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January 16, 2007

Segye Ilbo: Goh Kun Will Not Run

At a press conference tomorrow, Goh will supposedly make it official.  [Update:  he made it official.] First, Goh was Korea’s too-short vacation in what seemed a lot like reality.  Later, for exactly 15 minutes, Goh was the Paris Hilton of Korean politics:  arousing to a desperate, lonely few, whose adoration couldn’t quite mask the fact that he was just more of the same talentless, plasticky pap  we’ve seen so many times before.  As with Hilton, a merciful God will allow...
Categories Korean Politics
January 15, 2007

The China Veto

[Updated below]   For those who still doubt that the South Korean government would bow to another government’s sensitivities to cancel an artistic performance — witness the debate and denial over the censorship of “Yoduk Story” — I suppose we can now put those doubts to rest. On January 7, several major South Korean media published editorials that criticized the Korean government for kowtowing to the Chinese communist regime by canceling the New Tang Dynasty’s (NTDTV) New Year Spectacular in...
Categories Anti-Americanism/Censorship/China & Korea/Korean Law/Korean Society/U.S. & Korea
January 12, 2007

Beyond Empty Threats

  Yes, Stealth fighters have some value in deterring a North Korean  first strike, if we think that’s a possibility, but I do not believe that any weapon in the U.S. military arsenal (with this possible exception) can deter or prevent a North Korean nuclear test.  The threat of a direct, large-scale  use of force by either the United States or North Korea against the other  is an empty threat.  The conventional Korean War has been a standoff since 1953. ...
Categories An Alliance?/NK Military/Resistance/ROK Military/U.S. Military
January 12, 2007

Fortunately, No Translators Were Present

Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, stated that the new South Korean president must be “sensitive to the needs of the (Asia-Pacific) region, in addition to thinking about North-South relations.” …. Washington expects the new Korean administration to think “about working closely with Tokyo and Washington in terms of joint approaches, in terms of what’s going on in North Korea,” he told Yonhap News Agency after meeting with Kim Geun-tae, chairman of the ruling Uri Party, at Kim’s parliament...
Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
January 12, 2007

Donga Ilbo Interview: David Straub

Straub, a State Department expert on Korea and Japan who has been a member of our six-party negotiating team, will spend an unspecified amount of time at an unspecified university — the report seems to have been mangled by an editor —  doing the heroic work of openly questioning Korea’s historical mythology: “I would like to teach historical issues such as Katsura-Taft Secret Agreement (a secret treaty between Japan and the U.S. The U.S. recognized Japanese control of the Korean...
Categories America/Anti-Americanism/Diplomacy/U.S. & Korea
January 11, 2007

Lefkowitz on Kaesong: ‘Material support for a rogue government, its nuclear ambitions, and its human rights atrocities.’

[Updates Below; and a big welcome to  everyone coming in from Gateway  Pundit.]   Ambassador Jay Lefkowitz, the  U.S. Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea,  has an excellent new op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (thanks to a reader!) that will provoke an absolute  Category 5 sh*tstorm  between the United States and South Korea, and for the best of reasons.  Without question, the State Department and the Administration have not always lived up the high ideals the Special...
Categories "United" Nations/Human Trafficking/NK Economics/U.S. & Korea/WMD
January 10, 2007

Gov’t Investigates Misuse of Funds It Gave to ‘Civic’ Groups

I’ve previously written about the South Korean government’s provision of $5.2  billion in state funds to 149 different  hippie communes, drum circles,  and commie spy cells “civic” groups, only to have it revealed that some of those groups had a history of organized political violence.  The worst offender was South Korea’s largest labor organization, the ardently pro-North Korean and anti-American Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, and the worst of the violence was over the government’s  costly failure  to negotiate a...
Categories Anti-Americanism/Korean Law/Korean Politics/The Fifth Column
January 10, 2007

Be Sure the Survivors Stay Buried

The South  Korean government is going all out to find the remains of its  Korean War dead:  The Defense Ministry has set up a task force to retrieve and identify the remains of the dead from the 1950-53 Korean War, officials said Wednesday. The team of 85 is modeled after the U.S. Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command. Its mission is to excavate remains and identify them through DNA analysis, they said. Col. Park Sin-han, chief of the team, said they would...
Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Korean War/ROK Military
January 10, 2007

German Newspaper: Supernotes Are a CIA Plot!

Things sure have gotten strange over in the Soft Reich when a major German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allemaigne Zeitung, theorizes — in a complete evidentiary vacuum, too — that North Korean supernotes are actually a secret CIA plot run  from from a printing house in the DC area  (Korean link).  The sole basis for this novel theory, besides the unshakeable conviction that George W. Bush must be responsible for all evil on earth, is that counterfeiting is simply too complex...
Categories Anti-Americanism/Counterfeiting/Europe/WMD
January 10, 2007

The Death of an Alliance, Part 62: South Korea’s Government (and North Korea’s Agents) Try to Veto USFK Restructuring

Update 1/10:   The Korean reaction to General Bell’s push-back has actually ranged from the restrained (the leftist Hankyoreh picked up Yonhap’s coverage, quoted below, but had no editorial comment) to the rueful (the conservative Chosun Ilbo’s reporting focused blame on its own government): A key U.S. military official handling Korea’s national security has voiced his discontent with an ally by using the word “fight”. After the press conference, Korea’s Ministry of National Defense rushed to contain the situation by saying...
Categories An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea
January 9, 2007

Will They or Won’t They?

The USFK Commander, General B.B. Bell, thinks another North Korean nuke test is “likely,” although the South Koreans remain in denial mode. Update:   As Kalani  points out in the comments, the headline arguably misstates what Bell actually said: There is no reason to believe that at some time in the future, when it serves their purposes, that they won’t test another one,” General B.B. Bell told a news conference. “So I suspect some day they will,” Bell said, adding...
Categories An Alliance?/U.S. Military/WMD
January 8, 2007

U.S. and Japan Quietly Prepare for North Korean Collapse

The Asahi Shimbun said the government has estimated that 100,000 to 150,000 people would arrive from North Korea and has been discussing with the United States how to deal with such a situation. Japan could only provide temporary shelter for several tens of thousands of displaced persons and would need to consider transferring them to third countries in such a case, the Asahi quoted government sources as saying. The refugees are expected to head to southern Japan from ports on...
Categories An Alliance?/Japan/Japan & Korea/Reconstruction/U.S. Military
January 7, 2007

August Statesmanship, Uri Style

Satan:  I thought I killed you! Saddam Hussein:  Well, where was I gonna go? Detroit? The Uri Party continues to breathe with the assistance of an iron lung and a feeding tube.  In that interminable moment after the first mortar round hits the chicken farm, its members are smacking into each other as they all rush for different exits.  Thus we have rebellions breaking out within the larger rebellion, led by the incumbent ruling party chair, Kim Geun-Tae.  And it’s...
Categories Korean Politics
January 7, 2007

Gerry Bevers, Tokdo, and the Heckler’s Veto

Kind words about your thoughts mean all the more when they come from someone like Kevin Kim, a/k/a The Big Hominid. Kevin, who reads and writes in fluent French, speaks fluent Korean, and creates art and books that people pay real money for, is what people call a “renaissance man.” He’s even created photoshop icons for pretty much every k-blog but this one…. Kevin links to what he calls my “awesome … ranticle” (thanks!) on the Marmot thread about the...
Categories Censorship/Japan & Korea/Korean Society
January 6, 2007

KCTU Thugs May Have to Switch to PVC Pipe

When I testified before the House International Relations Committee last September, one of the issues I raised was a report that the South Korean government was funding “civic groups” that habitually engaged in violence (see page 18), including the protests at Camp Humphreys last year. More recently, some of the leaders of those protests, and other violent anti-American protests, have been exposed and indicted as North Korean agents. This should not have surprised anyone.
Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Democracy/Korean Law/Korean Politics/Korean Society/The Fifth Column/U.S. & Korea
January 2, 2007

Comrade Chung Picks Up Kim Jong Il’s Endorsement

In a uniform editorial in three newspapers representing the North’s party, military and youth militia, North Korea has urged South Koreans to prevent the opposition Grand National Party and conservatives from taking power by any means at their disposal. Commenting on South Korea’s presidential election scheduled on Dec. 19, 2007, the editorial said South Koreans from all walks of life should form an anti-conservative grand coalition and take the presidential election as an opportunity to throw out “conservative, pro-American power.” ...
Categories Korean Politics
January 1, 2007

2007 Portends a Leaner, Meaner Left

As foreshadowed here previously, the Uri death watch is over. Uri Party chairman Kim Geun-tae and former chairman Chung Dong-young in an emergency meeting on Thursday agreed to create a new party, to be called the People’s Party. In a thinly veiled warning to President Roh to keep his hands off, the two said it will be “autonomous and independent from outside political influence. That finalizes the two ex-Cabinet minister’s break with their former boss. Uri will continue to exist,...
Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society