Mick Hartley

Blaming Trump

It'd be a shame to let this pass as received wisdom:

Chinese state media are blaming the US relisting of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism for its latest missile test.

An editorial in the Global Times said US policy on North Korea had "been nothing but an abysmal failure" in wrongly assuming that it could force Pyongyang to abandon its weapons programme by applying more pressure on the country.

The newspaper warned that China would "not support a new round of Trump administration pressure tactics" but also reminded North Korea that the international community would never accept it as a nuclear-armed state.

"Washington has placed China in a precarious situation by asking for more than what was originally expected by the UN Security Council regarding the previous round of North Korea sanctions. China has always carried out UN security measures," the editorial said.

The English-language China Daily said: "A golden opportunity to build concerted momentum to encourage Pyongyang to engage in talks has been so casually wasted by the Trump administration's recent action of renaming Pyongyang a sponsor of state terrorism, which may have prompted Pyongyang's latest missile launch."

It's self-serving nonsense from the Chinese, who continue to be the main factor in the continuing survival of the Kim regime. Pyongyang has no interest in engaging in talks. The reason this kind of analysis has any leverage - and it does - is down to Trump, pure and simple. He's a blowhard who can't help sounding off on Twitter and elsewhere, so it fits the narrative to blame him for Pyongyang's increasing aggression. But, as it happens, his North Korean policy is one area where, to date, he's been a great deal stronger than his predecessors.

No, I don't believe that Trump personally has a firm grasp of the situation, or is driving US policy here. Read this excellent NYT piece by Brian Hook, director of policy planning and senior policy adviser at the State Department, and it becomes clear that, on North Korea at least, Trump has some key advisers who know what they're doing and have managed, so far, to guide the President in something like the right direction. 

Pre-war America

Photos by Arthur Rothstein, for the Farm Security Administration:

April 1939. "Rail yard. Newark, New Jersey."

January 1939. "Highway in Franklin County, Illinois."

July 1938. "Main street (Franklin Avenue) in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania."

April 1939. "Highway. New Jersey, near Newark."

October 1938. "Farm wife. Burlington County, New Jersey."

March 1940. "Cooperative gas station at Shafter migrant camp. Shafter, California."

August 1937. "Blacksmith's shop turned into a garage. Cambridge, Vermont." 

December 1937. "Deer hunter. Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania."

September 1937. "Town clerk's office. Hyde Park, Vermont."

April 1939. "Slums. Newark, New Jersey."

[Photos: Shorpy/Arthur Rothstein]

 

 

Zimbabwe and North Korea

Further to Sunday's post on Emmersom Mnangagwa, and developments in Zimbabwe, it turns out that Joshua Stanton - of One Free Korea - once visited the region, and knows the history. His post, The crocodiles of Pyongyang: A remembrance of Zimbabwe & thoughts on the fall of tyrants, is very much worth a read. 

Before she was famous, Samantha Power wrote at length about how Mugabe, for all his early promises of inclusion, moderation, and continuity, quickly consolidated power and gradually wrecked the economy. Not long after his inauguration in 1980, “Good Old Bob” (as the vanquished whites optimistically called him) visited Kim Il-sung in Pyongyang and met his totalitarian exemplar. He returned “a different man,” awed by Kim’s “absolute power and the apparent adoration of the North Korean people.” No one has chronicled the dark history of this “engagement” better than Benjamin Young did for NK News. Mugabe never achieved the same degree of totalitarian control as Kim Il-sung, but he certainly gave it a go: on the very eve of his overthrow, the editorials in his government newspapers could have been ghostwritten by KCNA....

Are there lessons for North Korea to be learned from the fall of Mugabe? Possibly yes - but read the whole piece.

Misreading Syria

Donald Trump has confirmed to the Turkish President that the US will stop selling arms to the Kurds in Syria.  Once ISIS had been defeated - mostly by the Kurds - Trump was easily persuaded by Erdogan that US support should be cut off, thus removing "a major source of tension between the United States and Turkey". Which is nice - except for the Kurds. Michael Totten:

Donald Trump is doubling down on the Obama administration’s grave misreading of Syria by assuming that ISIS was the only threat to Western interests in Syria. That wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now.

Rolling back ISIS in Syria and Iraq was relatively “easy” as far as armed conflicts in the Middle East go. ISIS was never going to be a terribly difficult problem to crack as long as it wasn’t allowed to fester indefinitely. The “caliphate” was land-locked. It had no allies, no real economy, no robust supply lines and precious little internal support from the terrorized citizens cowering under its rule.

The much larger and longer-term problem with Syria from the Western point of view is that Bashar al-Assad’s regime is an ally of the Islamic Republic of Iran and has been since 1979. It is also, by far, the biggest state sponsor of international terrorism in the Arab world and, after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Arab world’s most belligerent state. It has exported Sunni, Shia and secular terrorists to every single one of its neighbors, to Lebanon, to Iraq, to Israel, to Jordan and to Turkey. It dispatched Al Qaeda fighters against Americans in Iraq. It invaded and occupied Lebanon for well over a decade and, by incubating and nurturing Hezbollah, the PLO and Hamas, is directly responsible for more wars against Israel than I can count on one hand.

The Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah axis is poised to emerge victorious in the Syria war, stronger than ever, thanks to military assistance from Russia. Assad is surviving the biggest threat to his family’s rule since it seized power four decades ago. Short of political revolutions in Tehran and Moscow, he’s likely to die an old man in office. And he’ll have no incentive whatsoever to change his ways. He’ll continue exporting terrorism all over the region, and the next war between Israel and a now far-stronger Hezbollah will likely make the last one look like a peace process. The Kurds in Syria—our only true friends in that country—are likely to lose everything they have gained without American backing.

This is what happens when Americans grow weary of foreign policy and fool themselves, for fill-in-the-blank reasons, that Vladimir Putin is our friend.

Donald Trump owns this, and he owns it alone, mostly because he’s the president but also because his own team had planned for something entirely different in Syria. Just one day before he kicked the Kurds to the curb, administration officials told reporters that the US planned to use the Kurds, which now control large swaths of Northern Syria, to push Assad and the Iranian regime into a settlement. “We're not just going to walk away right now before the Geneva process has cracked,” Secretary of State James Mattis also said a week earlier.

Those statements meant nothing. The strategy his team put into place didn’t amount to anything either. We’ll need to put an asterisk next to anything and everything they say in the future because it can and quite possibly will be undercut and reversed at any time on Donald Trump’s whim.

Trump himself made that perfectly clear on Fox News in early November. “Let me tell you,” he said, “the one that matters is me. I'm the only one that matters, because when it comes to it, that's what the policy is going to be. You've seen that, you've seen it strongly.”

Indeed, we have.

An act of absolute submission

From the Times (£):

An Iranian wrestler is being lionised by his country for deliberately losing a match at a junior world championships so that he would not have to fight an Israeli opponent in the next round.

Alireza Karimi was ahead in his quarter-final bout in the under-23 world championships against a Russian, Alikhan Zhabrailov. Then news came in that in another quarter-final of the 86kg category Uri Kalashnikov, an Israeli, had won. In a video of the event posted online, a voice can clearly be heard off camera saying “Alireza, you have to lose!”....

Iran not only refuses to recognise Israel but will not allow any interaction with Israelis. Last month a teenage Iranian chess player, Borna Derakhshani, was accepted to play for England after being banned by Iran for playing an Israeli in a tournament.

Karimi, 23, while criticising Israel, questioned whether his coach’s decision amounted to oppression of his own ambitions and hard work. However, he was honoured for deliberately losing at the tournament in the Polish city of Bydgoszcz at the weekend.

“Your noble and heroic action in the world competition in Poland, abandoning the medal and the podium in support of the highest human values, is a source of pride and praise,” the sports ministry said in a statement posted on its website.

The national wrestling federation said that Karimi was committed to putting his country first. “It is the second time that you have risen up against the oppression of the Palestinian people by abandoning your rights in an act of absolute submission,” it said.

An act of absolute submission. For an Islamic theocracy there can be no higher praise.

In Xinjiang

A laborer on a residential buildingunder construction in Aksu, Xinjiang, China:

[Photo: Reuters]

From A Photo Trip Along the Ancient Silk Road.

Ghost ships

This has been going on for a while now. Desperate to increase fish yields, the North Korean authorities put pressure on fishermen to take more risks, with a total disregard for safety. The inevitable deaths - very likely well into the hundreds - are then treated as "acts of loyalty" by the state propaganda machine. 

Here's the latest grisly news:

Japanese authorities are trying to identify eight people whose partially skeletonised remains were found on a wooden boat that washed up on a beach.

The discovery took place in the northern Akita prefecture....

Crew-less boats or vessels with bodies on board, known as "ghost ships" and thought to be North Korean fishing boats, regularly wash up in Japan.

They have usually been found on the western coast, which faces North Korea.

In the latest incident, Japanese broadcaster NHK said the boat, measuring about 7m (23ft) long, was found on a beach near Oga city on Sunday. The vessel was missing a rotor blade and navigational devices.

On Monday officials found the remains of eight people, some reduced to bones, while inspecting the boat.

Kyodo news agency reported that the coast guard suspected the boat and its occupants had come from North Korea.

The discovery is the latest in a string of similar incidents. On Friday, a wooden boat carrying eight men - alive and in reasonably good health - washed up at Yurihonjo city.

The men said they were North Koreans fishing for squid, who had ended up drifting into Japanese waters when their boat experienced difficulties.

Reuters news agency reported that two bodies were also found over the weekend at Sado island, with a pack of North Korean cigarettes and other belongings with Korean lettering....

The BBC's Celia Hatton says the appearance of "ghost ships" is thought to be a consequence of North Korea's attempts to satisfy hunger by demanding huge quotas of seafood.

That forces fishermen to board aging ill-equipped vessels and to venture far out to sea, with no equipment to issue a distress call if their boats run into trouble, says our correspondent.

Sharecropper family

Dorothea Lange - July 1937. "Sharecropper near Hartwell, Georgia." 

"....formerly workers in the Gastonia textile mills. When the mills closed down seven years ago, they came to this farm near Hartwell, Georgia."

[Photos: Shorpy/Dorothea Lange  for the Resettlement Administration]

Mean Streets

In the Seventies and early Eighties, New York reached some kind of nadir. Bankrupt and crime-ridden, the subway dirty and covered with graffiti, it was a city whose streets were left to hustlers and bums. Photographer Edward Grazda was there to record it:

Bowery, 1971

Bowery, 1970

Chrystie Street, 1975

Bowery, 1976

Houston Street, 1973

Bowery, 1971

Midtown, 1970

Broadway & 55th Street, 1970

Bowery, 1973

Bowery & Bleecker Street, 1981

Bowery, 1971

Bowery, 1971

D Train, 1980

Bleecker & Elizabeth Streets, 1980

Midtown, 1970

Delancey Street, 1976

6th Street & Bowery, 1973

[Photos © Edward Grazda]

And he has a new book out...Mean Streets NYC 1970-1985.

Welcoming anti-Semites

James Kirchick, on the cult of BDS, and the continuing encouragement of antisemitic zealots who are hijacking American academia:

At first glance, the news that former CIA agent Valerie Plame has been invited to speak at Smith College on the topic of “Social Media and U.S. Foreign Policy” is laughable. Plame’s once-active Twitter account has been silent since September 24, the day she offered a mealy-mouthed apology for retweeting an article with the headline “America’s Jews are Driving America’s Wars” to her 50,000 followers. Plame initially defended as “provocative, but thoughtful” a piece which called for publicly identifying “those American Jews who lack any shred of integrity” like “a warning label on a bottle of rat poison.” Next at the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute? Harvey Weinstein on gender equality, Richard Spencer on American race relations, and Donald Trump on Social Media and U.S. Foreign Policy.

The invitation to the disgraced ex-CIA agent, however, speaks to something more serious, which is the way in which the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel is finding an institutional home in American academia. Only in an environment where it has become banal to exclude the world’s sole Jewish state would no one bat an eye at welcoming a blatant anti-Semite like Valerie Plame to address a roomful of young impressionable minds. A perverse consequence of the laudable progressive desire to be inclusive – which, taken to an extreme, has resulted in “safe spaces” for every conceivable minority group – is the exclusion of Jews at the behest of rejectionist Muslim voices who reject wholesale the existence of a Jewish state.

For a particularly egregious example of where things could be headed, consider Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. There, a trifecta of anti-Semitism scandals has engulfed the campus. First, there is Michael Chikindas, the professor of food science who has turned his Facebook page into a digital Der Stürmer and claims that Judaism is “the most racist religion in the world.” He’s joined by Jasbir Puar, a women’s studies professor who in the past claimed that Israel harvests Palestinian organs and whose latest peer-reviewed book, The Right to Maim, argues that the Israeli Defense Force’s “purportedly humanitarian practice of sparing death” is actually part of an ingenious strategy “to control” Palestinians. (Such outward benignity is not unlike the Jewish State’s LGBT-friendly policies, the ulterior motive of which, Puar argues, is the “homonationalist” “pinkwashining” of occupation. Those Jews can’t do anything right). Finally, Rutgers has brought into its taxpayer-funded employ a career Syrian diplomat named Mazen Adi, who, in his position as legal adviser at his country’s mission to the United Nations, echoed Puar’s claim that “international gangs led by some Israeli officials are now trafficking children’s organs....

And so, in a world in which all of the above inanity is becoming normalized, why wouldn’t a top-tier liberal arts college host a lecture on the use of social media by someone whose own use of social media is distinguished solely by its anti-Semitic incitement? It makes perfect sense.