12 February 2010: A Blissful Absence of Unifictions

I’m a sports agnostic and the Olympics especially boring to me, but I’m gratified there will be no wretch-inducing hippie unifiction of the Korean Olympic teams this year. The dishonesty of it — the moral decision to intentionally overlook what the North Korean regime really represents — always grated on me.

South Korea says the time is not ripe for cross-border tourism. A good case could be made that the exorbitant price the North Koreans charge for these tours triggers the financial accounting requirements of UNSCR 1874. Good luck getting the North Koreans to go along with that.

Let’s mark the goalposts now, so we can figure out how far they’ve moved later on: “Sanctions on North Korea will not be removed until Pyongyang returns to disarmament talks and takes serious steps towards scrapping its nuclear arms programme, the foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan said on Thursday.”

Those sanctions show signs of working. Another of those signs is that the North Koreans seem to have another harebained scheme for luring in harebrained foreign investors every month lately. These schemes all tend to end badly for everyone but the North Koreans, though I’m somewhat surprised to see Orascom still hanging in there.

Is Al Qaeda bankrupt? I certainly hope so, and given the low expense of carrying out a terrorist attack, it says a lot for Treasury that we’ve done so much damage to their financing. Frankly, Treasury has emerged as a more useful instrument of foreign policy than our State Department. I suspect that plenty of people in the State Department are painfully aware — and deeply resentful — of this.

Success has a thousand fathers: Joe Biden, who opposed the surge and wanted to partition Iraq — apparently because he thinks it worked so well in Bosnia — is now taking credit for the stability the Surge brought.

A Google-inspired Chinese New Year e-card.