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Category: Appeasement

February 11, 2008

S. Korea Still Denies Paying Ransom to Taliban; Larry Craig Still Not Gay

After months of wildly inconsistent estimates ($2 million? $20 million?) of just how much ransom the South Koreans paid for their two dozen-odd hostages in Afghanistan, the Taliban is saying the actual amount was “at least” $4 million. This final, authoritative answer is brought to you by an unidentified “senior Taliban commander,” so we need not ever speak of this again. Until the next time it happens: If we were going to free them without any payment, [the hostage taking]...
Categories An Alliance?/Appeasement/Terrorism (NK)
February 8, 2008

The Morally Retarded Lorin Maazel

I’ve  already said that I’m  ambivalent about the visit of the New York Philharmonic to North Korea.  They will play some  good music,  which will probably do little harm and little good.   If we would just accept the music on its face value without injecting politics into it, this visit wouldn’t be taking on  such a  pernicious odor.  Is that too much to ask?  Apparently. Spurred on by the mendacious appeaser  Christopher Hill, the Philharmonic  now imagines itself as an...
Categories Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Human Rights/WTF?
February 8, 2008

Christopher Hitchens on the Rice-Lefkowitz Flap

Since Hitchens may have had something to do with goading Lefkowitz into making his original comments, I’ve been wondering how he would react to what resulted. I like to imagine that my little essay stung Lefkowitz a bit. At any event, he got up on his hind legs at the American Enterprise Institute in the third week of January and made an explicit criticism of the Bush administration that he serves. The State Department’s insistence on “diplomacy,” he argued, had...
Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/U.S. Politics
February 4, 2008

N. Korea Demands Japan Drop Abductions Issue

Does this sound like a nation that has renounced terrorism? North Korea-Japan relations will never improve if Japan continues to link their improvement with a bilateral dispute over North Korea’s past abductions of Japanese nationals, North Korea’s state-run media said Thursday. In a lengthy commentary, the Korean Central News Agency said that North Korea has not forgiven Japan for forcing many Korean women into sexual slavery and taking many Korean men to Japan during World War II, and that it...
Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Japan & Korea/Terrorism (NK)
January 28, 2008

SOTU Speech Fails to Mention North Korea

I heard “Korea,” and I think I  probably heard  “North” somewhere, but I did not hear “North Korea.”   It’s  nice that President Bush stands against genocide in  Sudan.  Seriously.  It would be better than “nice” if  Bush would do something meaningful to stop it.  It’s too bad, of course, that he chose to end his term as  an abettor of  a genocidal regime  in North Korea.  North Korea was even left out of his catch-all  list of repressive  nations  abroad. ...
Categories Appeasement/U.S. Politics
January 26, 2008

Fox: White House May Accept Incomplete N. Korean Declaration

“Foreign diplomatic sources” have told Fox News that Chris Hill has floated the idea of accepting a declaration that omits information about North Korea’s proliferation — to Syria, for  instance —  or its suspected uranium enrichment programs. With North Korea almost a month overdue on its obligation to provide a complete and correct declaration of all its nuclear programs and materiel, the Bush administration — under increasing pressure from American conservatives to take a harder line with Pyongyang, or abandon the...
Categories Appeasement/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
January 19, 2008

Good Riddance, Ministry of Silly Talks

After weeks of conflicting reports, Lee Myung Bak’s transition team had made it official:  the UniFiction  Ministry goes to the ash-heap, along with  the Ministries  of Truth Information and Communication, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Science and Technology, and the Anti-Sex League Gender Equality and Family.  The  Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade will become a much larger  and more powerful  Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Unification.  As a whole, the government will shrink by more than 5%, about 7,000 employees....
Categories Appeasement/Korean Politics
January 19, 2008

Good Riddance, Nick Burns

Nicholas Burns, the State Department’s number three diplomat and the man  whom  a reliable  source told me was the one  who blocked  implementation of the North Korean  Human Rights Act,  will step down for “personal reasons.”  Alas, the reasons are not known to include painful bleeding hemorrhoids, and so I must go on doubting  God’s existence.  Burns’s legacy will include such notable accomplishments as  Iran’s nuclear bomb.  His replacement is the eponymous William Burns  (no relation) who has enjoyed such...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Washington Views
January 13, 2008

State Dep’t Denies Groundhog Sighting

The only thing worse than shifting deadlines is no deadlines:  The United States on Friday again denied setting a new target date for North Korea to give a full accounting of its nuclear programs that would replace a missed year-end deadline.   ”We are continuing to work towards the end of getting a declaration in, but there has been no new deadline set by the United States, by the North Koreans or by any other party in the six-party talks,” State...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
January 9, 2008

Honor, Delayed

President-Elect Lee Myung Bak will finally  honor six South Korean sailors killed in a North Korean attack on their patrol boat on  June 29, 2002.  The sailors’ surviving family members were embittered, believing that their government and outgoing  President Roh Moo Hyun had  snubbed  them to appease Kim Jong Il.  One young widow  even left South Korea for good: Kim Jong-seon, the widow of Petty Officer Han Sang-guk […]  turned her back on her homeland Sunday and boarded a flight...
Categories Appeasement/ROK Military
January 8, 2008

The Restoration

No one should take pleasure in seeing another person worry about  losing his job, but there  is much to celebrate about how Lee Myung-Bak’s new administration is shaping up.  Some doubt is now cast on earlier reports that  the UniFiction Ministry would be abolished, although it’s clear that  its size and influence will be reduced  dramatically.  Its days as a foreign policy player are over,  and the the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MOFAT) will regain its foreign policy...
Categories An Alliance?/Appeasement/U.S. & Korea
January 7, 2008

North Korea’s Moment of Untruth, and Chris Hill’s

Secretary Rice, embrace your legacy.  Agreed Framework 2.0  has  stalled, and probably for good.    Last month,  we  thought we were approaching North Korea’s moment of truth.  Last week, with the  matter of that overdue  declaration,  it was still possible (though gullible)  to  believe they’d still  offer it in due course.  Certainly that was the impression the White House was feeding us when it said on January 3rd that it was “going to keep hammering away” at getting the declaration...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
January 3, 2008

UniFiction Ministry to be abolished?

[Update:   The Marmot  is giddy about this.]   Had George Orwell lived in modern-day Korea, reality would have  mooted his most sardonic fiction.  After all, a  lying Ministry of Truth  is only marginally sillier than  a Ministry of Unification whose primary function is  keeping the slaves on the other side of the mine fields through the lavish financing of their overseers.  Today comes word that president-elect Lee Myung-Bak may put an end to this cruel joke by abolishing the...
Categories Appeasement/Korean Politics
January 2, 2008

Condi Going to Pyongyang?

Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard, citing a report from NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, reports that Secretary Rice intends to accompany the New York Philharmonic to Pyongyang this February.  I’m agnostic on the visit of the orchestra, but  a visit  from America’s senior diplomat will rightly be interpreted as an expression of American approval. This begs a question:  approval of what, exactly?  North Korea is ignoring its obligations under Agreed Framework 2.0, is still  lying about the full extent of its...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy
January 1, 2008

2007: A Lost Year

[Update 2 Jan 08:   “North Korea failed to fulfill its October promise to declare all its nuclear programs by the end of 2007 — and the United States did not make a big deal out of it.” — WaPo, Blaine Harden] SO ENDS THE YEAR 2007, with this terse statement from the State Department spokesman: In September 2005, the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea agreed on a Joint Statement with North Korea that charted the way...
Categories Appeasement/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
December 30, 2007

Ralph Cossa is wrong; Pressure on North Korea worked, when applied

Generally, I agree with  Robert Koehler  that Lee Myung Bak’s landslide victory was anything but a mandate for a better, more moral North Korea policy.  It will put  less irrational people in charge, but the policy will not be the improvement that Nicholas Eberstadt hopes for unless Kim Jong Il gets seriously on the wrong side of  Lee Myung-Bak’s temper. Why?   First, the election was all about money.  Second, Lee Myung Bak is all about money.  Third, South Korean voters  …...
Categories Appeasement/Korean Politics/Money Laundering
December 30, 2007

Jay who? Christopher Hitchens, President Bush, and the betrayal of the North Korean people

Christopher Hitchens is certainly one of our age’s most compelling thinkers and one of the English language’s best writers. I disagree with him about plenty of things; who could say otherwise? Hitchens’s greatest logical strength is his consistent argument for the moral superiority of freedom — for all of its flaws of application — over slavery. That is a woefully unfashionable idea among popinjays in Europe and America who are too sodden with the smug confidence of liberties taken for...
Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/U.S. Politics