Anju Links for 28 July 2008
WHAT’S MISSING HERE?
“For the past seven years, we’ve spoken out against human rights abuses by tyrannical regimes like those in Iran, Sudan and Syria and Zimbabwe,” Bush said in a speech here titled “the Freedom Agenda Introduction.” “We’ve spoken candidly about human rights with nations with whom we’ve got good relations, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia and China,” he said. [Yonhap]
Of course, it’s not as if Bush did much to materially advance freedom in any of those nations, either.
OPPOSITION PARTIES IN KOREA ARE DENOUNCING Lee Myung Bak’s government for spending a measly $4.5M in public funds to refute the viral bullshit about U.S. beef and mad cow disease:
The advertisements paid for by the government were televised and published via broadcasters and newspapers between May 5 to June 27, Kim said, citing government records. The ministries of agriculture, health and culture published ads emphasizing that Koreans will be eating the same beef Americans eat, and that Seoul had secured sufficient safeguards in an additional agreement reached on June 21. [Yonhap]
So when, exactly, did accurate counterspeech become an excess in the face of widely accepted viral falsehoods, many of them spread by a government-funded media organization? Wouldn’t the funding for said disgraced media organization be a more appropriate subject of inquiry? If a society’s news media can’t be trusted to disseminate the truth — pretty clearly the case here — who exactly is supposed to lead the national conversation if not its elected leaders? This is idiocy, especially coming from the party that did so much to inflame the nonsense, and which feigned insult at the very idea of testing the braying of the stampeding herds with scientific inquiry.
BUT WE MUSTN’T POLITICIZE THE OLYMPICS: China and South Korea both deny that China will close the bridges between China and North Korea before the Olympics, but South Korea does confirm that China is stepping up its refugee cleansing operations in the border region:
In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao dismissed the Yonhap report as “totally groundless.” “Everything along the China-DPRK border is normal,” Liu said, referring to the North by the acronym for its formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
The NIS official, who asked not be named, citing an internal policy, told The Associated Press that China had no plans to close all bridge links with North Korea “out of concerns of diplomatic friction with North Korea.” The official also said China would not ask all North Koreans in China to leave, saying that Beijing plans to crack down on North Koreans who illegally stay in China and Beijing plans to restrict renewing visas for North Koreans. [AP, Kwangtae Kim]
PROBABLY IN RESPONSE TO COMMENTS from South Korea’s Defense Minister, characterizing North Korea as an “enemy” that poses a threat to national security, the North Koreans are squeezing traffic to the Kaesong Industrial Park:
North Korea has limited overland traffic entering the communist country from South Korea, citing inadequate communication infrastructure near the corridor leading to the Kaesong industrial complex, government sources said Thursday.
Sources said the new restrictions that limit traffic to 200 vehicles every 30 minutes in the Gyeongui corridor went into effect at 8:30 a.m., when the first group of vehicles is allowed to cross. The west coast corridor is used mainly by South Korean cars going to and from the Kaesong industrial complex in the North.
“They claimed that old communications links between the two Koreas made it hard for them to get the information needed to process more than 200 vehicles at their end,” a government official said. [Yonhap]
In tandem with North Korea’s otherwise inexplicable shooting of tourist Park Wang-ja at the Kumgang Tourist Project, these actions suggest a calculated North Korean decision to seize upon any available provocation to reduce interaction with South Korea, which had already been strictly controlled (though highly profitable for the North). The North may not realize that actions like these will permanently chill investors’ interest in Kaesong, which was already struggling.
North Korea must have concluded that it can afford to cut its own nose off despite its face because of the easing of U.S. sanctions. It’s enough to make you wonder how quickly those Japanese abductees would be released if North Korea’s seduction of our State Department were to fall apart. You could hardly blame the Japanese for stabbing us in the back at this point. Plus, there’s a whole world of potential replacement abductees out there.
The Defense Minister’s remarks suggest a reversal of the Roh-era shift in South Korea’s annual Defense White Paper, which had dropped the longstanding characterization of North Korea as the South’s “main enemy.” All of which should give some comfort to 29,500 Americans military personnel who might have wondered if they were there to protect South Korea from the Mongol Hordes or Hideyoshi.
AT THE SAME TIME THE NORTH KOREANS are restricting traffic to Kaesong, they’re attacking the South for suspending tours to Kumgang pending a transparent inquiry into Park Wang-Ja’s killing.
HERE’S ONE DAMN FINE PIECE of political satire, regarding Obama’s visit to Europe. Really, I see Europe’s love of Obama as about two degrees away from North Korea’s preference of him. While the latter is rooted in outright hostility toward America, the Soft Reich’s is, at best, ambivalent tit-biting. I have no use for Europe’s idea of what America should be, though I wonder to what extent it’s mostly fantasy. Would Obama spring Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the other occupants of Gitmo to a quiet exile in the Paris suburbs? Will he suddenly arm U.S. forces in Afghanistan with nerf guns and Chicago-style community activism? With even the AP declaring the end of major combat operations in Iraq, will Obama be able to get most of our forces out of there much faster than McCain would? For that matter, would Europe suddenly put real pressure on Iran or make a sufficient military contribution in Afghanistan? How would Obama dramatically alter the thousands of hard compromises we’ve made between civil liberties and our security if he’d assume political responsibility for making the wrong ones? Is there any substance at all to his vague promise to denuclearize the world when he’s unlikely to even denuclearize Iran or North Korea? Less may change than Europe pines for, but for now, Europe loves its image of Obama the way a shrewish ex loves her image of vasectomy.