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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: d[-_-]b who wrote (568156)	5/26/2010 12:13:28 PM
From: one_less	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1579027

The mistake we made during the Iraq sanction years, and the mistake we are at risk of making now is the American thinking that ruling powers care about what happens to the civilian population. Blaming Saddam for preventable civilian deaths (500k children under the age of five, and countless others) did zero for the purposes of the sanctions. The only possible strategy behind that would have been for us to cause so much misery among the non-regimists, that they would rise up and overthrough Saddam. We were doing Saddam's work for him, he didn't need Weapons of Mass Destruction, he was using us. By 2003, the over through strategy (Evil and misguided from the start) had clearly failed. +++++++++++++++ "That there has been no revolution is attributable to the Confucian culture, based on strong family ties. No one wants to get his family in trouble, for males up to the eighth cousin level will be punished for anything you do. Most people have little information about other towns or other countries and no basis to compare their lives to others’. People cannot gather to plan a revolution, and in any event they tend to believe the party propaganda, which holds that Americans and Japanese are killers and rapists; South Koreans (at least the officials) are the dogs of American imperialists; and the outside world is hostile to North Koreans. Borders are blocked, although it is possible to get into China for business by paying bribes. The border with China is the only porous one, but under a secret agreement entered into in 2003, China is committed to return defectors, and its police pay citizens to report defectors. The South Korean government does not welcome defectors, feeling burdened with just the few thousand there already. North Korean society is rotting from the inside, but the regime could still last a long time, and meanwhile its people are suffering horribly. Only perhaps some 2 million members of the top cadre support the regime; how to spur them to take action is a challenge. With North Korea boxed in by the Chinese and South Koreans, we can’t do much to physically reach its people. We can, however, better use international radio and other media for public diplomacy, countering the propaganda by conveying that Americans are personally charitable and would welcome them. We also need to encourage the South Korean government to improve its treatment of defectors and facilitate defectors’ communicating with those they left behind." fpri.org