.
(아이는 키우기 보다는 알아서 큰다.)
그의 부모님, 한번도 하지 말라고 한 적도 없지만, 그렇다고 김어준의 행동에 대해 대신 책임을 져준 적도 없다.
손으로 밥을 먹다. 인간, 그저 하나의 동물일 뿐.
자신감과 자존감에 대한 그의 정의
김어준 아주대 강연
.
(아이는 키우기 보다는 알아서 큰다.)
그의 부모님, 한번도 하지 말라고 한 적도 없지만, 그렇다고 김어준의 행동에 대해 대신 책임을 져준 적도 없다.
손으로 밥을 먹다. 인간, 그저 하나의 동물일 뿐.
자신감과 자존감에 대한 그의 정의
How Fares the Dream? - Paul Krugman
January 15, 2012
How Fares the Dream?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
“I have a dream,”
declared Martin Luther King, in a speech that has lost none of its power to
inspire. And some of that dream has come true. When King spoke in the summer of
1963, America was a nation that denied basic rights to millions of its
citizens, simply because their skin was the wrong color. Today racism is no
longer embedded in law. And while it has by no means been banished from the
hearts of men, its grip is far weaker than once it was.
To say the obvious: to
look at a photo of
President Obama with his cabinet is to see a degree of racial openness — and
openness to women, too — that would have seemed almost inconceivable in 1963.
When we observe Martin Luther King’s Birthday, we have something very real to
celebrate: the civil rights movement was one of America’s finest
hours, and it made us a nation truer to its own ideals.
Yet if King could see
America now, I believe that he would be disappointed, and feel that his work
was nowhere near done. He dreamed of a nation in which his children “will not
be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
But what we actually became is a nation that judges people not by the color of
their skin — or at least not as much as in the past — but by the size of their
paychecks. And in America, more than in most other wealthy nations, the size of
your paycheck is strongly correlated with the size of your father’s paycheck.
Goodbye Jim Crow,
hello class system.
Economic inequality
isn’t inherently a racial issue, and rising inequality would be disturbing even
if there weren’t a racial dimension. But American society being what it is, there are racial implications to the way our incomes have been pulling
apart. And in any case, King — who was campaigning for higher wages
when he was assassinated — would surely have considered soaring inequality an
evil to be opposed.
So, about that racial
dimension: In the 1960s it was widely assumed that ending overt discrimination
would improve the economic as well as legal status of minority groups. And at
first this seemed to be happening. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s
substantial numbers of black families moved into the middle class, and even
into the upper middle class; the percentage of black households in the top 20
percent of the income distribution nearly doubled.
But around 1980
the relative economic position of blacks
in America stopped improving. Why? An important part of the answer, surely,
is that circa 1980 income disparities in the United States began to widen
dramatically, turning us into a society more unequal than at any time since the
1920s.
Think of the income
distribution as a ladder, with different people on different rungs. Starting
around 1980, the rungs began moving ever farther apart, adversely affecting
black economic progress in two ways. First, because many blacks were still on
the lower rungs, they were left behind as income at the top of the ladder
soared while income near the bottom stagnated. Second, as the rungs
moved farther apart, the ladder became harder to climb.
The Times recently reported on
a well-established finding that still surprises many Americans when they hear
about it: although we still see ourselves as the land of opportunity, we
actually have less intergenerational
economic mobility than other advanced nations. That is, the chances that
someone born into a low-income family will end up with high income, or vice
versa, are significantly lower here than in Canada or Europe.
And there’s every
reason to believe that our low economic mobility has a lot to do with
our high level of income inequality.
Last week Alan
Krueger, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, gave an
important speech about income inequality, presenting a relationship he dubbed
the “Great Gatsby Curve.” Highly unequal countries, he showed, have low
mobility: the more unequal a society is, the greater the extent to which an
individual’s economic status is determined by his or her parents’ status.
And as Mr. Krueger pointed out, this relationship suggests that America in the
year 2035 will have even less mobility than it has now, that it will be a place
in which the economic prospects of children largely reflect the class into
which they were born.
That is not a
development we should meekly accept.
Mitt Romney says that
we should discuss income inequality, if at all, only in “quiet rooms.” There
was a time when people said the same thing about racial inequality. Luckily,
however, there were people like Martin Luther King who refused to stay quiet.
And we should follow their example today. For the fact is that rising
inequality threatens to make America a different and worse place — and we need
to reverse that trend to preserve both our values and our dreams.
Associated Press North Korea Bureau Opens
Associated Press North
Korea Bureau Opens As First All-Format News Office In Pyongyang
Posted: 1/16/12
NEW YORK -- When
Associated Press executives and journalists attempted to open a North Korean
bureau last month, they arrived in Pyongyang just hours after the death of Kim Jong Il.
AP journalists hit the
ground running and provided text and photos of the historic time inside North
Korea to news outlets around the world. The bureau's official opening, however,
was postponed as the country mourned.
But on Monday, AP
executives were back in Pyongyang to formally launch the first full-time,
all-format western news bureau in North Korea, a totalitarian country that
ranks near the bottom of the world's press freedom index. Even with a base of
operations in the capital, it still won't be easy reporting within the
hermetically-sealed country. However, executive editor Kathleen Carroll said
the AP "does not submit to censorship" anywhere in the world,
including North Korea.
"We wouldn't have set up a bureau if we hadn't been able to operate the way we'd like to operate," Carroll told The Huffington Post by phone Monday morning from Pyongyang.
"We wouldn't have set up a bureau if we hadn't been able to operate the way we'd like to operate," Carroll told The Huffington Post by phone Monday morning from Pyongyang.
Carroll noted that
"every country has its own challenges" and AP journalists
don't wander freely in North Korea just as they couldn't wander freely while
reporting on a military base in various countries. But "when we have
asked permission to go places," she said, "we've been able to
go."
The AP first broke
into the nation in 2006, opening a video-only bureau in Pyongyang. Monday's
opening of an all-format bureau follows a year of negotiations with state-run
Korea Central News Agency. The AP first announced plans for the office in June.
In the Pyongyang bureau, veteran AP journalists who've covered the region for years will work alongside North Korean journalists. Carroll described the staffing as a merging of "outsiders' curiosity and insiders' knowledge."
In the Pyongyang bureau, veteran AP journalists who've covered the region for years will work alongside North Korean journalists. Carroll described the staffing as a merging of "outsiders' curiosity and insiders' knowledge."
Carroll said there may
be "some bumps in the road" covering North Korea, but noted that the
news organization has, at times, run afoul of governments throughout the world.
But it's worth it, she said, given that "the hunger for information about
North Korea and its people is so immense."
While the AP's
presence is significant for western news consumers, it may not greatly
effect North Koreans. News outlets worldwide will benefit from running AP
dispatches with a Pyongyang dateline, and yet the country's own citizens will
still have only state-run media. Given the absence of independent media,
Carroll noted, "we don't have any customers in North Korea."
Ma Ying-jeou, Taiwanese President, Wins Re-Election In Close Race
Ma Ying-jeou,
Taiwanese President, Wins Re-Election In Close Race
By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN 01/14/12
====
DO- stability +
prosperity (biz opportunity) vs. undermining
de facto independence , making political union inevitable
Washington - reduce the risk of being embroiled in a
Taiwan-China conflict
=====
TAIPEI, Taiwan --
Taiwan's president won re-election Saturday, paving the way for a continuation
of the China-friendly policies that have delighted Beijing and
Washington, and caused consternation among some in Taiwan worried about
the durability of their de facto independence.
With about 99 percent
of the vote counted, the official Central Election Commission said President Ma
Ying-jeou had garnered 51.6 percent of the total against 45.6 percent for Tsai
Ing-wen of the main opposition Democratic Progressive Party. A third candidate,
James Soong, once a heavyweight with Ma's Nationalist Party, had 2.8 percent.
Ma's Nationalist Party
also retained control of the 113-seat legislature, though with a reduced
majority.
Speaking before
thousands of jubilant supporters in downtown Taipei, Ma said his China policies
had resonated with voters.
"They gave us
support for our policy to put aside differences with the mainland. To search
for peace and turn it into business opportunities," he said.
Since taking office in
May 2008, Ma has tied Taiwan ever closer to China, which for the last 60 years
has represented a military threat, a political rival and, most recently, a key
commercial partner.
The two sides split
amid civil war in 1949, and China has never renounced its threat to use
military force to bring the democratic island under its control. But over the
past several years, and especially since Ma was first elected, tensions have
eased considerably amid an upsurge in trade and new transportation and tourist
links across the 100-mile-wide (160-kilometer-wide) Taiwan Strait.
Ma's re-election will
be seen in Beijing as a big victory for President Hu Jintao, who has
moved away from China's previous policy of repeatedly threatening the island
with war and instead has tried to woo Taiwanese by showing the
economic benefits of closer ties.
Still, Hu has funded a
wide-ranging military expansion that has made the use of force a more credible
option. A Ma defeat would have strengthened military hard-liners just as
Hu is preparing to step down to make way for a younger group of leaders.
There was no immediate
reaction from Beijing on the election results.
Ma's victory was
welcomed by the United States, Taiwan's most important security partner despite
shifting its recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979.
"We congratulate
Ma Ying-jeou on his re-election and the people of Taiwan on the successful
conduct of their presidential and legislative elections," the White
House said in a statement.
Drastically lowered
tensions have substantially reduced the chances that the U.S. will be
embroiled in a Taiwan-China conflict at a time when it is trying to repair
its economy, steady relations with Beijing and re-engage in East Asia after a
decade of preoccupation with Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Cross-Strait
peace, stability and improved relations, in an environment free from
intimidation, are of profound importance to the United States," the White
House statement said.
"We hope the
impressive efforts that both sides have undertaken in recent years to build
cross-Strait ties continue." Bruce Jacobs, a China expert at Monash
University in Melbourne, Australia, said, "Beijing, Washington and even
Australia will all breathe better with a Ma victory."
While there is little
appetite in Taiwan for political union
with Beijing, a majority of Taiwanese do want to engage the mainland
commercially, because they see it as an economic force whose footprint is
constantly growing.
Since taking office 3
1/2 years ago, Ma has sanctioned big upsurges in direct flights across the
strait, given the green light to accelerated Chinese tourist visits to Taiwan
and opened the door to Chinese investment.
His signature
achievement was the completion of a China trade deal in June 2010 that lowered
tariffs on hundreds of goods. While most of Taiwan's $124 billion worth of
exports to China last year were electronic items such as television
displays and cellphone chips, there was also a big upsurge in agricultural
sales from southern Taiwan, long a stronghold of Tsai's party.
Ma's victory was a bitter blow to Tsai, a
55-year-old London School of Economics Ph.D., who invested great efforts in
driving home her message that Ma's policies were not only widening economic
inequality but also undermining Taiwan's de facto independence in
exchange for economic benefits from China – a claim meant to resonate with her
party's pro-independence base.
While the DPP used to
push for formal Taiwanese independence, under Tsai it has adopted a more
moderate posture, insisting it wants to work with China, though without the
same degree of intensity it attributes to Ma.
DPP partisans – and
others on the island – worry that closer commercial links with the mainland
will force Taiwan into a state of dependency that they fear will make political
union inevitable. During the campaign, Ma insisted he has no intention of discussing
the sensitive unification issue with Beijing during a second term, but fears of
a closer political connection remain intact.
In his acceptance
speech, Ma pledged to boost support for poorer Taiwanese and narrow the growing
rich-poor divide while reaching out to civil society in making policy.
He promised to seek
Taiwanese entry into international economic and cultural organizations from
which it is now excluded by Chinese opposition, and to protect Taiwan's
sovereignty, security and "the dignity of the Taiwanese people."
Under Obama, an emerging global apparatus for drone killing
Under Obama, an
emerging global apparatus for drone killing
By Greg Miller,
Published: December 27, 2011
The Obama
administration’s counterterrorism accomplishments are most apparent in what it
has been able to dismantle, including CIA prisons and entire tiers of
al-Qaeda’s leadership. But what the administration has assembled, hidden from
public view, may be equally consequential.
In the space of three
years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to
carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth
surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret
facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force
cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine
bases in at least six countries on two continents.
Other commanders in
chief have presided over wars with far higher casualty counts. But no president
has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance
the nation’s security goals.
The rapid expansion of
the drone program has blurred long-standing boundaries between the CIA and
the military. Lethal operations are increasingly assembled a la carte,
piecing together personnel and equipment in ways that allow the White House
to toggle between separate legal authorities that govern the use of
lethal force.
In Yemen, for
instance, the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command pursue
the same adversary with nearly identical aircraft. But they alternate taking
the lead on strikes to exploit their separate authorities, and they maintain separate
kill lists that overlap but don’t match. CIA
and military strikes this fall killed three U.S. citizens, two of whom
were suspected al-Qaeda operatives.
The convergence of
military and intelligence resources has created blind spots in congressional
oversight. Intelligence committees are briefed on CIA operations, and JSOC
reports to armed services panels. As a result, no committee has a complete,
unobstructed view.
With a year to go in
President Obama’s first term, his administration can point to undeniable
results: Osama bin Laden is dead, the core al-Qaeda network is near defeat, and
members of its regional affiliates scan the sky for metallic glints.
Those results,
delivered with unprecedented precision from aircraft that put no American
pilots at risk, may help explain why the drone campaign has never attracted as
much scrutiny as the detention or interrogation programs of the George W. Bush
era. Although human rights advocates and others are increasingly critical of
the drone program, the level of public debate remains muted.
Senior Democrats
barely blink at the idea that a president from their party has assembled such a
highly efficient machine for the targeted killing of suspected terrorists. It
is a measure of the extent to which the drone campaign has become an awkward
open secret in Washington that even those inclined to express misgivings can
only allude to a program that, officially, they are not allowed to discuss.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein
(D-Calif.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, described the
program with a mixture of awe and concern. Its expansion under Obama was almost
inevitable, she said, because of the technology’s growing sophistication.
But the pace of its development, she said, makes it hard to predict how it
might come to be used.
“What this does is it
takes a lot of Americans out of harm’s way . . . without having to send in a special
ops team or drop a 500-pound bomb,” Feinstein said in an interview in which she
was careful to avoid explicit confirmation that the programs exist. “But I
worry about how this develops. I’m worried because of what increased technology
will make it capable of doing.”
Another reason for the
lack of extensive debate is secrecy. The
White House has refused to divulge details about the structure of the
drone program or, with rare exceptions, who has been killed. White House and
CIA officials declined to speak for attribution for this article.
Drone war’s evolution
Inside the White
House, according to officials who would discuss the drone program only on the
condition of anonymity, the drone is seen as a critical tool whose evolution
was accelerating even before Obama was elected. Senior administration officials
said the escalating number of strikes has created a perception that
the drone is driving counterterrorism policy, when the reverse is true.
“People think we start
with the drone and go from there, but that’s not it at all,” said a senior
administration official involved with the program. “We’re not constructing a
campaign around the drone. We’re not seeking to create some worldwide basing
network so we have drone capabilities in every corner of the globe.”
Nevertheless, for a
president who campaigned against the alleged counterterrorism excesses of his
predecessor, Obama has emphatically embraced the post-Sept. 11 era’s signature
counterterrorism tool.
When Obama was sworn
into office in 2009, the nation’s clandestine drone war was confined to a
single country, Pakistan, where 44 strikes over five years had left about 400
people dead, according
to the New America Foundation. The number of strikes has since soared to
nearly 240, and the number of those killed, according to conservative
estimates, has more than quadrupled.
The number of strikes
in Pakistan has declined this year, partly because the CIA has occasionally suspended them to
ease tensions at moments of crisis. One lull followed the arrest of an American
agency contractor who killed two Pakistani men; another came after the U.S.
commando raid that killed bin Laden. The CIA’s most recent period of restraint
followed U.S. military airstrikes last month that inadvertently killed 24
Pakistani soldiers along the Afghan border. At the same time, U.S. officials
have said that the number of “high-value” al-Qaeda
targets in Pakistan has dwindled to two.
Administration
officials said the expansion of the program under Obama has largely been driven
by the timeline of the drone’s development. Remotely piloted aircraft were used
during the Clinton and Bush administrations, but only in recent years have they
become advanced and abundant enough to be deployed on such a large scale.
The number of drone
aircraft has exploded in the past three years. A recent study by the
Congressional Budget Office counted 775 Predators, Reapers and other
medium- and long-range drones in the U.S. inventory, with hundreds more in the
pipeline.
About 30 of those
aircraft have been allocated to the CIA, officials said. But the agency has a
separate category that doesn’t show up in any public accounting, a fleet of
stealth drones that were developed and acquired under a highly
compartmentalized CIA program created after the Sept. 11 attacks. The RQ-170
model that recently crashed in Iran exposed the agency’s use of stealth drones
to spy on that country’s nuclear program, but the planes have also been used in
other countries.
The escalation of the
lethal drone campaign under Obama was driven to an extent by early
counterterrorism decisions. Shuttering the CIA’s detention program and
halting transfers to Guantanamo Bay left few options beyond
drone strikes or detention by often unreliable allies.
Key members of Obama’s
national security team came into office more inclined to endorse drone strikes
than were their counterparts under Bush, current and former officials said.
Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton, former CIA director and current Defense Secretary Leon
E. Panetta, and counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan seemed always ready to
step on the accelerator, said a former official who served in both administrations and was
supportive of the program. Current administration officials did not dispute the
former official’s characterization of the internal dynamics.
The only member
of Obama’s team known to have formally raised objections to the expanding
drone campaign is Dennis Blair, who served as director of national
intelligence.
During a National
Security Council meeting in November 2009, Blair sought to override the agenda
and force a debate on the use of drones, according to two participants.
Blair has since
articulated his concerns publicly, calling for a suspension of unilateral drone
strikes in Pakistan, which he argues damage relations with that country and
kill mainly mid-level militants. But he now speaks as a private citizen. His
opinion contributed to his isolation from Obama’s inner circle,
and he was fired last year.
Obama himself was
“oddly passive in this world,” the former official said, tending to defer on
drone policy to senior aides whose instincts often dovetailed with the
institutional agendas of the CIA and JSOC.
The senior
administration official disputed that characterization, saying that Obama
doesn’t weigh in on every operation but has been deeply involved in setting
the criteria for strikes and emphasizing the need to minimize collateral
damage.
“Everything about our
counterterrorism operations is about carrying out the guidance that he’s
given,” the official said. “I don’t think you could have the president any more
involved.”
Yemen convergence
Yemen has emerged as a
crucible of convergence, the only country where both the CIA and JSOC
are known to fly armed drones and carry out strikes. The attacks are
aimed at al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemen-based affiliate that has
eclipsed the terrorist network’s core as the most worrisome security threat.
From separate “ops
centers” at Langley and Fort Bragg, N.C., the agency and JSOC share
intelligence and coordinate attacks, even as operations unfold. U.S.
officials said the CIA recently intervened in a planned JSOC strike in Yemen,
urging its military counterpart to hold its fire because the intended target
was not where the missile was aimed. Subsequent intelligence confirmed the
agency’s concerns, officials said.
But seams in the
collaboration still show.
After locating Anwar
al-Awlaki in Yemen this fall, the CIA quickly assembled a fleet of armed drones
to track the alleged al-Qaeda leader until it could take a shot.
The agency moved armed
Predators from Pakistan to Yemen temporarily, and assumed control of others
from JSOC’s arsenal, to expand surveillance of Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric
connected to terrorism plots, including the attempted bombing of a
Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009.
The choreography of
the strike, which involved four drones, was intricate. Two Predators
pointed lasers at Awlaki’s vehicle, and a third circled to make sure that no
civilians wandered into the cross hairs. Reaper drones, which are larger than
Predators and can carry more missiles, have become the main shooters in most
strikes.
On Sept. 30, Awlaki
was killed in a missile strike carried out by the CIA under Title 50
authorities — which govern covert intelligence operations — even though
officials said it was initially unclear whether an agency or JSOC drone had
delivered the fatal blow. A second U.S. citizen, an al-Qaeda propagandist who
had lived in North Carolina, was among those killed.
The execution was
nearly flawless, officials said. Nevertheless, when a similar strike was
conducted just two weeks later, the entire protocol had changed. The
second attack, which killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, was carried out by
JSOC under Title 10 authorities that apply to the use of military
force.
When pressed on why
the CIA had not pulled the trigger, U.S. officials said it was because the main
target of the Oct. 14 attack, an Egyptian named Ibrahim al-Banna, was not on
the agency’s kill list. The Awlaki teenager, a
U.S. citizen with no history of involvement with al-Qaeda, was an
unintended casualty.
In interviews, senior
U.S. officials acknowledged that the two kill lists don’t match, but
offered conflicting explanations as to why.
Three senior U.S.
officials said the lists vary because of the divergent legal authorities. JSOC’s list is longer, the officials
said, because the post-Sept. 11, 2001, Authorization for Use of Military Force,
as well as a separate executive order, gave JSOC latitude to hunt broadly
defined groups of al-Qaeda fighters, even outside conventional war zones. The
CIA’s lethal-action authorities, based in a presidential “finding” that has
been modified since Sept. 11, were described as more narrow.
But others directly
involved in the drone campaign offered a simpler explanation: Because the CIA
had only recently resumed armed drone flights over Yemen, the agency hadn’t had
as much time as JSOC to compile its kill list. Over time, officials said, the
agency would catch up.
The administration
official who discussed the drone program declined to address the discrepancies
in the kill lists, except to say: “We are aiming and striving for alignment.
That is an ideal to be achieved.”
Divided oversight
Such disparities often
elude Congress, where the structure of oversight committees has failed
to keep pace with the way military and intelligence operations have
converged.
Within 24 hours of
every CIA drone strike, a classified fax machine lights up in the secure spaces
of the Senate intelligence committee, spitting out a report on the
location, target and result.
The outdated procedure
reflects the agency’s effort to comply with Title 50 requirements that
Congress be provided with timely, written notification of covert action
overseas. There is no comparable requirement in Title 10, and the Senate
Armed Services Committee can go days before learning the details of JSOC
strikes.
Neither panel is in a
position to compare the CIA and JSOC kill lists or even arrive at a
comprehensive understanding of the rules by which each is assembled.
The senior
administration official said the gap is inadvertent. “It’s certainly not
something where the goal is to evade oversight,” the official said. A senior
Senate aide involved in reviewing military drone strikes said that the blind
spot reflects a failure by Congress to adapt but that “we will eventually catch
up.”
The disclosure of
these operations is generally limited to relevant committees in the House and
Senate and sometimes only to their leaders. Those briefed must abide by
restrictions that prevent them from discussing what they have learned with
those who lack the requisite security clearances. The vast majority of
lawmakers receive scant information about the administration’s drone program.
The Senate
intelligence committee, which is wrapping up a years-long investigation of the
Bush-era interrogation program, has not initiated such an examination of armed
drones. But officials said their oversight of the program has been augmented
significantly in the past couple of years, with senior staff members now making
frequent and sometimes unannounced visits to the CIA “ops center,” reviewing
the intelligence involved in errant strikes, and visiting counterterrorism
operations sites overseas.
Feinstein acknowledged
concern with emerging blind spots.
“Whenever this is
used, particularly in a lethal manner, there ought to be careful oversight, and
that ought to be by civilians,” Feinstein said. “What we have is a very unique
battlefield weapon. You can’t stop the technology from improving, so you better
start thinking about how you monitor it.”
Increasing reach
The return of armed
CIA Predators to Yemen — after carrying out a single strike there in 2002 — was
part of a significant expansion of the drones’ geographic reach.
Over the past year,
the agency has erected a secret drone base on the Arabian Peninsula. The
U.S. military began flying Predators and Reapers from bases in Seychelles and
Ethiopia, in addition to JSOC’s long-standing drone base in Djibouti.
Senior administration
officials said the sprawling program comprises distinct campaigns, each
calibrated according to where and against whom the aircraft and other
counterterrorism weapons are used.
In Pakistan,
the CIA has carried out 239 strikes since Obama was sworn in, and the agency
continues to have wide latitude to launch attacks.
In Yemen, there
have been about 15 strikes since Obama took office, although it is not clear
how many were carried out by drones because the U.S. military has also used
conventional aircraft and cruise missiles.
Somalia, where the militant group al-Shabab is
based, is surrounded by American drone installations. And officials said that
JSOC has repeatedly lobbied for authority to strike al-Shabab training camps
that have attracted some Somali Americans.
But the administration
has allowed only a handful of strikes, out of concern that a broader campaign
could turn al-Shabab from a regional menace into an adversary determined to
carry out attacks on U.S. soil.
The plans are
constantly being adjusted, officials said, with the White House holding
strategy sessions on Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia two or three times a month.
Administration officials point to the varied approach as evidence of its
restraint.
“Somalia would be the
easiest place to go in in an undiscriminating way and do drone strikes because
there’s no host government to get” angry, the senior administration official
said. “But that’s certainly not the way we’re approaching it.”
Drone strikes could
resume, however, if factions of al-Shabab’s leadership succeed in expanding the
group’s agenda.
“That’s an ongoing
calculation because there’s an ongoing debate inside the senior leadership of
al-Shabab,” the senior administration official said. “It certainly would not
bother us if potential terrorists took note of the fact that we tend to go
after those who go after us.”
The Economist on Kim Jong-un’s regime – increasing difficulty resisting change
Succession in North
Korea
Grief and fear
It seems unlikely that
Kim Jong Un will want to reform North Korea, but even less likely that the
regime can go on resisting change
Dec 31st 2011
====
DO - . Mobile phones,
cross-border profiteering, corruption, inequality, unprecedented public anger,
car, middle class vs. bereft of trustworthy information .
=====
IF NORTH KOREA were
not so tragic and dangerous, the scenes broadcast to the world after the
funeral of Kim Jong Il would have been comic. Waves of mourners outdid each
other in grief. Men, women and children tore at their clothes in homage to a
man who for 17 years kept his people in a state of isolation, poverty and
indoctrination unparalleled in the modern world. According to the state news
agency, “even the sky seemed to writhe in grief” at the demise of the “great
saint born of Heaven”. There was pathetic gratitude when tin mugs of warm milk
were put into trembling hands—proof, it was reported, of the solicitousness of
Kim Jong Un, third son of the “Dear Leader” and heir to his murderous regime.
In his glass coffin,
the dead Kim had lain in the Kumsusan mausoleum, his head on a white cushion,
his body draped in a red blanket whose colour matched the flowers—his cherished
B egonia kimjongilia—that surrounded his corpse. If the mass grieving filmed in
Pyongyang was a mixture of brainwashed reverence, genuine fear of the unknown,
choreography, and the seditious risk of looking nonchalant, the images of the
young Un at the foot of his father’s coffin were a study in how to make a
ruling clique look sombre, steadfast and united. That was quite a feat for what
by North Korean standards was a hastily arranged succession. For over two years
the Dear Leader had been ailing, which was not much time to groom Kim Jong
Un—his father had decades to cement his succession to Kim Il Sung, the Great
Leader, who died in 1994. Kim Jong Il’s own death on December 17th, of heart
failure, came as no surprise. But next April is the 100th anniversary of Kim Il
Sung’s birth, and his son was to have overseen the celebrations, which North
Koreans have been promised will mark the country’s elevation to something like
developed-country status. Presided over by the callow Kim Jong Un, the
milestone will now look even more hollow.
The dead Kim has left
a failing, nuclear-armed, totalitarian state in the hands of a youth who has
rarely if ever made a public utterance, and who is so unknown outside his small
circle of advisers that it is not clear whether he is 27 or 28. He may have got
the job in part because his elder brother, Kim Jong Nam, was caught trying to
enter Japan to go to Tokyo Disneyland in 2001; he subsequently moved to, and
gambled in, Macau.
Just 15 months after
he was named as heir-apparent, Kim Jong Un was officially dubbed the “Great
Successor” on December 19th, when state media finally reported his father’s
death. Nominally, at least, that puts North Korea’s 24m people, many of whom
are so destitute they
supplement their meagre maize-based subsistence with grass and whatever else
they can forage, under his heel. They are
spied on by neighbours,
and live in a fearful uncertainty, not knowing what might befall them or their
families if they step out of line.
To keep order at home,
and enemies abroad at bay, Mr Kim inherits a standing army of perhaps 1m
soldiers, with ballistic missiles aimed at South Korea and Japan, and a small
arsenal of nuclear weapons. China and America, which keep troops on his
country’s northern and southern flanks respectively, have been pressing the
regime to give them up; but their disagreements on how to treat the rogue
regime have not helped defang it. The fate of Muammar Qaddafi after he gave up
his nuclear-weapons programme will not encourage Mr Kim to abandon North
Korea’s.
He is not alone at the
controls. Standing conspicuously behind the heir are an apparent troika of
regents: his aunt, Kim Kyong Hui, her husband, Jang Song Taek, both
longtime confidants of his father, and another ally of his father, General Ri
Yong Ho, the boy king’s umbilical cord to the army. Together with his late
father, the regents appear to have purged potential rivals and promoted allies
in clearing the path for succession.
China, North Korea’s closest ally and begrudging
patron, has, at the urging of Pyongyang, ratified the ascension in its official
condolences, addressed to the nation “under the leadership of Comrade Kim Jong
Un”. South Korea and America chose not to convey official sorrow
at the passing of a dictator who terrorised their countries with bombings,
kidnappings and nuclear provocations. When South Korea indicated it would allow
only a small delegation to travel north to express their condolences,
Pyongyang’s propaganda machinery, true to form, threatened to meet any
obstructions from Seoul with “unpredictable catastrophic consequences”.
Avoiding chaos
Since the elder Kim
first fell gravely ill from a suspected stroke in 2008, North Korea-watchers in
Washington, DC and elsewhere have predicted that a chaotic succession would be
the greatest threat to the regime. However, after the 51-hour hiatus
before Mr Kim’s death was announced, many say that every step has been taken to
signal, both to outsiders and to the nation, that the country remains
firmly in the grip of its founding family.
The organs of state
have begun churning out paeans to the young Kim, who appears set to assume his
father’s huge collection of titles, including (most prosaically) supreme leader
of the revolutionary armed forces, and head of the Korean Workers’ Party.
Visitors to North Korea say that after more than 60 years there is still
reverence for the Kim name, partly because of nostalgia for Kim Il Sung, the
revolutionary father of the nation, who had the good fortune to die just before
a famine killed about 1m people and the state’s food-distribution system
collapsed. Kim Jong Il has overseen mass starvation and diverted huge resources
to his dream of building a nuclear weapon to blackmail the outside world. But
his subjects have no avenues to express dissatisfaction; and, for many, the Kim
family mythology—with all its fascistic xenophobia—is all they have to believe
in.
What is more, the
clique of Kim family members, generals and senior government officials whose
loyalty has stood the test of purges may have as much to lose as their young
protégé from the collapse of the regime. Bradley Martin, author of a
comprehensive account of the Kim dynasty, believes the ruling clique has every
reason to fear the loss of its privileges. That keeps personal ambitions in
check. When communism fell in Eastern Europe, North Korean media showed videos
of formerly high-ranking East German officials reduced to selling sausages on
the street. “This was intended to remind the elite where their loyalties needed
to lie,” Mr Martin says.
They are not the only
beneficiaries of the regime. In Pyongyang visitors say life has improved
recently for Kim family loyalists, which may explain the berserk expressions of
grief. Though power cuts persist, tens of thousands of cars throng the
streets, compared with empty thoroughfares just five years ago, and a
middle class is developing that is separate from the power elites.
There are now hundreds
of thousands of mobile-phone users on the regime’s network, with
international calls for some. And a few department stores are well-stocked,
with no need any longer to usher foreign visitors quickly past shops with
prices, but no goods, on their shelves. Indeed, Kim Jong Il’s last public
appearance was at an upscale Pyongyang supermarket; its staff, it was reported,
wailed and threw themselves into each other’s arms on hearing of his death.
Foreigners who travel
to other cities say these too have some residents with what one visitor calls
“semi-disposable income”. In one city, Hamhung, a charity worker reports
high-heeled shoes, clean imported clothing, nice winter jackets, all alongside
tattered old clothing. The benefits, though, come to those with family
connections in the party and the army and to those with relatives in China.
That allows them to take part in the semi-tolerated black-markets which have
sprung up in the void left by the collapse of the food-distribution system.
Yet even in the early
months of the regime, internal stability cannot be taken for granted.
Surrounded by crusty generals three times his age, an insecure young leader
might just resort to hot-headed measures to assert himself. Analysts point to
rumours that he helped orchestrate murderous attacks on South Korean targets in
2010 as evidence of a brattish malevolence. Old tensions between the army
and the party could resurface, especially over the former’s involvement in
the cross-border trade that fosters the black markets.
Perhaps the biggest
risk to the regime’s stability comes from the black markets and the
taste for freedoms and better living they bring. Near the border
with China, North Koreans can use Chinese mobile networks to call South Korea,
either directly or by paying brokers to put them through. DVDs on sale on the
black market show what life in the outside world, especially South Korea, is
like. Growing understanding of North Korea’s economic backwardness seems likely
to breed hunger for change.
Food or bullets?
From a dictator’s
perspective, the markets may be the trickiest issue to manage. Shut
them down and risk revolt; leave
them alone and a growing number of wealthy
traders could form a threatening constituency. Kim Jong Il
experienced this. These illegal bastions of capitalism had sprung up throughout
much of the country, establishing a semblance of a working economy alongside
the nonfunctioning state system, and enriching a dangerous new merchant class. A
2009 currency confiscation wiped out the wealth of the most successful traders,
but the move brought with it hunger and widespread anger.
Adding to the
potential pressure on the young Kim, 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of his
revered grandfather’s birth when North Korea is to become a “strong and
prosperous nation”. Some believe Mr Kim will mark the occasion by using a
phrase attributed to him, that “food is more important than bullets.” Dovish
Chinese analysts express their usual hope that there will be a shift toward
economic liberalisation. For years Chinese leaders tried in vain to convince
Kim Jong Il to embrace Chinese-style economic reforms; they might yet choose to
push those reforms with renewed vigour. Optimists suggest that, to justify
reform, the young Kim could argue that his father built the nuclear weapons
that made his nation “strong”; now it is the time to make it “prosperous”.
But pessimists, whose
views North Korea’s recent history has tended to support, argue that the
elite will be reluctant to abandon the patronage and rent-seeking from
which they have benefited. Much of the investment from Chinese firms has
gone to secure mineral rights, providing little benefit to the people at large.
Rajin-Sonbong, a special economic zone near China’s border, has lingered
as a failed promise of reform and opening for years. Korea Taepung
International Investment Group, which is trying to strike mineral deals and
promote Rajin-Sonbong, is overseen directly by central leaders, including Mr
Kim’s uncle, Jang Song Taek, who has done business with the Chinese for years.
It is hard to see
how the economy could be modernised without abruptly destroying the state’s
paternalistic ruling mythology. Much of the dark interior of North Korea is
bereft not only of consumer goods but also of trustworthy information,
on anything from prices to politics. Although an increasing number of people,
especially in the border areas, are aware of the vast disparity between
capitalist South Korea and their own workers’ paradise, defectors say many
still do not fully grasp how wide that chasm is. As one defector puts it,
explaining why his relatives cling to their belief in the Kim family state when
he sends them cash from South Korea: “There is a gap between what you know and
what you believe.”
North Koreans are
educated from early childhood to believe in the purity and superiority of
their race, in the evils of the Americans and the Japanese, and of
their need for an all-powerful, protecting figure to lead them. That explains the
lure of juche (loosely, self-reliance, or autarky), which is the sole
ideological pillar of this mythology. Any more information would expose how
pathetically the Kim family regime has failed to provide what even their poor
cousins in neighbouring China mostly take for granted: not just food, but
transport links, and fuel and electricity to heat homes in the winter.
As it is, North
Koreans need only look to the plunging value of their local currency to realise
how fragile their situation is. The official rate is 15 won per Chinese yuan.
Charity workers say that a black-market exchange rate of 340 won in June had
plunged to 600 won in November. With average salaries of 3,000-6,000 won per
month the currency is, in effect, worthless. That helps explain why much of the
population is stunted by malnutrition.
China, the only power with much influence over
the country, is less troubled by the long-term grinding suffering of the North
Koreans than by the prospect of a leadership vacuum leading suddenly to
economic collapse and a flood of refugees. Such a prospect threatens to
cause wider instability. If China tried to control the ensuing chaos by moving
troops to the North Korean side of the border, hackles would rise in
South Korea, which fears China’s territorial demands on a piece of the
peninsula that it considers almost sacredly Korean. It would also send shock
waves through Asian countries fearful of Chinese expansionism.
The nuclear option
In the case of
full-scale collapse, American troops stationed south of the 38th parallel would
try to secure North Korea’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and their
production facilities. The locations of some of these are known—but there may
be others. Such a move could lead to confrontation between American and Chinese
troops on North Korean soil. America would also feel bound to support Seoul
against China. For its part, South Korea, whose economy is 30 times larger than
North Korea’s, sees uncontrolled unification, and the refugee crisis it would
probably create, as a huge threat to its stability.
These fears are real,
but they have led North Korea’s neighbours to accept a worse
evil—the status quo. Instead of abandoning the regime and hoping
it would collapse, they have been vainly negotiating for it to abandon the
nuclear weapons on which its survival depends.
Under the late Kim the
North Koreans appeared twice to promise to denuclearise, but both times they
went back on their word, as well as selling nuclear technology to rogue states
elsewhere. The six-party talks with North Korea, chaired by China and including
America, South Korea, Japan and Russia, have been stalled since 2008.
America’s then defence
secretary, Robert Gates, took a tough line on North Korea’s deceptions, saying:
“I’m tired of buying the same horse twice.” Yet just before Mr Kim’s death,
America was negotiating ways to restart food aid to North Korea, and there was
speculation that it was seeking nuclear concessions in the process.
Park Syung-je, of the
Asia Strategy Institute in Seoul, believes the young Mr Kim will play upon his
father’s death to recommence the merry-go-round. The North Korean strategy,
“provoke, negotiate, rinse, repeat”, will, he believes, make fools of its
six-party interlocutors again.
Perhaps the most
confounding aspect of North Korea is that, however much it has depended on
Chinese investment and Western aid since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
outside world cannot do much to influence its internal dynamics. So deprived
are its people of both external and internal sources of information that the
regime has been able to assert control. So dependent are they on its favour
that North Koreans have become accustomed to policing themselves.
Yet the country that
Mr Kim inherits is not as unchanging as it appears. Mobile phones, cross-border
profiteering, corruption and inequality have all flourished.
The failed currency reforms led to unprecedented public anger. A few
outsiders with contacts inside the country say North Koreans quietly mock the
young heir who, educated in part at a smart Swiss boarding school, is hardly
cut from the same revolutionary cloth as his grandfather.
The Kim dynasty’s
biggest achievement is that, despite its fearsome cruelty, its leaders have
twice died of natural causes and have even been mourned by their subjects. But
even those who think the young Mr Kim will have a grip on power for some time
doubt that they can keep it up. “I don’t envy the boy ruler,” says Mr Martin.
“I just don’t think he’s going to die in bed.”
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