 Tuesday, January 20, 2004
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Jack Pritchard of the Brookings Institution writes about his visit to North Korea, and to the Yongbyon nuclear facility, in Tuesday's New York Times. The quote is from Kim Gye-gwan, vice foreign minister of the DPRK.
On Jan. 8, North Korean officials gave an unofficial American delegation, of which I was a member, access to the building in Yongbyon where about 8,000 spent fuel rods had once been safeguarded. We discovered that all 8,000 rods had been removed.
Pritchard seems to have been an odd representative of US interests, blaming the crisis almost entirely on the Bush administration. I find the administration's handling of North Korea strange too -- why Iraq, which had no WMD's, when North Korea bragged about having them? -- for example.
But in the end it was the DPRK who built the weapons which threaten to destabilize northeast Asia and, in the end, bring about their own self-destruction. We didn't. And to say it was American belligerence that somehow "forced" Pyongyang to into building them is just plain bizarre: any serious watcher of the US knows that it has no territorial ambition on the Korean peninsula.
On the other hand, the US does have a reinvigorated, now-visceral need to secure itself. A nuclear-armed DPRK openly at war with the US and ROK, and with a history of terrorism, incipient ICBM's capable of reaching Seattle -- well, some here might just consider that a provocation.
Time is not on the side of the DPRK.
UPDATE: I don't get why Ryan is after Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, who also reported this story. Kessler is reporting what Pritchard said, pure and simple. Pritchard seems like the whiner to me.
And I don't get Instapundit's naivete on the issue.
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Now here is a truly amazing story (via Marmot): a South Korean actress is going to North Korea to do a TV special on North Korean cuisine.
That's right: their cooking!
This in a country where in the last decade literally millions have starved to death, where the average North Korean 7-year-old is six inches shorter and 22 pounds lighter than his South Korean counterpart, where tales of eating grass, tree bark, and human children are rampant:
Yang [Mi-kyung]is accompanied by reporters from both the South and North as she narrates about the lives and food of North Korea. The program will introduce Pyongyang onban, Hamhung raengmyon, Wonsan tolkaejjim, Kaesong ginseng takgom and many other dishes.
Viewers will also have a chance to take a look at how North Koreans spend their lunar New Year holidays, the diets of locals and classes at culinary schools.
We don't make this stuff up, folks.
Meanwhile, these clever chefs are cooking other things up:
Highly sensitive nuclear technology developed by a Netherlands company may have been transferred to Libya and North Korea, two government ministers acknowledged yesterday.
The disclosure in Parliament in Amsterdam marked the first public confirmation of assertions that centrifuge technology for enriching uranium apparently found its way to Libya and North Korea. It was already known that Pakistan and Iran had the technology.
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Yeah, yeah, Iowa, Kerry, State of the Union.
But this is really cool:
Experts have dismissed the claim that a 104-year-old foul-mouthed parrot once belonged to the wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Charlie, a blue and yellow macaw, is spending his twilight years in a garden centre in Surrey and his owner Peter Oram says the bird used to live with Sir Winston Churchill in his heyday.
OK: what kind of cigars does the bird smoke? And what does he have to say about Lloyd George?
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I know.
Work has been intense the last few days. Plus I've just finished reviewing the galleys for my next book, due out in a month or so, plus working on a screenplay.
But stay tuned, things will pick up again real soon!
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eWeek:
A cadre of former Lotus software employees is leading a reinvigorated push at Microsoft Corp. to lure Lotus customers to .Net with new products and services.
And our pal Jim Bernardo says it all:
"Given IBM's strategy for Workplace, a lot of Lotus customers are going to be taking advantage of the opportunity to re-evaluate their investments," said Jim Bernardo, lead product manager for Microsoft Exchange.
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Dec Feb
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