podpolia

China is defying the predictions of some that they would avoid confronting North Korea over the latest nuclear kerfuffle. It seems that the Chinese are starting to search ships headed for North Korea. I’m not really suprised that China wants to stop the North Koreans from causing regional trouble, even if they would be interested in a new Cold War with the US. After all, the last thing China would want would be a nuclear Japan, South Korea, or Australia allied with the United States and virtually on its doorstep. China is also building a border fence between itself and North Korea. (You wonder where all the protesters are about this particular fence — heaven knows Israel and the US have gotten enough flak for their own versions). It’s possible that this wall is not only for military and immigration purposes, but to make it so that the North Koreans can’t escape, and are driven to revolt against their government. A unified non-nuclear Korea separated from its dependence on US protection would be much more palatable to the Chinese in the long run, I suspect. However all of this plays out in the long run, it is definitely nice to have China on our side of this issue in the short run.

As we all know, the US Congressional elections are coming up, and at the same time, so are the casualties in Iraq. So what’s up with that?
The story behind the increase in casualties is that American troops are going on the offensive through Baghdad. American and Iraqi troops have gone through 8 of Baghdad’s nine districts. They’re almost done, in other words. I suspect that the idea behind this is to knock the insurgency back on its heels so that things are looking brighter around the time of the election, and we can start withdrawing troops (or at least, publicly announcing that we’re going to start withdrawing troops soon, while handing full control to the Iraqi government). The Iraqi insurgency is of course still hitting back, trying to gain headlines and win a propaganda victory before the upcoming election. However, it now looks as if the verdict of Saddam’s trial will happen on November 5th — just before the election. (Saddam can still appeal the verdict, but the election is so soon after the projected date of the verdict that that shouldn’t fundamentally alter the psychological impact of his conviction by the date of the election.) Expect a concerted Republican effort to illustrate success in Iraq in the week before the election. That is what things are looking like to me right now, especially with te way Bush tends to campaign fairly slowly before a campaign, and then make a massive push much later than the Democrats — the perfect example being the late Republican convention and campaign in the 2004 Presidential election. Rove and Bush’s strategy seems to be to let the Democrats spread themselves thin financially and in terms of campaign energy, and to make up for it with a single solid push at the end, massively outspending their opponents in the last few weeks. Perhaps this plan and the anticipation of its success are why Bush and Rove are “almost inexplicably upbeat” about the whole thing.
At this point, I’m not tempted to make a prediction about how the election will go. I suspect that the Republicans will lose seats in the House and the Senate, but how many and who will control the two houses afterwards are still anybody’s guess.

I must say, I think this is about the best political stunt I can remember. Here’s a video clip from Bhakta’s website that seems to be an interview about the stunt, but I’ve been having trouble with my browser for a while, so I can’t really tell for sure. Let me know if it doesn’t work, or if it’s of something completely unrelated to elephants and mariachi bands.

Via Power Line we have a link to an excellent analysis of the recent Johns Hopkins/Lancet report that the invasion of Iraq has killed 600,000 Iraqis. Moran has a go at showing the seamy underside of the study’s statistics, and ends up with some very good questions about the whole thing.

This is just hilarious.

Well, it’s finally happened — North Korea tested a nuclear weapon. This is not really very suprising. Time magazine has a decent discussion here of the possible results of the test.
Personally, my first inclination would be to start building up American troops in South Korea while warning the North to verifiably disarm, and then if they refused, blockade their ports. China probably would not be happy with this, but it seems to me that only the threat of force will make Kim Jong-Il give in.

After the to-do recently about China messing with US satellites, we have another wave of Chinese hacking. It seems quite likely that these hackers have the support of the Chinese government (let’s face it — do you really think they’d get away with it if they didn’t? This is China, after all). It is looking more and more like the United States is starting to enter a second Cold War — this time with China. Unfortunately for us, China’s economic system does not seem to be nearly as brittle as the Soviet Union’s, so a Cold War with China could not be resolved the same way the first was. Most likely, the best way to deal with China now would be to encourage internal dissent, keep pressure on them to open up socially, and try to work towards better human rights there. Further democratization there would likely be America’s best bet for decreasing the potential threat posed by China.