Anju Links for 6/25

*   There’s another report that a  North Korean border guard has defected, only this time, he brought a few things with him:

At the time of arrest, Kim was armed with an automatic AK rifle, 5 magazines, 30 cartridges and [a]sword.  [Daily NK]  

Then, the Chinese caught him.  They’ll send him back to North Korea, where he’s certain to face a firing squad at 19 [because Koreans calculate age from the time of conception, he’s just 17 or 18 in Western terms].  The clear lesson:  resist, don’t let them take you alive, and take as many Chinese police with you as possible.  Is that really the message the Chinese want to send?  That’s going to be the result, because discipline among  the North Korean border guards  is unraveling.  The force has had desertions, and even mass desertions, but incidents in which guards defect with their weapons are still rare.  That may change.

*   At a press conference yesterday, Chris Hill was asked about the timeline for implementing AF 2.0.  At the end of this year, he expects Yongbyon (but only Yongbyon) to be shut down, sealed, and disabled.  He also expects the “working groups” driving us toward a full normalization of relations to be functioning, but just functioning —  no benchmarks for progress.  Hill seemed to suggest that a full declaration of North Korea’s nuclear programs would be “the next phase,” but he didn’t say when, specifically, he expected that full declaration.  Rather than insisting on a declaration  re-admitting the existence of  North Korea’s highly enriched uranium program, he said we need “clarity” on the issue.  When asked if the United States was now prepared to buy back North Korea’s nuclear weapons, Hill was conspicuously evasive.  Sorry, I can’t quote or link my source.  Summary:  the goal posts will continue to slip gently toward 2009 because we’re being  vague about our expectations.  We’re either approaching the Moment of Truth or the long stall into the election season. 

*   Christopher Hitchens talks about limits of pacifying Muslim rage.  He concludes that there are none:

Rage Boy keenly looks forward to anger, while we worriedly anticipate trouble, and fret about etiquette, and prepare the next retreat. If taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean living at the pleasure of Rage Boy, and that I am not prepared to do.  [Slate]

Do not miss:  Hitchens’s link to the photo essay of rage boy — one pissed-off Kashmiri Muslim who has posed for what must be a dozen different news photos. 

*   Al-Qaeda terror against the civilian population of Iraq is not “sectarian violence,” and it is dishonest to describe it as such.  It’s also dishonest to obscure al-Qaeda’s role in so much of it, but that’s meant to steer us away from a logical conclusion:  we may be tempted to run away from warring factions of faceless thugs, but we can’t just run away from al-Qaeda.