renaissance in Senegal, the North has made another $12 million dollars.
There are around 19.8㎢ set aside for a vacation spot for the president of Equatorial Guinea, which is supposed to earn Mansudae around $800,000, not to mention a government office building ($1.5 million), Luba Stadium ($6.74 million) and conference halls ($3.5 million).
The source also reported, “The money earned from these construction projects is managed by the No. 39 Department. Some of these dollars are used for domestic governance, while the rest go to secret accounts in Switzerland or Macau to become Kim Jong Il’s secret funds.” [Daily NK]
An aside: how the hell do they find this stuff out? Nice pictures there, by the way.
Personally, I’m incensed at the thought of all of the nerve gas and uranium hexafluoride the African people are being denied so that their leaders can have these things instead. But thanks to North Korea’s trade with Africa, at least Kim Jong Il won’t lack for elephants, even if the elephants still aren’t white.
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 Baucus, the patron saint of cattle ranchers in God’s country (if you must know, it begins at the Rockies and ends where the eastern bank of the Missouri River cedes to the flat, glacial topography beyond).
Lawmakers from Obama’s Democratic party who had campaigned against the deal appear ready to approve it. “The president’s announcement of a concrete plan to move the Korea agreement forward is great news for America’s economy,” said Democratic Senator Max Baucus, head of the powerful Senate Finance Committee. He called it “the most commercially significant trade agreement in more than a decade.”
“But I’ve long held serious concerns about the unscientific barriers Korea has erected against American beef — barriers that must be removed. I intend to work with both the administration and Korea to craft a plan to fully open Korea’s market to safe and delicious American beef,” he said. [AFP]
You tell ‘em, Max.
Readers will recall that I wasn’t initially a big fan of the FTA, either. For one thing, an FTA is supposed to be an inducement to better relations, yes, but also a reward to governments that behave like allies, which Roh Moo Hyun’s certainly did not. I was and am incensed by the idea of rewarding Roh’s anti-American ex-president and his anti-American party with an FTA for their valiant effort to unilaterally moot South Korea’s alliance with the United States, keep North Korea safe for human rights atrocities and proliferation, and demonize the American government and its soldiers. For another, the FTA annex regarding those “outward processing zones” clearly referred to North Korea’s Kaesong Industrial Park, and a stealth FTA for Kim Jong Il was more than I could stand (though not more than I could believe possible in the waning years of the Bush Administration). Today, Kaesong’s decline is sufficiently advanced that its death is pretty much assured, and I’m much less worried about this concern than I was in 2008. And while I won’t call Lee Myung Bak a true ally until he sends a brigade to forcibly repossess the ransom Roh paid to the Taliban, I at least credit him for slowing the rate at which South Korea undermines American economic pressure on North Korea. And if that sounds like faint praise, then it is.
As for delaying the OpCon transfer date, I share Robert’s disappointment and don’t have much to add to his thoughts, except to emphasize that South Korean opcon is fundamentally about a strong South Korea, though it’s also about tailoring U.S. force commitments to suit our own risk-reward calculations and national security priorities. Like Robert, I also hope we got something in return for all of these concessions, because I don’t think extending the opcon transfer will do anything to heal what’s fundamentally unhealthy about the alliance — the wide gap between how the two nations perceive their own interests and values.
If and when the U.S. and ROK governments finally realize that our fundamental problem with North Korea is with the identity and character of those who run the place, we’ll have a much more effective policy together than separately. It is the realization of this truth, the determination to act on it, and the creativity and vision to see how that can best unite the interests of the two nations. A strong alliance between America and South Korea can no more be built on the presence of thousands of American soldiers in Korea than it can on the absence of any significant Korean forces from Afghanistan.
I’m apparently not the only one who cocked an eyebrow at the refusal of a State Department spokesman recently to rule out applying new sanctions to be directed at North Korea to third-country entities.
The United States Wednesday did not preclude the possibility of freezing North Korean assets in foreign banks to effectively cut off resources for the North’s development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
“I’m not going to predict any particular step that we’re contemplating, but these are steps that are available to us under existing U.S. international law,” State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told reporters at a daily news briefing.
He was responding to the question if Washington was considering freezing North Korean assets at foreign banks just like it froze more than US$25 million in North Korean accounts in Banco Delta Asia in Macau in 2005. [Yonhap]
Whether we actually set about doing this or not, the response itself is significant. One only hopes that investors in Kim Jong Il’s regime will take enough heed to proceed in an orderly manner to the rooftops of their embassies in Pyongyang with semaphore flags and briefcases stuffed with all the dollars — and yuan — they can carry. One hopes that the most recent G-8 summit also took up this topic in detail, and went beyond gauzy statements about “consequences” for North Korea’s “irresponsible behavior.” Not all power, it seems, comes from the barrel of a gun these days. You’d think this would be cause for rejoicing, but not for Beijing and its tools.
Well, good! If China were not abetting mass murder, proliferation, and now acts of war by Kim Jong Il, if China were not cynically undermining the same U.N. resolutions for which it voted, it wouldn’t have to worry about its banks and mining companies being sanctioned for their role in propping up Kim Jong Il. It seems to me that Treasury is supplying the leverage we’ve been missing all along. Consequently, Lee seems to have reserved particular degree of enmity for OFK favorite Stuart Levey, whose inconvenience is that his record disproves the narrative that America has no options but to tolerate and even subsidize Kim Jong Il’s ongoing nuclear buildup. After all of the finger-wagging we’ve had to endure from assorted “China Hands” that America mustn’t do anything to harm about its relations with China, maybe it’s about time the converse was finally true, too.
The main theme of Lee’s argument against sanctioning North Korea and Iran through their Chinese sponsors is that it’s somehow immoral or unfair of the United States and Treasury in particular to use the power of the dollar to influence China toward a foreign policy that’s less malignant toward America’s national security. He calls the threat of sanctions “an abuse of America’s privileged position at the center of the financial world.” Lee’s have-you-no-decency-sir tone makes for an amusing contrast to his giddy harrumphing about America’s debt to China, a subject I previously discussed here. As Lee eventually acknowledges in part, America’s currency gives it this power, in part, because of China’s (artificial) depression of the yuan exchange rate against the dollar to generate more export revenue, but then, what else is China supposed to do with its dollars? I don’t think any Chinese banker is really thinking much about Lee’s suggestion that it buy more Euro these days.
The curious shift in Lee’s tone is a curious thing to observe, but when it comes to the relationship between U.S. sanctions and North Korea policy, Lee is in way over his head and doing his best to cast economic pressure as the moral enemy of effective diplomacy. Now, either the flaw in this argument is obvious to you or it isn’t, but regardless of how you see that question, this flawed argument is built on some real howlers I couldn’t let myself pass up:
Hopefully, the results for the US this time will not be as dire as North Korea’s rush to the atomic bomb occasioned by the sanctions campaign of the Bush administration.
So in addition to The Bomb, Lee must think Kim Jong Il somehow acquired a De Lorean and a flux capacitor. That’s right — Lee is suggesting that President Bush’s financial sanctions caused North Korea to go nuclear, or to dispel any doubts that it has. Perhaps China would be better off if Americans were still arguing over op-eds by Selig Harrison and Mike Chinoy insisting to this day that North Korea’s nuclear program was all some figment of Dick Cheney’s imagination. The truth, however, is that Kim Jong Il’s “rush to the atomic bomb” actually began in earnest during the Reagan Administration. How could he have known that George W. Bush would eventually give it all a perfectly good (for Lee, anyway) post-hoc justification?
I suppose anyone can characterize coincidence as causation, but I see a far greater chance of a causal connection between North Korea’s nuclear test and the open encouragement of people believed to speak for the Chinese government, such as the influential Chinese academic Shen Dingli. Shen’s articles are well worth reading for just to see the malice he expresses toward the United States and its basic security interests, but they’re also important documentary evidence of China’s insincerity when its flacks insist that they, too, want a nuclear-free North Korea. In 2005, Shen wrote the development of nuclear weapons was Kim Jong Il’s “sovereign right,” and he was again showing a green light to the North Koreans as recently as three days before the October 2006 nuclear test Lee now calls a dread “consequence” of sanctions Treasury had announced against a Chinese bank, Banco Delta Asia, on September 15, 2005:
First, and most importantly, North Korea withdrew from the six-party talks in fury, abandoned its nuclear haggling with the United States, and detonated its first atomic bomb on October 9, 2006. Despite revisionist attempts to decouple BDA from the bomb, Levey’s paternity of the Nork nuke is pretty much indisputable.
You can either enforce the law or negotiate with North Korea, but never both. Here is the proof!
That’s right. North Korea was not only still at the six-party talks on September 19, 2005, four days after Treasury took action against BDA, it signed a statement agreeing in principle to give up its nukes. This all happened while depositors were lined up outside of BDA trying to withdraw their money. Now, far be for me to suggest that a North Korean promise, much less merely showing up to talk, represents progress. I’ll leave it to Lee to explain just how much the six-party talks have accomplished, the likelihood that they’d ever accomplish anything, and how China has been helpful in this whole endlessly receding process. You can believe that if you choose, but just know that there are some important facts Lee isn’t telling you.
Secondly, America’s image as an honest broker impartially protecting the integrity of the dollar-based international financial system was seriously tarnished.
Now here is some odd logic. Lee is actually suggesting that Treasury harmed the integrity of the dollar-based international financial system by taking an enforcement action against a willing accomplice of a syndicate that distributed remarkably high-quality counterfeit U.S. dollars, requiring multiple redesigns of U.S. currency. Are we supposed to take this seriously? Lee says that turning Treasury loose on a government with which the U.S. government has differences “weaponizes” law enforcement. But what’s unprecedented here isn’t that Treasury follows crime to its source; it’s that a state is engaging in counterfeiting, and doing so backed by the full faith and credit of the Chinese government, which has the unmitigated chutzpah to suggest that for the sake of a failed diplomatic track, we’re obligated to exempt both China and North Korea from the enforcement of the laws that protect our currency.
Feebly, Lee also questions the evidence that North Korea is counterfeiting dollars:
US laziness in making its case - though largely unchallenged by the media with the exception of McClatchy’s Kevin Hall - did not enhance international confidence in OTFI’s ability to wield this considerable power responsibly.
What Lee mischaracterizes as laziness is in fact the secrecy in which all law enforcement and intelligence services need to pursue their investigations to completion; after all, the lead agency in this investigation is called the Secret Service. This is a principle recognized under law by exceptions to our Freedom of Information Act. Perhaps Lee would like to submit his own FOIA request to the Chinese authorities to see what documents they’d be willing to disclose on this topic. This is an odd argument indeed, coming as it does from a supporter of an opaque and unaccountable dictatorship.
By the way, Lee helpfully informs us that the president of BDA was “Stanley Au, a local businessman with close ties to Beijing” and “a delegate to the China People’s Consultative Congress.” Just in case you think this was a matter over which the Chinese government had no influence. And BDA was only a small player in Chinese banks’ abetting of the counterfeiting scam:
“Banco Delta was a symbolic target. We were trying to kill the chicken to scare the monkeys. And the monkeys were big Chinese banks doing business in North Korea… and we’re not talking about tens of millions [of dollars], we’re talking hundreds of millions.”
Lee is horrified that anyone in the U.S. government attempted to intimidate big Chinese banks away from handling counterfeit dollars, or from keeping Kim Jong Il on his throne. It won’t surprise you that I differ on this. I believe that it’s possible to have biases about a topic, as both Lee and I undoubtedly do, and still follow the known facts to objectively defensible conclusions. Instead, Lee shoehorns them into his conclusions, conclusions that have never seemed more driven by emotion and nationalism, and which, consequently, he simply cannot support.
“We’d like to punish the Kim Jong Il government by spreading the truth written on these leaflets,” said Seo Jung-gab, president of the National Action Campaign, one of the participating groups.
Also among groups participating was the National Association for the Rescue of Japanese Kidnapped by North Korea, a group supporting the families of Japanese abducted by Pyongyang’s agents in the 1970s and ’80s. The leaflets contained a message to the abductees and contact information for organizations in Japan and China working to assist them.
“North Korean citizens don’t even know that their government kidnapped people worldwide,” said Tsutomu Nishioka, chairman of the group.
If you make enough people mad enough at you, they’ll eventually hurt you. The leaflet operations are growing bigger and bolder in their scale and content, and they make for sublime media theater.
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Oh, great:
Bruce Bechtol of the Marine Corps Command and Staff College will deliver, next Monday at Brookings in Washington, a paper contending that North Korea is now or will soon be capable of building a uranium-core bomb. [Gordon Chang, Forbes]
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Would it be so wrong if the South Korean authorities just told North Korean propaganda star and traitorHan Song-Ryol not to bother coming home and gave his apartment to some deserving family of North Korean refugees? It seems like a much better idea than arresting him and giving the Hankyoreh and the Rodong Sinmun something to talk about.
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The GAO has just released this rather extensive report on the progress of federal executive agencies in complying with the asylum facilitation provisions of the North Korean Human Rights Act. Summary here; highlights here.
The Wall Street Journal thinks someone should give the North Korean soccer team asylum. Well, I suppose someone should, if the North Koreans ask first. And after a final 3-0 clubbing at the hands of the Ivory Coast, maybe they should reconsider. I’m sure there must have been a strong temptation to shout some impolitic words into that invisible cell phone.
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In Seoul, five police are under arrest for torturing suspects. In light of the number of stories like this I heard from fellow prosecutors, CID agents, and clients, I’m most surprised by how seldom stories like this are actually reported.
Posted by Joshua on June 25, 2010 at 10:51 pm · Filed under Korean War
On this, the 60th anniversary of the Korean War, it’s gratifying to see that not all Korean films are anti-American propaganda harangues:
The 15-year-old boy prayed silently beside a freshly dug grave as he and other prisoners waited to be shot by a North Korean firing squad. Kim Man-kyu, barely taller than his M-1 rifle, had fought with other South Korean student volunteers in an 11-hour battle before being captured just weeks into the 1950-53 Korean War.
“Suddenly, a fighter jet appeared and bombed and fired machine guns at the area,” recalled Kim, now a 75-year-old retired pastor. Under attack, the North Koreans abandoned the execution of the prisoners, including some American soldiers.
About 100,000 South Korean students volunteered to fight in the Korean War, which broke out 60 years ago Friday. More than 1,970 perished, according to the War Memorial of Korea, a national museum in Seoul.
Kim was one of 71 students whose story is told in a blockbuster, star-studded film, “71 — In to the Fire,” which opened to huge audiences in South Korea last week. The distributor plans to release the movie in the United States and Japan too, though no dates have been set. [AP, Kwang-Tae Kim]
In North Korea, surviving veterans are fortunate enough to receive extra rice rations. I don’t doubt that for many North Korean veterans, their honored place in society reinforces their belief in the state’s ideology. For some, however, who might have watched loved ones starve during the famine years, there must be gnawing questions about whether theirs was a system really worth fighting for.
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Some messages of thanks from Korea: here, and this from President Lee Myung-Bak in the L.A. Times. It’s not the same message published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that I linked the other day, suggesting a concerted and dedicated effort to show his appreciation to the American people.
This is a good start, but it’s more important that Koreans, especially younger Koreans, have a better understanding of their own history and reality. Meanwhile, back in Seoul, Lee called on North Korea to stop its “reckless” behavior.
Posted by Joshua on June 25, 2010 at 10:31 am · Filed under Anju Links
AFP is reporting that two Chinese traders, suspected of espionage, were beaten to death in North Korea.
According to South Korea’s Yonhap new agency, which quoted unnamed sources in Beijing, the two traders from the northeastern province of Jilin were allegedly killed during a trip to the North’s border city of Manpo. “We have noted the report. We are seeking to confirm it,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters without further comment.
The report said North Korea was resisting China’s demand to turn over the bodies, angering Beijing which believed Pyongyang brought espionage charges against the two in an attempt to evade responsibility over the incident.
Citizens are expendable, but good puppets are hard to find. Funny, isn’t it, how word of incidents like these is getting out nowadays?
The ROK government tightens screening for North Korean refugees: I suppose it’s both regrettable and understandable, given the number of spies North Korea has infiltrated into the South this way.
I believe American citizens owe the presidents they collectively elect a clean-slate judgment that begins at the moment when they assume office. Never mind what they said during the campaign; it’s the actions of a president in office by which we judge him. And on North Korea policy — without comment on his other policies — I’ve tried to be objective in judging President Obama; perhaps because of my low expectations, I’ve found much to praise in his actions since North Korea’s May 2009 nuclear test. The honeymoon may have to end here. If this report proves to be accurate, President Obama has just lost me (hat tip: Curtis).
I’ve previously recounted the many reasons why North Korea should be on the list, so I’ll just summarize here and send you to other posts for the specifics: (1) North Korea, which then had a long history of carrying out or sponsoring terrorist attacks, was taken off the list in the first place for completely political reasons, while it held perhaps thousands of Japanese and South Korean abductees, because of disarmament promises it predictably broke; (2) North Korea was de-listed despite failing to account for a U.S. resident it kidnapped and murdered, despite then-Senator Obama’s promise to oppose de-listing until North Korea accounted for him; (3) since it was de-listed, North Korea has significantly increased the use of its state media as an instrument of terrorism, to include a threat to civilian air traffic and multiple threats of nuclear strikes; (4) since it was de-listed, North Korea has been caught, repeatedly, shipping arms to Iranian-backed terrorists, arms that included man-portable surface-to-air missiles; and (5) two North Korean majors have pled guilty to attempting to murder a dissident in South Korea on orders from their government.
(And lest we forget, North Korea is now threatening to inflict more punishment on poor Aijalon Gomes, the Massachusetts native who is unjustly imprisoned in North Korea because he made the foolish — yet hardly criminal — mistake of walking up to North Korean border guards and handing them a petition calling for the end of its human rights atrocities. If only Gomes’s senior Senator had half the diplomatic talent he images himself to have….)
If this isn’t the state sponsorship of terrorism, I really don’t know what is, although I suspect it’s the State Department’s General Counsel that hasn’t found the statutory definition for “international terrorism.” This isn’t just bad policy, it’s also incompetent lawyering. If the Obama Administration doesn’t have the analytical or testicular wherewithall to call these acts what they are, I question the seriousness of its policies with respect to North Korea or terrorism.
Worse, this is terrible diplomacy. De-listing North Korea may have been the obsessive pursuit of Chris Hill, Sung Kim, and the other nerds at the East Asia Bureau, but it badly damaged relations with Japan. Now, after we’ve just awakened from the bad dream of Hatoyama and Futenma, we’re going to kick the Japanese in the teeth. The issue of Japanese who are believed to be held (or buried) in North Korea is a matter of extreme emotional sensitivity to the Japanese people, one that transcends partisan affiliation. And if that’s not bad enough, Mrs. Clinton is letting word of this decision leak out as President Lee feels his impotence at the United Nations, is limited in his response to the attack because of North Korean threats, and needs a strong signal of U.S. backing after the sinking of the Cheonan. To send this signal, of all times, as the two nations mark the 60th anniversary of the Korean War, only serves to symbolize that in a moment of crisis, this administration doesn’t have South Korea’s back in one symbolically and financially important way that costs the United States nothing.
Just imagine the reaction if the Bush Administration had been so arrogant and inconsiderate toward longstanding U.S. allies. Now tell me what possible countervailing interest we will advance by keeping North Korea off this list, aside from helping Kim Jong Il evade the legal, financial, and diplomatic consequences of his sponsorship of terrorism. What a terribly dangerous time to send a signal of such profound weakness.
Posted by Joshua on June 24, 2010 at 3:57 pm · Filed under WTF?
In our last episode, we learned that Kim Jong-Il, cutting an “august” figure in his “modest-looking suits,” has “gripped people’s imagination and become a global vogue,” which I guess you can’t call entirely untrue. In today’s episode, women everywhere are tantalized by the thought of wrapping themselves in fashion designed by a government ministry. Da!
The Garment Institute of the Ministry of Foodstuff and Daily Necessities Industry has recently designed new models of dresses suitable for women’s aesthetic tastes. The institute, classifying women’s national dresses into gala and wedding ones, has developed them more beautifully and comfortably.
Holiday dresses have a mix of gorgeous and sober colors and different patterns, with girl’s skirt being a little shorter.
“Gorgeous” meaning olive drab, and “sober” meaning dark gray, with light gray and black currently under study for the next five-year plan.
Wedding dresses are charming with floral decorations for head and breast.
Two acronyms I’d never thought I’d see together: KCNA and NSFW. Now that’s something I have to see (Curtis? Naenara, perhaps?).
The institute has also designed suits, one-piece dresses, overcoats and other seasonal garments for women of different ages and figures.
Conspicuous in the designs of winter clothes is an overcoat with colorful sashes in its sleeves, collar and breast, fur-covered collar and woolen hat.
Meanwhile, the institute has made designs of various patterns including those of flowers.
Flowers, too? The decadence!
It is now widely acknowledged that orderly socialism has done much to advance the art of fashion. Here, we see some designs produced by the U.S.S.R. Ministry of Bulk Proletarian Commodity Production, Bureau of Textile Fabrication:
Didn’t Wendy’s just have the best commercials in those days?
Posted by Joshua on June 24, 2010 at 10:30 am · Filed under Sports
Should we fear for the North Korean soccer team? Professor Sung Yoon Lee, in a must read analysis for GQ, explains why (at least in North Korean terms) their fate isn’t likely to be a severe as some people fear — and if there is a Korea authority who truly belongs in GQ, it’s Sung Yoon Lee. I tend to think that if North Korea was using the World Cup as a propaganda ploy, then it has to know that if it does something terrible to the players or the coach, the word would get out. They’re not as good at keeping secrets as they used to be.
The history of repressive regimes using sports for propaganda purposes goes back at least as far as Berlin in 1936, and it was common knowledge that the Soviets sent minders to watch their traveling athletes carefully, prevent defections, and limit their exposure to our decadent ways:
In fact, I don’t think the World Cup turned out to be quite the propaganda success North Korea had hoped for, given the immediate speculation that its players would face punishment after the big loss to Portugal. This story, for example, says that the “World Cup seems like good publicity for the rogue state,” but then links to a photo essay called, “The Countless Luxury Mansions Of Kim Jong-il.” Nice.
In any event, I still question FIFA’s decision to invite the North Koreans to the game at all.
Update:Robert links to a very good essay in Newsweek that reaches conclusions similar to those I had here.
Golly, this was a nice thing of President Lee to say:
As we commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Korean War, I offer our deepest, most sincere gratitude to all the American veterans and their families for what they did. The friendship and bond that we share is reinforced by the strong and robust military alliance, which in turn was the basis for the Republic of Korea’s remarkable twin achievements of the past six decades, namely achieving economic growth and becoming a true liberal democracy. [President Lee Myung-Bak, Atlanta Journal-Constitution]
If only President Lee’s own constituents actually believed this. I was ready to suggest that it’s them President Lee should be addressing until I saw that George W. Bush had emerged as our newest global goodwill ambassador. The former president, who is best known and loved by Koreans everywhere as the man who removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, was in Seoul the other day, also commemorating the anniversary, where he addressed a crowd of 60,000 (!) at a prayer meeting in a stadium:
“While South Korea prospers, the people of North Korea have suffered profoundly,” he said, adding communism had resulted in “dire poverty, mass starvation and brutal suppression”. “In recent years the suffering has been compounded by the leader who wasted North Korea’s precious few resources on personal luxuries and nuclear weapons programmes.” [….]
Bush, a devout Christian, described the 1950-53 conflict as an unforgotten war, saying “an act of unprovoked aggression” had led to an unnatural division in Northeast Asia. “It will never be forgotten by those who served and by those who were saved, and it must not be forgotten by the world,” he said.
The presence of US troops in South Korea showed Washington’s strong commitment to defending its ally, he said, adding the South’s prosperity is “a shining example of the power of freedom and faith”. [AFP]
As all 60,000 of those in attendance thought, as if with one mind: Just as long as our daughters stay out of Hongdae at night. Oddly enough, not all Koreans truly appreciate President Bush for his conciliatory outreach toward Kim Jong Il or his aid for the North Korean people, at least before he was ousted by a cabal of neocon hard-liners in 2009:
“It is just nonsense to bring to the Korean War prayer meeting the former US President Bush, who started the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and have him give testimony,” they said in a joint statement.
Funny how these people never seem to hold grudges against those who start wars in Korea. But then, they’re not really anti-war. They’re just on the other side.
And in related news, Foreign Policy Magazine has voted Kim Jong Il the world’s worst dictator this year, easily edging out Robert Mugabe.
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 have mentally run through their checklist of the Army Values and realized that the first three are “loyalty,” “duty,” and “respect.” As many others have already said, the military leadership must respect and subordinate itself to the elected political branches. It is of no consequence that you might just agree with the substance of McChrystal’s views about, say, Joe Biden (if I’m guessing right, so does President Obama in his tiny sphere of privacy). The decision to fire McChrystal was an obvious one, and President Obama seems to have done it with about the right combination of force and tact.
The harder question was replacing McChrystal without confusing the command structure or the flow of operations, or suggesting a lack of commitment to the greater effort. Here, the choice of General Petraeus clearly satisfies the latter criterion, and probably both of the former ones.
Here, I marvel at how much this President’s views about Iraq have shifted since he, his Vice President, and his Secretary of State were senators using Petraeus as a campaign foil to please their anti-war base. To President Obama’s eternal credit as a patriot, he abandoned that base in their alternative reality, one in which their desperate quest for defeat does not have consequences for the rest of us. I can’t think of a more cogent statement about the state of matters in Iraq today than the choice of Petraeus as the man who might turn things around in Afghanistan, too. I hope he can do it. This time, we are unburdened of the silly post-hoc arguments that hobbled us in Iraq. This time, there’s no argument that Afghanistan has nothing to do with the security of the United States, no hyperventilation that some long-gone president and his oily cabal fed us all a lie to corner the global rug market. People plotted the murder of 3,000 of us from Afghanistan. They’ll do far worse if we choose to let them.
Still, we should remember that Petraeus’s success in Iraq is also a function of luck. He showed up at the right time. Most societies grow tired of wars after a few years, especially wars fought where they live. War fatigue almost defeated us, but it was probably a very big part of what made conditions right for the Awakening. Still, let’s not take away from Petraeus that he had the the savvy to sense opportunity and exploit it.
It is fairly common knowledge that Kim Jong Il deprives and starves his people to buy luxuries for himself and build monuments to his rule, but I did not know how many more luxuries and monuments he can now afford by selling luxuries and monuments to other statist tyrants. 