Not Ready

I have resigned myself to a Lee Myung Bak presidency in Korea, something I can do without much difficulty because (a) there will be much amusement, hilarity, scandal, and great blog material,  and  (b) because I’m not South Korean [Update:   or North Korean]. 

Superficially, Lee is the furthest “right” of the major candidates, and while  South Korea’s idea of “right” may  not be my thing, it’s  the linear opposite of South Korea’s idea of  “left,” which I unreservedly  despise.  Concepts of “left” and “right” don’t translate well from Korean.  I’ve noticed that American liberals don’t often like Roh; they find him generally  inept and  too cozy with Kim Jong Il’s atrocities.  American conservatives wince at Lee’s love of massive quasi-Stalinist public works projects,  his lack of personal gravitas, and the sense that  as he drifts off to sleep each night,  he dreams of waving at columns of tanks from a reviewing stand.  That, or columns of scantily clad maidens in tall white boots (maybe we have more in common than I’d thought).

Still, we can  take comfort from knowing that  a Lee Myung Bak presidency will not be a Roh Moo Hyun presidency.  Roh’s historical legacies have been irreparable damage to its highly beneficial relationship to the United States, a creeping Finlandization by China, and  the lion’s share of a  seven-billion dollar contribution to a putting nukes in the hands of the world’s most ruthless oligarchy. 

President Roh Moo-hyun on Saturday told South Korean expatriates in New Zealand that preventing North Korea’s possible collapse is a “very important strategy” for our government because the North “will never wage war unless attacked or collapsing.” Seoul is therefore “concerned” about the suspension of humanitarian aid to the North under UN Security Council Resolution 1718, he added.  [Chosun Ilbo]

If  the former human rights lawyer has  actually read 1718 (full text here),  he  must have meant to say “unconditional cash payments,” because there is a specific exception for humanitarian aid in 1718.  Not that Roh really cares much either way in practice, because his government has ignored 1718 since Day One.  I’m unwilling to believe Roh doesn’t know this, but it’s often hard  to tell whether Roh is being dishonest or simply ingorant.  We know that Lee is dishonest and no intellectual, but hardly anyone doubts his guile.  I sense that Koreans have grown weary of fresh faces.  They want guile again. 

The hopes of those who voted for Roh were once so much higher.  Five years ago, Roh was … a candidate so unpopular within his own party that he’d caused it to split, but four and a half years ago, he was the fresh-faced  boy who would lead Korea to reunification by throwing off the Yankee yoke.  Today, Korea is more dangerous and divided than ever, and South Korea is more vulnerable to the whims of foreign powers, not less.  Roh has often been compared to Jimmy Carter, a fresh-faced American boy who who promised a post-Watergate return to clean government and a quasi-pacifist foreign policy focused on human rights.   Clean government did not ensue  (Bert Lance, Hamilton Jordan), and overseas, the Carter years were boom times for dictatorship and  terrorism.   It was Iran, a problem nation  that has been kidnapping and  killing Americans  ever since, that finally broke Carter of his illusory ideas about American power, its uses, and the importance of sustaining it.

So it tends to go with elevating fresh faces to high office.   What has me thinking about this is Barack Obama, who managed to say something I approved of last week, which is what politicians try to do in election years.  Since then, he’s taken a lot of criticism for his enthusiastic  youbetcha after being asked whether he would “be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria,  Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea.”  A voter unfamiliar with diplomacy may not see the naivete of this, and an especially savvy voter could even see opportunity in such a meeting, since it could be a bold way to challenge an unpopular dictator on his home turf,  including in the eyes of his own people, and bring attention to that dictator’s worst abuses in the very  way that Bill Richardson never would.  It might have been possible to deny that Obama had  shown himself as Not Ready, until this:

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.

“Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done,” Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press.

“We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea,” he said.

Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois, said it’s likely there would be increased bloodshed if U.S. forces left Iraq.  [AP]

A moment later, Obama denied that U.S. forces would leave “precipitiously” because there would be other U.S. forces in the region,  forces Obama  presumes would  neither invite nor inspire yet  more terrorism or casualties.  Does anyone think that President Obama, having declared Iraq a hopeless disaster (and having thus helped make it so) would re-invade for the same reason he just told us wouldn’t prevent him from withdrawing?  Does anyone think the people of this nation or any other will look favorably  this leap from the frying pan to the holocaust?   James Taranto adds:

Mr. Obama is engaging in sophistry. By his logic, if America lacks the capacity to intervene everywhere there is ethnic killing, it has no obligation to intervene anywhere–and perhaps an obligation to intervene nowhere. His reasoning elevates consistency into the cardinal virtue, making the perfect the enemy of the good.

Further, he elides the distinction between an act of omission (refraining from intervention in Congo and Darfur) and an act of commission (withdrawing from Iraq). The implication is that although the U.S. has had a military presence in Iraq since 1991, the fate of Iraqis is not America’s problem.

Seldom  are the unfitness and its consequence captured in a single frame so far before their realization.   Obama’s campaign seems to have hit its high water mark, although Hillary Clinton is so widely disliked by so many voters that we can eliminate the possibility that her campaign will “catch fire.”  This certainly is a depressing pair of prospects, unless your name is Al Gore (yes, he will run).  Much depends on what happens next month, when every thug in Iraq will launch an all-out offensive in anticipation of General Petraeus’s report.  Although  al-Qaeda is hated  by almost all Iraqis, and despite the fact that its  military capability is  evaporating on the battlefield,  it  could still succeed at  making  Iraq the next Cambodia, making Afghanistan the next Iraq, and making America the next Israel.  But they can’t do it without the help of invertebrate American politicians.

[Update:   Obama,  sensing that he has hurt himself,  spins tough.]

Which brings us back to North Korea, where Roh Moo Hyun offers  his all-inclusive list of circumstances — “unless attacked or collapsing” —  in which Kim Jong Il might go for broke.  It seems unlikely that a collapsing regime would  try to save itself  by drawing in yet more enemies,  but Roh  omits a far likelier  circumstance: a clear signal that American power was paralyzed and unwilling to deter the North, even from the air or sea.  The worst possible circumstance would be to realize that only  after a North Korean first strike  aimed at U.S. forces, done with the calculated intent of knocking us out of the war politically.   Whether this would turn out to be a miscalculation is debatable, but irrelevant.   Our objective  is to increase our power to deter at  the lowest possible cost  by quietly projecting strength  and reducing  vulnerabilities that  undermine that power.  Barack Obama’s naive view of our predatory world  could be the greatest of them.  The potential costs are incalculable.

See also:

*   North Korean soldiers are turning to traditional  highway robbery.  Theft and marauding by soldiers is not a new trend in North Korea, and it’s difficult to know whether it’s a rising one.

*   Their government prefers more organized methods.  It has summarily  demanded a 15% raise in the “wages” paid to the workers at Kaesong, although it’s not clear how much of it actually trickles down to the workers after Kim Jong Il takes his cut, which would naturally follow an expensive reconversion  to North Korean won at the official exchange rate.

*   If it’s censorship to arrest someone for burning a flag or immersing a cross in urine, why isn’t it censorship  to  arrest a man who immersed a Koran in a toilet — at a university, no less?  There are times when I think there’s less freedom of thought at our universities than in  most  medium security prisons.

*   The Daily NK that North Korea is stepping up the brazenness of its songun (“military first”) propaganda in the South.  How adherents of that sort of aggressive, militaristic, repressive thinking ever got the name “peace activists” baffles me.

*   Congratulations to the Iraqi soccer team on winning the Asia cup.  Its last two big wins were against South Korea and Saudi Arabia.