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 10 [...]
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 and/or [...]
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 recent [...]
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 to [...]
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 insurgent [...]
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, greatly [...]
After missile and nuclear tests and uranium enrichment, the U.S. sanctions North Korean firms while Pyongyang reverses, making overtures. It’s not an accident, it’s a pattern of strategic disengagement.
- #Vanity Fair, of all publications, has a lengthy article on North Korea’s counterfeiting operations, including Office 39. Well worth a read. (h/t NE Asia Matters)
- #The Chosun Ilbo has an article about a new book by Chang Jin-song (formerly affiliated with the North Korean Workers' Party) that details Kim Jong-il private life, including the inside scoop on all his lady friends. According to Chang, one unfortunate young lady to get Kim's attention was, "brutally executed after she spurned Kim's persistent advances and fell in love with another man."
- #Gizmodo has an excellent array of Kim Jong-il photos; In Which We Provoke Kim Jong Il in 77 Offensive and Hilarious Ways. Some are sure to become often used classics.
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