This week Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama criticized the Bush administration for not engaging in diplomacy with North Korea between 2002-2005. Said Obama:
“While the United States was refusing to talk with North Korea, the reclusive regime developed eight units of nuclear weapons… North Korea secured nuclear materials (plutonium) that can make eight to […]
While the comparison of Iraq now to Korea five decades ago is far from perfect, there are indeed several major points that make it an apt enough abstract example. For starters, after WWII until long after the Korean War, the accepted paradigm was that South Korea would remain a good, third-world, source of materials […]
As Coop noted earlier, declassified documents show that the pre-war Saddam regime in Iraq did possess WMD:
This is certainly significant, but what they’re talking about is old munitions left over from, presumably, before the first Gulf War. This doesn’t appear to constitute evidence that Saddam’s regime had continued to manufacture chemical weapons in more […]
Michael Fumento of Hudson Institute (which inhabits the same building as Discovery Institute’s D.C. office) forwarded me the link to his latest war reporting from Iraq, a multimedia piece that he considers his best. The article has many photographs and video clips, and documents the heroic efforts of our troops in Ramadi, a city […]
The Z-Man is no more.
Photo from AP via MSNBC.
WaPo reports:
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the mastermind behind hundreds of bombings, kidnappings and beheadings in Iraq, was killed early Wednesday by an airstrike –north of Baghdad, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Thursday.
[snip]
U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house in which Zarqawi was meeting with other […]
I wrote of a courageous Iraqi secular democrat (I emphasize the small “d” there) a couple of times in the past. See a profile of Mithal al-Alusi in my RealClearPolitics piece as well as a reprint of a Seattle Times column about his sons who were slain in a terrorist ambush.
A number of people, […]
In an article at the Asia Times, Riddles and enigmas from North Korea, Andrei Lankov speculates on how governments get intelligence from inside North Korea, and lists some of the other valuable sources of information from the country.
- #From Mainichi and via the Chosun Bimbo, "In his first reported appearance following news of his hospitalization, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il lost his temper while watching a college soccer match, denouncing several players' long hair as "disgusting," according to a source close to the North Korean government. The outburst was followed by a nationwide ban on long hair for men." We'll all be watching the next soccer match to see if it's so.
- #Outward Bound, an international non-profit outdoor education program, is offering fully funded (including transportation to/from sites) outdoor adventure excursions to all OEF/OIF veterans. It doesn't matter what your current military status is (active, inactive, discharged, retired) - you're eligible to attend as long as you deployed in support of OEF/OIF combat operations while in the military.
- #Via AFP: “South Korea has lifted an overseas travel ban on Hwang Jang-Yop, the highest-ranking North Korean defector ever to come here and a harsh critic of the Pyongyang regime. . . Hwang, former secretary of the ruling Workers' Party and an ex-tutor of Kim Jong-Il, defected during a trip to Beijing in 1997.” His travel restriction was due to 10 years of pro-North ROK leadership, now over.
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