Open Sources

The Grand National Party officially enters election mode with the old “Northern Wind” play:

South Korea’s ruling party chief crossed the border into North Korea to tour a joint inter-Korean industrial complex on Friday, saying it is “a politician’s obligation” to break the deadlock in inter-Korean relations. [….]

The one-day trip by Rep. Hong Joon-pyo, chairman of the ruling Grand National Party, comes after he called for Seoul to exercise flexibility on its policy toward Pyongyang to try to improve their frayed ties.

Someone asked me what I thought about South Korea’s new, allegedly more moderate Unification Minister. I suspect his appointment and supposed moderation are mostly optical distortion, but we’ll just have to see what policies he advances. I wouldn’t look for Lee’s government to do anything especially controversial for the next year, and the visit to Kaesong is meant to send a message to South Korean voters that the GNP favors consistency. The problem with this is that it reinforces North Korea’s belief that North-South tensions are a political liability to the GNP, and will motivate it to act accordingly.

Even so, if Lee Myung Bak goes through with this, it will be the best thing he does as President:

South Korea says it will begin producing Korean-language Internet television and radio broadcasts later this month, aimed at raising public interest in the unification of North and South Korea.

The Yonhap news agency said its Internet broadcasting operation will begin September 26 with video content about unification issues. Yonhap says the Unification Ministry plans to produce weekly news reports and sitcom episodes about the latest unification developments.

Here’s some more information about the equipment they’ll use to broadcast. A willingness to openly broadcast from South Korean territory to North Korea represents a significant step forward, and the North Koreans’ latest war threats affirm that the North sees this as a threat to its stability. Still, it won’t change the game until South Korea is willing to host networks that let ordinary North Koreans talk to each other, and to people outside North Korea. Still, foreign news continues to penetrate North Korea in the form of DVD’s and thumb drives. This isn’t the brainwashed North Korea of the 1980’s anymore.

For the record, I doubt that Kim Jong Eun will live much longer than his dad, but it’s getting difficult to deny that he’s being deified and set up as a successor.

Oh, goody:

Last year, a U.N. report suggested that impoverished, reclusive North Korea might have supplied Iran as well as Syria and Myanmar with banned atomic technology. In what could be a sign of this, a German newspaper last month reported that North Korea had provided Iran with a computer programme as part of intensified cooperation that could help the Islamic state build nuclear weapons.

“There are reports and rumours, which governments and the IAEA (the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency) have not denied, indicating that there may be a track record of bilateral nuclear cooperation between North Korea and Iran,” Hibbs said.

Who else noticed a glaring omission in AP’s self-congratulation over its growing entanglement with North Korea’s mendacious official media?

More North Korean students are abandoning their homeland than ever. Well, wouldn’t you?

Why do some people so stubbornly adhere to the belief that Kim Jong Il is a closet reformer, despite the fact that the available evidence overwhelmingly says otherwise? I can only think they do so based not on any real evidence, but because if it isn’t true, everything they’ve told us for the last decade was completely wrong.

If it’s such a high priority, why don’t more people know you exist?

More reports that hungry soldiers are marauding civilian food supplies, but this time, the regime is trying to interfere.

So I can’t say I’m at all surprised that the Syrian opposition had grown tired of just taking Assad’s bullets and the vicariously masochistic counsel of Europeans and Americans who still urge them to reject violence at all costs. But it is the Syrians who are actually paying those costs, and they have shown far more patience with a strategy of non-violence than any bystander has a right to expect. Gauzy ideas like (not again) diplomatic pressure on Russia and China, and (brace yourself for this one) making dictatorship an international crime will assuredly fail to protect the Syrian people or advance their legitimate aspirations, because there is no way to give any of these idealistic notions effect without an eventual resort to force of arms. They can’t be enforced against uncooperative states, including those that happen to sit on the U.N. Security Council.

The present reality of Syria offers two alternatives: a long civil war, or a short one of the sort that seems to be in its final stages in Libya. The longer that war lasts, the more radicalized its warring factions will become, the more factions there will be, the more difficult it will become to reconcile them for multiple generations, and the longer portions of Syria will be ungovernable. If the reports of significant defections from the Syrian Army are true, it suggests that there may still be a means to empower a non-radicalized, relatively cohesive institution that aligns itself with the aspirations of the people. We have Libya as a recent example of an imperfect but effective military alliance between armed citizens and a coalition of states supporting (if nothing more) their inherent right not to be slaughtered in the streets. Such an alliance would be in our interests as well as theirs. The overthrow of the Assad regime would have a series of vastly beneficial secondary consequences, including undermining Iran’s malicious influence, removing a source of instability in Iraq, weakening Hamas and Hezbollah, and as a further consequence, improving the prospects for the rise of more stable and peaceful states in Palestine and Lebanon that are a prerequisite to effective diplomacy. A strong demonstration of international support for the opposition might be all that is needed to encourage Syria’s fence-sitters in the Army and the business class to switch sides and topple the regime.

But despite the hopeful example of Libya as an effective alliance between armed citizens and foreign, the more persistent tradition for democracies is to dither. One reason to expect dithering is that the leaders of the United States and France are both weakened politically. That is partially a function of the isolationism that tends to affect even non-fringe Republicans when Democrats occupy the White House. Which means our last window of opportunity to realize a less chaotic Middle East will soon close.