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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (14262)	11/3/2006 5:52:19 PM
From: ManyMoose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

OK, here's the operative sentence: There is great risk that the election goes democrats way and giddy dems take the wrong message away from it.

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (14262)	11/10/2006 5:46:22 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Like Father, Like Son? Team 41 is a threat to the Bush legacy. BY DANIEL HENNINGER Friday, November 10, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST With the appointment of Robert Gates--CIA director from 1991 to 1993--to succeed Don Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, George W. Bush has brought upon himself much talk about sons in the shadow of their fathers. His presidency has turned Shakespearean, allowing all to tell sad stories about kings haunted by the ghosts they have deposed. Alone, the Gates appointment might have passed as a necessary, post-election expedient. But it is not alone. Pressed for a new direction in Iraq, Mr. Bush routinely draws attention to the imminent post-Thanksgiving report of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Survey Group. "Baker" is Jim Baker, who was his father's secretary of state from 1989 to 1992. The ISG's formal charge does not include finding a "way out" of Iraq for Mr. Bush, but all now assume this is what they intend to produce. The village elders on the Iraq Survey Group who will perform this duty are Lee Hamilton, Vernon Jordan, Ed Meese, Sandra Day O'Connor, Leon Panetta, former Clinton Defense Secretary Bill Perry, former Sens. Chuck Robb and Alan Simpson, and the secretary of defense designate, Robert Gates. George W. Bush has in no way been an Establishment President. On both taxes and foreign policy, he broke with them, and did so decisively. So he ought not underestimate, with the firing of Don Rumsfeld and the odd selection of his father's CIA director, how much visceral pleasure this brings to the displaced Establishment between Georgetown and Manhattan. Some Beltway pundits are now writing with smug satisfaction--but not without reason--that this marks the end of the Bush Doctrine, the idea that the U.S. could create opportunities for democratic self-determination in a region such as the Middle East. It is expected that the ISG's recommendation will carry with it the implicit conclusion that this goal has been too ambitious. And that it must give way now to a restoration of realism associated with Bush 41's secretary of state, Mr. Baker; with his National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and the former president's CIA director, Mr. Gates. And with the return of established foreign-policy wisdom, the "neocons" associated with Mr. Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney and their "failed" ideas will be swept out to sea. The post-Rumsfeld purge began yesterday. Sen. Joe Biden, now in the majority, announced that U.N. Ambassador John Bolton's stalled confirmation is "going nowhere." The three or four men who are thinking of seeking the Republican presidential nomination had better focus now on the potential fall of the Bush Doctrine at the hands of the Iraq Survey Group. If they don't, one of them, on the first day of his presidency, will inherit a re-entrenched foreign policy--at State, the CIA and on Wall Street--with a vision of America's role in the world reduced to that of auto-shop fixit men. They "work" the world's problems. Mr. Bush has joined this ascendant, if sclerotic, conventional wisdom by loading enormous expectations onto Mr. Baker's group. In doing so, he may be backing the country and his successor into a foreign-policy fait accompli that will be difficult to dislodge. One may reasonably argue at this point about the Bush team's policy decisions in Iraq. Nearby Reuel Marc Gerecht draws attention to the underexamined policy role of Mr. Bush's generals, to whom he has shown remarkable deference. Our own editorials have repeatedly said that the decision in 2003 to replace Gen. Jay Garner with Paul Bremer and abandon the early formation of an Iraqi-led governing structure deprived the Iraqis of desperately needed political experience. Mr. Bush's repeated requests now for patience with the "five-month old" government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki validates that point. But what has distinguished Mr. Bush's foreign policy, more than the Bush Doctrine itself, was the sense and belief that he would not abandon an ally. You may not like that, and may have just voted against it, but this country's global reputation is as allied with the people of Iraq as it was with the left-behind people of Vietnam. Or in 1991, the Shiites in southern Iraq. On Feb. 15 of that year, after routing Saddam's army in the south, President George H.W. Bush urged the Iraqi generals and people to "take matters into their own hands" against Saddam. Then on Feb. 27 came the White House order to Gen. Schwarzkopf to stand down and thus forgo the destruction of Saddam's tank army. The Bush 41 team expected Saddam's Baathist generals to finish him off and "stabilize" Iraq. That was realism. The secretary of state was Jim Baker and the deputy national security advisor to Brent Scowcroft was Robert Gates. Shortly, Saddam's systematic, tank-led slaughter began of the Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north. In April, U.N. Resolution 688 said the attacks "threaten international peace and security in the region." Mr. Gates acknowledged the miscalculation in the New Yorker last year. The opinion of the American people matters, and this week's election reflected fatigue with Iraq. We may be seeking a "way out," but if the Iraq Survey Group proposes a solution with the merest whiff of selling out Iraq's popularly elected Shiites, expect crudely realistic leaders in Russia, China, Nigeria, Venezuela, Bolivia, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere to conclude they too can downgrade, or obliterate, their own U.S.-oriented democratic groups. Then we can roll back the real end to notions of democratic possibility to the end of World War II. And with Democratic Party assent. George Bush's foreign policy is at a tipping point. The administration's thinking on Iran and North Korea looks stalemated. He has taken to talking about the need for "fresh eyes" on Iraq. Looking back over the roster of the Iraq Survey Group, I'd say the eyes focused on his foreign-policy legacy, all essentially retired from public life, are anything but fresh. In response to Tuesday's election, House Republicans are about to usher in a younger generation of political thinkers. If he really wants to refresh his presidency, Mr. Bush should start looking in the same direction. Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com. opinionjournal.com

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (14262)	11/12/2006 5:26:11 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

Little Lost Ones Will China let the U.N. help North Korean orphans? BY MELANIE KIRKPATRICK Sunday, November 12, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST Among a small group of North Korean refugees who have taken sanctuary in the U.S. Consulate in Shenyang, China, are two orphan children, both boys, ages 13 and 16. With luck, if the Chinese authorities allow them to leave and the U.S. government works out the legalities of granting asylum to parentless minors, they will be in the U.S. before Thanksgiving. Fortune has already shone on these boys by granting them safe passage on the underground railroad that ferries North Korean refugees in China to shelter in embassies or consulates there or in third countries. Korean refugees--who number in the tens, or even hundreds, of thousands--are leading desperate lives of hide-and-seek in China. Beijing's policy, in contravention of international law, is to track them down and repatriate them to North Korea, where they face prison camps or worse. It even pays bounties to citizens for turning them in. The boys were led to safety by Liberty in North Korea (LINK), a Virginia-based nonprofit dedicated to helping the refugees in China. LINK says the boys lost their parents to famine and crossed the border separately, scavenging for food. They met in an underground shelter run by LINK. "What we're trying to do is help these children," says a spokesman. "We house them and protect them and try to get them out to freedom." There are dozens of such secret orphanages in northeast China, operated by local Samaritans and supported by groups based in the U.S. and South Korea. Unlike the boys at the consulate, most abandoned orphans in northeast China are the progeny of North Korean women who have been captured and deported and their Chinese "husbands," who spurn their children. They are stateless, rejected by both China and North Korea for their "impure blood." Pregnant women deported to North Korea are often forced to abort for the same reason, says Chun Ki Won, a South Korean minister whose organization, Durihana, has helped spirit hundreds of refugees out of China. "I know of many cases myself," he says. "Diu Diu," or "little lost one," is the nickname given to a 3 1/2-year-old boy that LINK tried, but failed, to help. A year ago he and his mother were captured by Chinese police and taken to the border, where racist North Korean border guards refused to admit the half-Chinese boy, whom they tore from his mother's arms. The police then sold the boy to a circus for $100, where he was severely abused and ended up in a hospital. The photos LINK obtained of the boy are too shocking to print. "The stories are all so similar," says Tim Peters, an American missionary in Seoul who runs Helping Hands Korea. "A girl comes out [of the North] and either she has been secretly sold into marriage or she volunteers to marry a Chinese man. And then she gets caught and sent back." Mr. Peters estimates there are "thousands" of such abandoned children. Pastor Chun puts the number even higher. Left-behind infants and toddlers are sometimes sold to childless Chinese couples, Pastor Chun says. Older girls are peddled as brides or to brothels--"that's a given"--while the boys are sold as laborers. Others are left to fend for themselves, and humanitarian workers find them wandering the streets or living in train stations. Pastor Chun's organization runs several orphanages, each with four to seven children cared for by volunteer Chinese-Korean "mothers." Once in shelters, the children are de facto prisoners. They usually lack the official papers needed to attend school, get medical attention or participate in any other way in local society. "That's the problem," says a spokesman for Aegis Foundation, another U.S.-based nonprofit that runs shelters for Korean children in China. "We cannot send them to normal school and if they don't get any education, they can't be good citizens. That's why we need to smuggle them out." Crossing Borders, a Christian ministry based in Virginia, takes a different approach. It also sponsors secret orphanages but "we don't do the underground railroad," a spokesman says. "The long-term goal is to see these kids grow up and become productive members of society." Regulation is loose in the areas where its shelters are located, and the children it helps can sometimes attend school. Some of the children have been voluntarily handed over by fathers. "Most fathers have no means or desire of helping take care of their children," the spokesman says. "We go into the village and offer to take the kids. It's a handshake deal." The U.N. High Commission on Refugees stands ready to help the Korean refugees in China--if only Beijing would let it. Several countries in the region are prepared to set up transit camps for refugees provided the U.S. helps pay for it and South Korea ultimately accepts them for re-settlement, as its Constitution requires. But even if, in the happiest of worlds, all this were to occur, the stateless orphans could still be left out. According to groups that run the underground railroad, even South Korea, which accepts most of the Northerners who manage to escape, refuses to admit the children on the grounds that they are not true "defectors." Amid this misery, there are a few stories with happy endings--of mothers who ride the underground railroad to the South with their Korean-born children or mothers who escape and then go back to smuggle out their Chinese-born kids. The humanitarian workers tell these stories with unflagging spirit. But the vast majority of the orphans remain lost in China, in lives that offer little hope. Most of the South Koreans and Americans working to help the children are Christian, as are many of the ethnically Korean Chinese who care for them. Pastor Chun speaks for many, when he says he takes inspiration from Isaiah 1:17, in which God exhorts the prophet to "Defend the fatherless." Ms. Kirkpatrick is a deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. opinionjournal.com