DebateGate

The Beltway Retreat
The insurgents are hitting their targets--in Washington.
Wednesday, October 25, 2006

We need to be realist but not defeatist. We need to understand that there is a need of utmost urgency to deal with many of the problems of Iraq but we must not give in to panic.  So said Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih on Monday, in a BBC interview while in London for talks with Tony Blair. If only such statesmanship prevailed on this side of the Atlantic, where election politics and a spate of critical new books have combined to paint an increasingly desperate--and false--picture of what's happening in Iraq.

As the critics describe it, all of Iraq is in chaos, its new government isn't functioning, the U.S. is helpless to act against these inexorable forces, and it is only a matter of time before we must pack up and leave in abject defeat. "We're on the verge of chaos, and the current plan is not working," declares Senator Lindsey Graham, in one of the purer expressions of this elite inconstancy. Just what Mr. Graham would do about this, he doesn't say; but in the land of blind panic, the sound-bite Senator is king.

Yes, the Iraq project is difficult, and its outcome dangerously uncertain. The Bush Administration and its military generals have so far failed to stem insurgent attacks or pacify Baghdad, and the factions comprising Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government have so far failed to make essential political compromises. But the American response to this should be to change military tactics or deployments until they do succeed, and to reassure Iraqi leaders that their hard political choices will result in U.S. support, not precipitous withdrawal.

The current American panic, by contrast, is precisely what the insurgents intend with their surge of October violence. The Baathists and Sadrists can read the U.S. political calendar, and they'd like nothing better than to feed the perception that the violence is intractable. They want our election to be perceived as a referendum on Iraq that will speed the pace of American withdrawal.
The Bush Administration hasn't helped matters of late with its own appearance of indecision, asserting on one day that we must avoid "cut-and-run" while leaking on another that the forthcoming Baker-Hamilton report might be an opportunity for a strategic retreat. President Bush has sounded resolute himself, but many of his own advisers seem to be well along in their own electoral run for cover.

A measure of rationality at least came yesterday out of Baghdad, where General George Casey and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad tried to put the violence in some larger context. The Iraq government is in fact "functioning," as Iraqis continue to get their food rations, and as more than a million civil servants, Iraqi security force members and teachers continue to show up for work every day and get paid. Just this weekend, Iraq's oil minister announced that production had surpassed pre-war levels.

"Economically, I see an Iraq every day that I do not think the American people know about--where cell phones and satellite dishes, once forbidden, are now common, where economic reform takes place on a regular basis, where agricultural production is rising dramatically, and where the overall economy and the consumer sector is growing," said Mr. Khalilzad, who for this attempt at hopeful realism will be derided in some quarters as a Pollyanna.

As for security, two provinces have already been turned over entirely to the control of Iraqi forces, with a total of six or seven scheduled to be under Iraqi control by January. While the police forces remain unreliable, the Iraqi army is making notable progress. The joint Iraqi-U.S. operation to make Baghdad safe hasn't succeeded so far, but Iraqis we talk to say the situation in many specific neighborhoods of the capital has been vastly improved.

And while every terrorist success is broadcast far and wide, acts of bravery by Iraqi forces go unheralded. Only 10 days ago, insurgents staged a huge attack on government and police offices in Mosul, but it was successfully repulsed by Iraqi forces. Dozens of insurgents were killed or captured, and one heroic Iraqi police officer gave his life successfully defending others against a suicide truck bomber.

The truth is that the Sunni insurgents are still capable only of hit-and-run attacks, are slaughtered whenever they gather en masse, and have held down no permanent territory since Fallujah was cleaned out in late 2004. Nor have they been successful in their other goal of keeping their fellow Sunnis out of the political process. Sunnis continue to sit in the current government and parliament, despite being labelled "collaborators" and marked for death.

As General Casey observed yesterday, "we've seen the nature of the conflict evolving from what was an insurgency against us to a struggle for the division of political and economic power among the Iraqis." One of the main challenges now is to reassure the Sunnis that it is safe to compromise with Shiite and Kurdish leaders on issues such as the distribution of oil revenue and the shape of Iraqi federalism. Mr. Maliki must also demobilize--or at least neutralize--the militias that grew in his own Shiite community in response to Sunni violence.

But the political truth is that none of this will happen any sooner if Americans look like they are heading for the exits. Timetables and deadlines may sound like realpolitik, but they only feed suspicions that the U.S. will abandon Iraq's leaders once they have walked out onto a political limb. Iraq is not yet in a state of "civil war," and it has a functioning, if imperfect, government. If changes of tactics or force levels are needed, by all means make them. But what Iraqis most need from Washington is reassurance of support for the tough decisions and battles that lie ahead.


http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009147

Litigation Day
Control of Congress may be decided in the courts, starting Nov. 8.

Monday, October 23, 2006

Everyone is speculating about which party will control Congress after next month's voting. But we may not know for a while. We could see either party pursue the kind of lawsuits that Al Gore unleashed in Florida in 2000 and contest any number of tight races that are within the "margin of litigation." Recounts and even seating challenges in Congress could stretch on for weeks--another endless election. "We're waiting for the day that pols can cut out the middleman and settle all elections in court," jokes the political newsletter Hotline.

"In 2000 in Florida, we broke a psychic barrier," says Doug Chapin, director of the nonpartisan Election Reform Information Project. "Election night is not necessarily the finish line anymore. Both sides are lawyering up." Indeed, in 1998 the number of court cases challenging elections totaled 104, by 2004 that number had climbed to 361.

Even though the Bush-Gore fiasco did prompt calls for reform and the passage of the 2002 Help America Vote Act, that law didn't become fully operational until this January and was relatively modest in scope. Many of the kinks and difficulties engendered by HAVA will have to be sorted out in this election. "There hasn't been enough improvement in the system so we can actually have greater confidence in the election process," says Rick Hasen, a law professor who runs the blog Electionlawblog.org. Here are some potential sticking points:

• New laws. Many states have adopted new computerized voting lists that have purged ineligible or dead voters. Others have adopted voter identification laws. Both measures will provide fodder for lawsuits. Last Thursday, for example, the Supreme Court unanimously vacated a Ninth Circuit opinion enjoining the use of Arizona's new voter ID law on the grounds it would disenfranchise voters.

The court, clearly sympathetic to those who believe voter ID will cut on down on voter fraud, turned the disenfranchisement argument around on its opponents. The unsigned decision noted that anyone without ID could cast a provisional ballot that would be verified later and that fraud "drives honest citizens out of the democratic process . . . voters who fear their legitimate votes will be outweighed by fraudulent ones will feel disenfranchised."

Notwithstanding the court's ruling, such laws have the potential to trigger postelection litigation. "We're expecting arguments at the polls in these states that will slow everything down," says Barbara Burt, an elections reform director for Common Cause.

• New technology. Many states and counties will be using electronic voting machines for the first time, and in some places there have been delays in the delivery and setup of the machines. A large majority of Election Day workers are elderly and uncomfortable with new technology, which makes training difficult. A shortage of technical workers to service broken machines has forced vendors in some states to advertise for such workers on job sites such as Monster.com.

Then there is the possibility that pure incompetence will throw an election into chaos. Last month's Maryland primary almost melted down after election officials in affluent Montgomery County forgot to deliver access keys to the electronic machines before polls opened. Some polling places ran out of paper provisional ballots, and thousands of prospective voters gave up and went home. For next month's election, both Gov. Bob Ehrlich and his Democratic challenger, Martin O'Malley, are suggesting voters consider casting an absentee ballot to dodge potential problems at the polls.

• Absentee ballots. When top officials such as those in Maryland call for general use of absentee ballots, a fundamental erosion of trust in the voting system is taking place. The growth of absentee ballots has been explosive in recent years, exceeding 30% of all ballots cast in 2004 in such states as California, Washington and Iowa. When combined with the early voting many states now allow, about one out of four Americans will vote on a day other than Election Day this year. John Fortier of the American Enterprise Institute concludes in his new book, "Absentee and Early Voting," that "there are now many election days, beginning in September and only culminating on the traditional November date."

But absentee ballots aren't the answer to election fears. They clearly increase the potential for fraud "The lack of at-the-polls accountability and protection from intimidation makes absentee ballots the tool of choice for those who commit fraud," the Florida Department of Law Enforcement concluded in 1998 after a mayoral election in Miami was thrown out when it was learned "vote brokers" had submitted hundreds of phony absentee ballots. More recently, in Wise County, Va., three elected officials were charged this past March with 900 counts of ballot fraud. They had filled out absentee ballot applications for others, intercepted the ballots in the mail, and then filled them out themselves. Last year a Connecticut state representative admitted, according to the Hartford Courant, that he "illegally induced elderly residents of the Betty Knox housing complex in Hartford to cast absentee ballots for him." He got off with a $10,000 fine and community service.

Mr. Fortier says that greater measures to combat absentee ballot fraud are needed, such as using computer software to check signatures and investigating those that don't match. Similarly, an inked-space could be provided for voters to submit a fingerprint with their absentee ballot--a precaution that is taken in Mexico and several other countries. To provide for voter convenience, Mr. Fortier suggests expanding the number of hours a day that states allow early voting at government buildings, although he believes the early voting period should be limited to 10 days before an election to ensure that as many voters as possible have the same information available to them when they make their choices.

At this late stage, it's unrealistic to believe that many of the potential problems in this year's election can be guarded against. So after the inevitable recounts and court cases that will accompany any very close election, there is also the chance that this year's disappointed candidates will take their case to Congress. Both the House and Senate are each legally the final judge of any disputed election. If control of each chamber hinges on a couple of razor-thin races, look for lengthy floor debates to be held over who really won each seat.

Sometimes such disputes can drag on. In 1974, New Hampshire Democrat John Durkin ran for the Senate and very narrowly lost. A recount then overturned that original result and gave him a 10-vote lead over Republican Louis Wyman. But the state's Ballot Law Commission recounted the ballots again and found Wyman the winner by two votes. Mr. Durkin had no real evidence of fraud, but he contested the election anyway. The Democratic-controlled Senate sided with him and refused to honor the state's certification. The seat remained vacant for seven months. The debate over it spanned 100 hours over a month's time with 35 inconclusive roll calls--and at the time Democrats had a solid Senate majority. Imagine how bitter the debate would be over contested seats if the Senate is closely divided after next month's elections. (The 1975 impasse ended only after Mr. Durkin agreed to a special election, which he won.)

Ten years later, it was the House's turn to have a vicious dispute over a contested election, this time in Indiana. After a recount, Republican Richard McIntyre was declared the winner by 34 votes over Democratic incumbent Frank McCloskey. The Indiana secretary of state, a Republican, certified the McIntyre victory, but the Democratic House refused to seat him and left the seat vacant for four months while a special task force recounted all the ballots. The task force decided--and the full House agreed along party lines--that the Democrat had won by four votes. Republicans charged that the Democrats had recounted the ballots until their man was ahead and then promptly shut down the count. Newt Gingrich, the future House speaker, labeled the refusal to seat the certified winner "the Watergate of the House," and led a walkout of GOP members from the chamber.

"The problem with these kinds of close votes . . . [is that] it always produces wounds on the losing side," Leon Panetta, a Democratic former congressman who was a member of the 1984 task force and later President Clinton's chief of staff, told Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper. "And if there are already existing divisions, it will certainly exacerbate those differences, there is no question about it." In other words, if you think this campaign is angry and bitter, wait till you see the debate over any contested elections.

Just as the no-holds-barred debate over Robert Bork's ill-fated appointment to the Supreme Court in 1987 changed the politics of judicial nominations permanently, the Bush-Gore Florida election contest in 2000 might have changed the way close elections are decided. Regardless of the eventual winner in any contested election, the country may be the loser if the result is a poisoning of public opinion and the creation of a climate of illegitimacy around any final winner.

Voters are still used to having the final word in an election. But that could change if the election next month degenerates into the decisions in voting booths quickly being fought over by often unelected judges and trial lawyers practicing scorched-earth tactics. Brad Smith, a law professor and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, says the trend toward "election by litigation" isn't healthy and ways should be found to minimize its spread. "It's good to have added attention on elections and federal money to run them," he told the Associated Press. "But people have to relax, be reasonable and have some level of good faith." Right now, there's precious little evidence of any of that kind of behavior out on the campaign trail.


http://opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110009139

The Battles of Hastings
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 19, 2006

I give you Alcee Hastings, Democrat from Florida, the next chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence should Democrats win a majority in the next Congress.

Before I explain exactly why that is a bad thing for America, let me make clear that I am a registered Republican. I tell you this up front because several of my friends who say they are Republicans have told me recently they intend to vote for Democrats this November, because the Republican Party has betrayed their trust.

These “Republicans” have two main gripes with the party they embrace on sunny days.

Under Bush, they say, the size of the federal government has expanded by leaps and bounds. We are small-government Republicans. If our party won’t limit the size of government, who will? they ask. (Answer: not the Democrats, that’s for sure).

Under Bush, they say – gripe number two – the size of federal budget deficits continues to grow. It couldn’t get much worse under tax and spend Democrats, they argue. What we have now are tax and spend Republicans. They need a lesson that only electoral defeat can give them.

We all have heard such arguments from family and friends. The Republicans won’t do my bidding, so let’s get rid of the Republicans!

Who cares if the Democrats won’t do any better; at least my guys will have learned their lesson!

This column is not about the value of consensus, or about the need to find common ground with your political opponents for the greater good of the nation – although both are extremely important when it comes to the day to day business of actually governing.

It’s about what my friend Paul Weyrich recently evoked in reminiscing on what has disappeared from American politics since leftists (as opposed to liberals) took over the Democrat party.

“There once was a time…when you did not fear victory by the opposition party,” Weyrich writes. “In 1960, I worked hard for Nixon. I did everything I could to help him defeat Senator John F. Kennedy. But when the electoral votes were in and Kennedy had apparently won, I was disappointed but had no fear in my heart.”

No fear in my heart.

Now imagine for an instant Alcee Hastings as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Here is a man who was appointed to the federal bench by Jimmy Carter in 1979, and whose outright corruption was so egregious that his own party saw fit to impeach him ten years later.

Judge Hastings was one of just six federal judges since the beginning of the Republic to be impeached by Congress and removed from office by the United States Senate.

After his impeachment and removal from office in 1989 – on charges of corruption and perjury – Hastings did not retreat in a corner. He did not beg forgiveness. He made no public display of repentence.

On the contrary. Judge Hastings played the Jesse Jackson race card. He was a victim. He had been wronged – not the people of Florida, to whom he had lied and from whom he had stolen (such is the meaning of perjury and corruption, after all).

In November 1992, Hastings ran successfully in the newly-created 23rd district of Florida, an overwhelmingly Democrat district created by the  Florida legislature after the 1990 census as a safe Democratic seat.

Since then, Hastings has been re-elected with comfortable margins every two years. His official biography makes no mention of the untidy fact of his impeachment and removal as a federal judge. I guess he figures it’s not something potential voters in Broward and Palm Beach County need to know.

And that’s just for starters.

Since Congress began investigating the September 11 attacks, senior members of the U.S. intelligence community have been in open revolt against the Bush administration.

The leaders of this revolt continue to occupy the highest ranking positions in the intelligence community. Over the past four years, their efforts to undermine the Bush administration through the systematic leaking of national security secrets and the compromise of top secret operations in the war on terror, constitute nothing less than treason.

They have been given cover by Democrats on both the House and the Senate intelligence committees, who have been more than willing to serve  as conduits for their partisan attacks against the Bush White House and, in some cases, as conduits for leaking intelligence secrets to the press.

Ever wonder how the media first learned that the CIA had set up “secret prisons” in Europe and the Middle East, where it was interrogating al Qaeda members captured during hush-hush operations?

Or how the media first got wind that the National Security Agency was listening to telephone calls and other communications between known terrorists and individuals in the United States, without seeking a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court?

Or how the press got word of a long-standing effort by the U.S. Treasury department to work with the SWIFT bank consortium in Belgium, to monitor international wire transfers by individuals suspected of terrorist ties?

These leaks have done irreparable harm to the people of the United States by limiting the ability of the U.S. government to track terrorists, capture them, and learn their secrets.

Alcee Hastings was not personally behind those leaks, as far as I know. But Alcee Hastings, and the current ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Jane Harman (who is term-limited from becoming chairman should the Democrats win in November) have transformed the House intelligence committee from its bipartisan oversight role into a highly-partisan attack committee – at least, the forty percent of it they currently control.

Should Democrats win this November, we can expert Mr. Hastings to use the HPSCI to conduct a series of partisan witch hunts against the White House and against Republicans elsewhere in the administration. These “investigations” will be conducted under the banner of “oversight,” and will allege partisan personnel appointments to top intelligence positions.

In fact, the goal of the Democrats is to use the Congressional oversight process to cripple the ability of a Republican administration to effectively run the federal government.

So far, they have made a pretty good job of it, even though they have been in the minority. They hounded Porter Goss out as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and have brought back a representative of the CIA “Old Boys Club,” Stephen Kappes – whom Mr. Goss correctly fired for insubordination in November 2004 – as Deputy CIA director.

The word on the street is that Mr. Kappes is now angling for the top CIA slot, after his current boss, Air Force General Michael Hayden, replaces John Negroponte as Director of National Intelligence later this year. (Mr. Negroponte is said to want Secretary of State, or NSC).

Imagine this pair: a former judge, impeached for corruption, teaming up with a former clandestine officer, fired for insubordination, at the head of America’s premier spy service?

And you think they will turn their talents on al Qaeda?

My money is that they will use their formidable powers to hound out Bush administration appointees from the intelligence community, and to quietly put an end to the war against our terrorist foes.

Call it, unilateral disarmament.

I give you Alcee Hastings.


http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=25006

Lowest 'Common' Denominator
The Democrats have a new slogan, the Associated Press reports:

Ned Lamont uses it in his Connecticut Senate race. President Clinton is scheduled to speak on the idea in Washington this week. Bob Casey Jr., Pennsylvania candidate for Senate, put it in the title of his talk at The Catholic University of America--then repeated the phrase 29 times.

The term is "common good," and it's catching on as a way to describe liberal values and reach religious voters who rejected Democrats in the 2004 election. Led by the Center for American Progress, a Washington think-tank, party activists hope the phrase will do for them what "compassionate conservative" did for the Republicans.

"It's a core value that we think organizes the entire political agenda for progressives," said John Halpin, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. "With the rise of materialism, greed and corruption in American society, people want a return to a better sense of community--sort of a shared sacrifice, a return to the ethic of service and duty."

Isn't this about the 87th slogan the Dems have come up with? Remember "culture of corruption," "America can do better," "enough is enough," etc.? Maybe the Republican slogan should be "slogans are not enough."

Then again, maybe they are enough. It now seems within the realm of possibility that Democrats will take one or both houses of Congress in three weeks, even though they are campaigning on not much more than not being Republicans.

But the Republicans are campaigning on not much more than not being Democrats.

To our mind the Republicans have the better of this argument, but there is something to be said for punishing the party in power if its performance has been subpar.


http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110009107

"As of this coming Thursday, Saddam Hussein will have been on trial for one year. One year. Do you realize if his trial was in LA, he'd be out playing golf by now."
Jay Leno

N. Korea: Sanctions Are War Declaration
Oct 17, 2006
   
By JAE-SOON CHANG
Associated Press Writer

SEOUL, South Korea

North Korea said Tuesday it considered U.N. sanctions aimed at punishing the country for its nuclear test "a declaration of war," as Japan and South Korea reported the communist nation might be preparing a second explosion.

The North broke two days of silence about the U.N. resolution adopted after its Oct. 9 nuclear test with a statement on the official state news agency, as China warned Pyongyang against stoking tensions.

"The resolution cannot be construed otherwise than a declaration of a war" against the North, the statement said. North Korea is known officially as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The chief U.S. nuclear envoy, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, said the North's response was "not very helpful."

"I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding about what the international community feels about its actions," Hill said in Seoul after a meeting with his South Korean and Russian counterparts.

Hill said he could not confirm South Korean and Japanese reports that the North may be preparing another nuclear explosion, but said a second test would force the international community "to respond very clearly."

North Korea "is under the impression that once they make more nuclear tests that somehow we will respect them more," Hill told reporters after a meeting with U.S. and Russian counterparts. "The fact of the matter is that nuclear tests make us respect them less."

In its statement, North Korea said it would not be intimidated.

The communist nation "had remained unfazed in any storm and stress in the past when it had no nuclear weapons," the statement said. "It is quite nonsensical to expect the DPRK to yield to the pressure and threat of someone at this time when it has become a nuclear weapons state."

Chun Yung-woo, South Korea's top nuclear envoy, dismissed the statement as "the usual rhetoric that they have been using at the time of the adoption of the Security Council resolution."

China has long been one of North Korea's few allies, but relations have frayed in recent months by Pyongyang's missile tests and the nuclear explosion last week.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao warned Pyongyang against aggravating tensions, saying the North should help resolve the situation "through dialogue and consultation instead of taking any actions that may further escalate or worsen the situation."

The United States pressed on with a round of diplomacy in Asia aimed at finding consensus on how to implement U.N. sanctions on the North. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was expected to go to Japan on Wednesday before traveling to South Korea and China.

Hill stressed that the international community should make the North pay a "high price" for its "reckless behavior."

Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso said his government had "information" about another possible blast, and a senior South Korean official said there were signs that the North could be preparing a second test _ but emphasized that it was unlikely to happen immediately.

"We have yet to confirm any imminent signs of a second nuclear test," the official said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.

China, whose support for the measures is key to whether they will have any effect on neighboring North Korea, has begun examining trucks at the North Korean border to comply with new U.N. sanctions endorsed over the weekend.

South Korea has said it would implement the U.N. sanctions, but also has been cautious about allowing sanctions to shake regional stability. Seoul has also indicated that it has no intention of halting key economic projects with the North, despite concerns that they may help fund the North's nuclear and missile programs.

"Sanctions against North Korea should be done in a way that draws North Korea to the dialogue table," South Korean Prime Minister Han Myung-sook said Tuesday, according to Yonhap news agency. "There should never be a way that causes armed clashes."

In Washington, U.S. National Intelligence Director John Negroponte's office said Monday that air samples gathered last week contain radioactive materials that confirm that North Korea conducted an underground nuclear explosion.

In a short statement posted on its Web site, Negroponte's office also confirmed that the size of the explosion was less than 1 kiloton, a comparatively small nuclear detonation. Each kiloton is equal to the force produced by 1,000 tons of TNT.

It was the first official confirmation from the United States that a nuclear detonation took place, as Pyongyang has claimed.


http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/10/17/D8KQDMT80.html

Great Leadership
What I saw in North Korea.

BY SUKI KIM
Monday, October 16, 2006

Despite the much-touted label of being the most secretive nation in the world, the one thing everyone knows about North Korea is that its people have been dying in massive numbers from starvation and persecution for decades, the reality of which seems to have bypassed the nations involved in the on-again-off-again six-party talks--whose diplomacy has apparently failed. By landing a punch at the nonproliferation policy of the U.N. Security Council, an organization soon to be led by South Korean Ban Ki Moon, North Korea yet again thwarted its former promises of stopping all nuclear activities. The Bush administration is advocating harsher ways of punishing a country they maintain is a member of the "axis of evil" through tougher sanctions and cutting off its financial sources, neither of which has worked so far in stopping North Korea from doing whatever it wants to do. Now that it claims to have become the world's ninth nuclear power, I wonder what will change, if anything, for its people.

On June 25, 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea, my mother's brother, then age 18 and living in Seoul, was kidnapped by the North's soldiers. Fleeing the bombs, my grandmother, with her five children, fought through the panicked crowd onto the jam-packed, southbound train when someone screamed out that young men should give up their seats for women and children. My grandmother spent her remaining life haunted by that last moment, of her eldest son rising and reassuring her that he would be on the next train. Hers turned out to be the last train out of Seoul. Later, a neighbor reported seeing him tied up and being dragged away by the North Korean soldiers. Korean Confucian ethics holds that there is no bigger sin than abandoning one's family, and yet neither Korean government has granted reunions for the millions of separated families, except for a handful who have been used as a showcase for the failed peace summits.

In February 2002, I traveled to Pyongyang in an effort to locate my uncle. I never found him, but I spent about a week with the Workers' Party leaders, ranging from the chairman of the Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries to the then-ambassador to the Permanent Mission to the U.N., who repeatedly told me that their real enemy was not South Korea, with whom they are still technically at war, but the U.S., which, along with the Soviet Union, had drawn up the 38th Parallel in 1948 and perpetuated the war by isolating them through sanctions. They were mystified as to why the United States was allowed to have nuclear weapons when it was the only nation in history to have deployed them on civilians, never mind starting wars all over the world.

My most vivid impression of Pyongyang was that an entire generation must have been eradicated for such a place to exist. Nothing on their empty, energy-deprived streets indicated that anything prior existed. Every book, piece of artwork and building was either made by the Great Leader or about the Great Leader. Their only official newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, was four pages long and consisted almost exclusively of praise for their Great Leader. Their state-controlled TV showed mostly undated footage of the Great Leader. Everywhere I went, music played in the background and the subject of the lyrics was inevitably the Great Leader.

The regime of North Korea has done a most efficient job of wiping out Korea's 5,000-year history, imbued with Buddhism, Shamanism and Confucianism, with one amnesia-inflicting spell called "Juche," its political philosophy of self-reliance. And what seems to make the Great Leader so "great" is that he has replaced their lost memory. For my uncle to have survived there, he either would have had to forget everything he had known, or learned to believe in the Great Leader. Or it is possible that he held on with the hope for the two Koreas to reunite; my grandmother did, until she passed away 25 years after he went missing.

In the 1970s in South Korea, I grew up with the anthem, "Our Wish is Reunification," which children still sing. Today, however, South Koreans readily claim North Koreans as their siblings and yet they hesitate upon the topic of the Kim Jong Il regime's collapse, which might lead to the breakdown of 38th Parallel and to millions of refugees pouring south. President Roh Moo Hyun's increasingly less popular "sunshine policy" has provided a conduit through which money is funneled into North Korea for supposed economic reform, although it now looks as though it has effectually funded the North's nuclear program.

South Korea is not the only one who fears the consequence of Kim Jong Il's demise. Neither China nor Russia, North Korea's biggest allies and neighbors, wants to foot the bill for refugees. As many as 300,000 North Koreans have crossed the northern border since the Korean War despite a joint crackdown from North Korean agents and Chinese police. For Japan, the threat from North Korea has provided a basis for lobbying for remilitarization and a revision of their post-World War II, U.S.-sponsored pacifist constitution. America, whose soon-to-be downsized 32,000 troops are still stationed in Seoul's Yong San Garrison, does not want to forfeit its control over the region to China, whose trading relationship with South Korea and economic hold over the North have grown rapidly in recent years. The prospect of One Korea benefits no one except the welfare of the North Korean people, whom the mighty six-party nations seem to have forgotten. So why are we relying on their decision on what to do about North Korea?

Just last month, the World Food Program launched an appeal for more funds to fight the food shortage in North Korea, worsened by the August flood that had, according to the state's figures, killed and left homeless hundreds, although various human rights groups claim numbers closer to hundreds of thousands if not millions. Over a third of all children are reported to be malnourished. According to Amnesty International, 400,000 have perished from political persecution; 150,000 are still held in underground concentration camps. Since the much condemned July 4 missile tests, humanitarian aid has been cut drastically.

In the 1970s, South Korean propaganda posters of starving children were forced upon us to show that North Korea was hell on earth and that its leader was a selfish, ruthless despot. In the decades since, during which time a famine killed over a tenth of North Korea's 23 million people, not much has changed at all. The 38th Parallel is still there. The most the Bush administration has done in its diplomatic strategy about North Korea is to call it evil. The peace talks are continuously stalled. The U.N. is in yet another emergency huddle to figure out a way of handling the problem. Now that North Korea claims to be a nuclear power, what will be different?

In the meantime, the Siberian winter is quickly approaching for the people of North Korea, where heat and food are scarcer than ever. The Rodong Sinmun headlines after the nuclear test revealed just one brief congratulatory paragraph on the success of the test, which has turned the rest of the world upside down. The other articles were about the floral baskets delivered to their Great Leader from the various communist parties of China, Laos and Cuba.


http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009098