Let’s Hope No One Draws Parallels between the Abductees and the Two American Journalists…

Joe’s comment here gives me good chance to unleash yet again a couple of my pet peeves—regarding the abductees and Prime Minister Koizumi. No, those canards do not come up in Joe’s comment, but it’s clear that they lurk behind the media reports that go into forming the background of his take.

There are good reasons why nothing has been achieved with regard to the following Japanese demands:

1) Give a full and credible accounting of the fate of the remaining abductees;
2) Return remaining survivors; and
3) Punish the people responsible for the operation.

The North Korean authorities claim that they have already accounted for the remainder—they deny some of the Japanese claims—and that there are no more survivors. They also claim that the people responsible for the operation were punished. There is a gap here. No, there is nothing short of regime change that can bring the North Koreans to satisfy Japanese demands. I think that this is hard not to see. But then, why does MOFA persist in making these demands?

One line of persistent popular among Western liberals is that this is the result of a successful rightwing campaign, who use this issue for some inchoate but undoubtedly nefarious purposes. Not so. This, as I have never tired of explaining, is a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding based on a few undeniable facts regarding Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. To wit, Koizumi:

1) paid his respects at Yasukuni Shrine (to fulfill a campaign promise);
2) dispatched troop to Iraq (after the war was over); and
2) was succeeded by Shinzo Abe as Prime Minister.

In fact, the Japanese demands are supported in public by most politicians across the entire political spectrum from the nationalist-nativists to JCP spokesmen as well as just about every editorial writer in the mainstream media from Sankei to Asahi. The key phrase here is “in public.” For it is the Japanese public that was the driving force behind these demands; Koizumi would have lost his job if he had stayed the course after his first trip to Pyongyang, and Abe was the grateful recipient, not the instigator, of the popular outcry over the North Korean revelations that helped propel him into the Prime Minister’s office. Public sentiment regarding the issue has very much cooled, but no one in any position of responsibility is willing yet to touch this political third rail. And that’s things stand today. If you doubt me, read the election manifestos.

If you want to know more about thoughts regarding Koizumi and how he fits into the big picture on this, you are free to search my blog or, better, pay me to write an essay on this subject. If you don’t have the time or money to do so, then you’ll just have to take my word for it.

If No One Builds in Pyongyang, Will It Still Be “Groundbreaking”?

Trivial? Perhaps…

The online version of the Washington Post carried this post-arrival story* in a follow-up to this print-version, page A02 report and this page A08 report, both pre-arrival, and pushed it on the online front page as of February 25 (EST)as

“N.Y. Philharmonic Begins Groundbreaking Visit”.

To correspondent Blaine Harden’s credit (or the Section A copy writer’s), the article itself carries a less ambitious headline:

N.Y. Philharmonic Arrives in North Korea Closed Country to Broadcast Concert on State Television.

Now the event does have the full backing of the Bush administration. To quote from the A08 report, "‘[The North Koreans] are alleging that we have a hostile policy and that's why they need nuclear weapons. The presence of the New York Philharmonic argues against that,’ Hill told the Los Angeles Times editorial board last week. ‘I don't see any downside to this.’" So Mr. Hill’s point is that the visit takes an excuse out of Kim Jong Il’s hands? So on February 27, after the NY Phil leaves, Hu Jintao and Lee Myung-bak are going to call Kim Jong Il and tell him, “See, America likes you,” and Dear Leader is going to lean back in his easy chair, smack his forehead, and say, “Dang, you’re right, I’m wrong. I’ll make a full declaration of our nuclear program, including our plutonium stockpile and nuclear warheads ASAP”?

Mr. Hill, of course, has been racing the clock and pulling out all stops to conclude the Second Phase Actions of the Six-Party deal. Anything that might help keep the ball in play is, in his eyes, a plus. But my view is that this trip is essentially a small, domestic propaganda coup for Kim Jong Il but will have little or no effect outside North Korean borders. For the sake of security in East Asia, I hope that he’s right, and I’m wrong. But in the meantime, it’s Maazel Tov for Kim Jong Il.

---

In the meantime, I have a few questions about the NY Phil playing the two national anthems in Pyongyang. Did it play The Star Spangled Banner and Kimi ga Yo (the Japanese anthem) in 2004 when it came to Japan? The South Korean anthem in Seoul?

And what are we to make of this controversy, where “North Korea has balked at South Korea playing its national anthem or raising its flag at a World Cup soccer qualifier in Pyongyang next month [March 26], claiming a neutral flag and traditional folk song should be used”? Granted, “[t]o promote unity at friendly sport events between the two Koreas in recent years, the sides have displayed a flag depicting a united Korea in blue and substituted the traditional folk song "Arirang" for their national anthems.” But this is an official FIFA event.

According to this report, South Korea’s Unification Ministry, in one of its last acts under President Roh, approved a list of 102 people to attend the Pyongyang concert. 72 of them are from MBC, a broadcasting station in Seoul. When　will they trek to stand in Pyongyang for their own national anthem?

* Please note that WaPo has a later, very different report with a different title covering more or less the same subject on this URL now. This is the second time that I have seen this happen on WaPo and one of the reasons why I copy most articles for the record.

Parsing the Recent Flurry of Inactivity over the North Korea’s Nuclear Program

The 31 December deadline for North Korea to disable three nuclear facilities including the Yongbyon reactors and to provide a complete and correct declaration of its nuclear program passed without comment from the North Korean government. It did not escape notice by the Bush administration though, which issued this statement through the U.S. State Department on December 30. The following is a somewhat ungrammatical excerpt that initially reveals its displeasure, putting the blame on the North Korean side on both counts:

It is unfortunate that North Korea has not yet met its commitments by providing a complete and correct declaration of its nuclear programs and slowing down the process of disablement.


However, the following day, the White House seemed to give North Korea a pass, as the following excerpt from this press gaggle* at the White House shows:

“The United States actually slowed down part of the disablement process, and that is not something that we blamed the North Koreans for, but we wanted that to be done in a safe and secure manner. So we are not blaming the North Koreans for the slowdown in that disablement process”.

North Korea, took the bait and bit off more by way of a January 4 Foreign Ministry statement carried by the Korean Central News Agency of D.P.R.K., the state wire service (but not yet available on the KCNA English page). The following is an excerpt of sorts from this NYTarticle:

North Korea said the disablement work at Yongbyon was “completed within the technologically possible scope as of Dec. 31.”

But since the aid** delivery “has not been done even 50 percent,” the North had to “adjust the speed of the nuclear disablement process,” it said. The work of unloading spent fuel rods from the North’s nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, a crucial part of the disablement, will take an additional 100 days, it said.

North Korea appears to agree with the White House that they carry no blame for not meeting the deadline. Although there is a whiff of that maddening ESL/partial-quote vagueness here, it appears that the North Korean “adjustment” is the threat of a post-December 31 delay, and does not refer to the pre-deadline “slowdown”. The following excerpt from a subsequent January 4 press briefing shows the U.S. State Department also taking that tack and choosing to all but ignore the North Korean threat:

We also look forward to their completing the disablement phase up at Yongbyon. That is moving forward and there is good progress on that.

So the opening North Korean bid for 2008 seems to be:

Half of Phase Two for half the 1,000,000 tons HFE.

Clearly, this part of the deal is doable. But the other half － the “complete and correct declaration” of the North Korean nuclear program － looks far more difficult. On that point, KCNA has, again according to the NYT article, the following:

The [North Korean Foreign Ministry’s] statement said that North Korea had already conducted “enough discussions” with the United States officials after they demanded more negotiations on its November draft declaration and that “[a]s far as the nuclear declaration on which wrong opinion is being built up by some quarters is concerned, the D.P.R.K. has done what it should do.”

This claim could have been interpreted to mean that North Korea would not give any more information on the uranium enrichment program that it had denied having once the Six-Party talks began, or on its plutonium stockpile and nuclear explosive devices. The State Department Spokesman chose to give it a positive spin, reminding us of the following:

[T]he fact is they haven't turned in a final declaration yet. They're going to turn that in to the Chinese as chair, conveners of the six-party meetings and we don't have that yet. We look forward to a full and complete declaration.

Further:

And part of the reasons why they are not right now is we are breaking new ground in terms of what we're doing, in terms of disabling Yongbyon and in terms of working with North Korea in the six-party talks to get a full, complete picture of their nuclear program, not something that has ever been done before***.

But even the amount of processed plutonium is in dispute, if the following excerpt from thisWaPo article is to be believed:

A Japanese newspaper quoted North Korean and U.S. officials as saying that the North has reported making about 66 pounds of plutonium, considerably less than U.S. estimates.

The article continues with the following riff on the state sponsors of terrorism list, injecting another element into speculation over North Korean motives:

In Pyongyang, there appears to be anger and frustration over the U.S. government's reluctance to remove North Korea from its list of states that sponsor terrorism.

The Bush administration suggested in October that it would pursue such a removal, but has since made clear that all promises regarding nuclear facilities and programs must first be met.

And there the article abruptly ends, without even a mention of a Japanese role in the alleged U.S. step-back. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the Bush administration standing up to Congress and large segments of the Republican constituency for a deal that takes North Korea off the list without a satisfactory and explainable rendering of its nuclear program. Japanese insistence on the abductees issue should cast a shadow there as well, particularly in light of the 2007 House of Representatives resolution on the comfort women.

As for the Six-Party talks as a whole, the State Department spokesman stated the following in his response to the question on the North Korean statement on the nuclear program:

The first thing I'll note about what they said is that they are committed to the six-party process. That is, I think, the kicker line in their statement and there is every evidence that they are still committed to the six-party process and are moving forward with the implementation of this phase of the agreement as was outlined back in October.

So it looks like the talks will continue, with North Korea extracting the maximum possible from the disablement process and prolonging the nuclear program declaration as long as they can.

It is barely conceivable that the lame-duck Bush administration could bring the North Koreans around to a deal on the declaration that it can defend against Congressional accusations of caving in. But that would require North Korea to make a couple of difficult decisions, at least one of which would completely strip North Korea of the strategic ambiguity that it currently enjoys.

First, the two sides must come up with a plausible explanation of the scope and extent of North Korea’s uranium program, or, much less likely, a convincing case that there is no such thing. This is possible if North Korea determines that its uranium enrichment program is so rudimentary and its lead time accordingly so long that its strategic value is small enough to trade it in for delisting and the rest of the 1,000,000 tons. Let me put it this way; I don’t have any information that shows that to be impossible. But second, the two sides must come up with a plausible explanation of the scope and extent of North Korea’s plutonium stockpile and nuclear arsenal, such as there is. This is far more problematic than the enrichment program. The power, real and imagined, of these two elements that comprise the bulk of North Korea’s nuclear deterrent and serve as the symbol of the conflict with the U.S. is substantially amplified by the opacity of North Korea’s nuclear program. The perception of vulnerability as the result of a defensibly (from the viewpoint of the Bush administration of course) transparent deal will have serious domestic implications for the North Korean regime. Frankly, I don’t see North Korea jumping this shark any time soon, though I hope to be wrong.

Beyond 2008, a Democratic administration could very well re-inject a human rights angle into the picture, adding further complications, even if the Chris-Hill approach survives regime change. Given that the perception of a U.S. threat and the resultant perpetual state of emergency are actually a stabilizing element for the authoritarian regime, and that South Korea and China appear willing to continue to buy off the North Korean regime indefinitely, my money is on phase two extending itself deep into the foreseeable future. And in the less probable case of a North Korean decision to effectively conclude phase two, North Korea will find reasons to perpetuate the Six-Party talks at the threshold of phase three.

The upside, if you can call it that, to these short- and long-term outcomes that I find likely is that they entrench the status quo. The nuclear threat lies dormant in a North Korea in near-institutional stasis, while everyone waits for Kim Jong Il to pass away. This is obviously not the worst case scenario for Japan. For the Fukuda administration, this situation allows it to table a decision on the abductees issue at least until after the next Lower House election, a decision that could open the Prime Minister’s flank to an attack from the LDP right wing.

* Official term.

** The “aid” refers to the 1,000,000 tons of heavy fuel oil equivalent.

*** Note that on this point, the NYT article erroneously links the two sides of the deal, saying, “The State Department’s spokesman, Sean McCormack, said that the United States and the other countries involved in the talks had not reacted more strongly to the missed deadline because foreign nuclear experts were continuing their work to dismantle the Yongbyon plant, hoping through that work to learn more about aspects of North Korea’s nuclear program.” Such discrepancies happen because the State Department correspondent cannot be expected to fully understand a press briefing that covers anything from North Korea’s nuclear program to Kenya’s presidential election. But someone should have checked it against the transcript.

Why Did the US Vote for Kibaki then Vote against Him?

In a move reminiscent of the premature endorsement of the unsuccessful attempt to unseat Hugo Chavez in 2002, the U.S. withdrew its initial congratulations to Kenyan incumbent and President-Elect Mwai Kibaki.

Why the flip-flop? First of all, Ms. Rice was never that good in the first place. Second, and this is more important, political appointees and career officials alike have been bailing out, and nobody who’s any good is going to climb on board for a one year ride on a sinking ship. There are simply not enough people to keep watch beyond the Middle East.

Playing short-handed has repercussions here in Northeast Asia as well, where the prospects of an uneasy stalemate that I first speculated on here has grown. The U.S. Congress is not going to let the Bush administration give Chris Hill his “deal at any price”, while North Korea appears to be willing to play the short game only. And I will be surprised if the U.S. Congress ratifies the FTA with South Korea, even though the climate should be improved under the new South Korean president.

How to Write; Chapter 2. Christopher Hitchens on the Bush Administration’s North Korea Policy under Chris Hill

You don’t have to be an atheist to enjoy Christopher Hitchens’ anger in all its spluttering, grandiloquent magnificence. In fact, Evangelical Christians will no doubt welcome this typical broadside against the Bush administration’s accommodation of the North Korean regime (although they may read his depiction of Kim Jong Il as “the other ‘Lord’—the deranged godhead who claims to be a fresh incarnation of his beloved father and to own North Korea and all the people in it” and stop to wonder if Mr. Hitchens isn’t slipping them a different agenda on the sly). In fact, you don’t even have to agree with him to appreciate it.

Where Nicholas Eberstadt holds out (in my view) false hope, Mr. Hitchens does what he does best.

How to Write; Chapter 1. Mr. Eberstadt’s Korean Sleight-of-Hand

I would like nothing better than to go to some place warm, sit in the shade under a tree, and wait for people to stop by so that I could talk with them all day long, until the sun came down. But circumstances dictate otherwise. So, for the time being, this blog is my tree.


I’ve been blogging for over a year now, and I’ve come to realize how difficult it is to express my thoughts in ways that accurately reflect the varying degrees of uncertainty with regard to the material on which they are founded. I’ve noticed that one of the tools that writers use to get around this predicament is the all purpose “may”, a word that can be applied equally to events of vastly different probabilities. More often than not, a writer cannot be sure how unsure he is, and sometimes he should just drop the matter altogether. At a minimum, he should be honest about his uncertainties.

Another not uncommon way of fudging the conclusion is by way of what I shall call the That Is the Question Ending. Imagine Hamlet delivering that soliloquy and the curtain dropping right there and then. A typical op-ed using TITQE begins and ends the like this: “X is at a crossroads… the choice is X’s to make.” Sometimes, the crossroads itself is such a revelation that it justifies an article on its own. At other times, the non-ending is the manifestation of the writer’s inability or lack of courage to make the call.

But far more often, a polemicist prefers to bend the facts to fit his conclusion, and he has many items in his tool kit. Outright lying is all too common, but other, more subtle methods are also widely employed. Creative interpretation of the facts (Hillary accuses Obama of harboring presidential ambitions since pre-school; Al Gore claims he invented the Internet) is very effective. Mislabeling (whales are the lungs of the ocean) is another.

Pure sleight-of –hand can be lethal in the hands of an adept. This WaPo op-ed by Nicholas Eberstadt is a good example. This trick is particularly insidious because, if executed properly, it will be difficult to catch even when you think you know the subject.

Mr. Eberstadt’s argument looks like a perfectly reasonable argument that calls on the Bush administration to return to a harder line against North Korea in concert with the incoming Lee Myung-bak regime in South Korea. Who knows, maybe he’s right. But the argument hinges on a South Korean public that will accept the kind of measures that Mr. Eberstadt and the men who populated the first-term Bush administration used to push. And here is where the trick comes in:

The landslide vote, to be sure, was in large measure a rebuke of President Roh Moo-hyun's inept handling of the economy and polarizing domestic policies. Yet, taken together, the candidates who opposed the "Peace and Prosperity" policy (originally dubbed "Sunshine") toward North Korea in last Wednesday's election received more than 63 percent of the vote -- compared with 35 percent for all those who approved of it. Why the widespread discontent with "sunshine"?

First, he admits to the obvious, incontrovertible fact that Mr. Roh lost because of policy failure on the domestic front. It is also true, as the second sentence says, that “Peace and Prosperity” policy opponents polled 63% of the vote. So, isn’t it natural to ask, as the third sentence does, why the South Korean electorate is dissatisfied with a soft-sell approach to North Korea?

But wait, where does Mr. Eberstadt say that in rejecting Mr. Roh’s favored candidate, the South Korean electorate rejected the “Sunshine” policy? Actually, he doesn’t. He has slipped this unstated premise into the narrative by sleight-of-hand.

I know that this is deliberate and not mere faulty thinking. Look closely, and there are two, telltale signs. First, note the use of the qualitative “large measure” to gauge the impact. Is two-thirds large? Of course. But one-third? Without resorting to outright lying, he has diminished the impression of the impact by the use of this qualitative word that maintains its substantiality while shedding the sense of enormity, the overwhelming nature of the cause for rejection.

Second, and more obviously, he shifts terminology at each step, from the “Peace and Prosperity” policy to “Sunshine” to “sunshine”. This too is deliberate. You see, he starts by insinuating the rejection of President Roh’s policy, then moves on to the rejection of President Kim Dae-jung’s policy, and finally arrives at the rejection of the generic “sunshine” approach. Note that he manages to drop the word “policy” along the way, a word that implies a set of measures which could be accepted singly or collectively, or modified. This is important, for the notion that the South Korean electorate rejected the soft-sell approach in every guise is vital to an argument essentially in favor of a return to pre-Six Party level demands on North Korea.

Now this is not the place to argue whether or not such a reversal is in order. But in avoiding an argument on the facts, Mr. Eberstadt implicitly acknowledges that if anything does happen, the changes will still fall far short of his desires. And in that, at least, he is correct, because if Mr. Roh’s trip to North Korea in October failed to save his favored candidate, he did succeed in vaulting his dismal approval rate over the 50% mark. The South Korean electorate did not reject President Kim’s “Sunshine” policy, much less a soft-sell approach in general; President-elect Lee Myun-bak is not going to blot out the “sunshine”.

This trick is surely one of many different illusions that advocates, both explicit and implicit, use to undermine reason. If I come up with other examples that catch my attention, I may post them.

As a coda, I’ll indulge in some speculation. Why did Mr. Eberstadt write this op-ed in the first place? Part of it must be that birds are born to sing, and this happens to be the only song that it knows. But he must feel secure, with good reason, that the soft-sell approach will achieve unsatisfactory results (at least from the perspective of his back-to-the-future approach, which, luckily for him, will never be tested). Thus, he thinks that he will be able to continue pleasing his constituency by criticizing whatever policy that any administration adopts and the outcome thereof from the vantage point of an untested hypothesis. In that at least, he will be right.