Author: Josh Philip Ross

Today is my one-year anniversary at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations. Assuming I make it to work tomorrow (or on any subsequent day), this will become the second time in my entire life that I’ve held a job for more than a year. My teaching stint in Korea lasted precisely a year and no more, while my time at STV was mercifully cut short at 11 months. The only place I stayed longer than here was DoubleClick, where they gave me free sodas and stock options and there were video games and ridiculously hot women in the sales department.

So a year in, how’s it going? No, I did not get a cake like the one in the picture. But I still love the job, and I’m getting to do substantive work regularly. The new ambassador is great, and I’m excited about the upcoming September Summit, when President Roh Moo-hyun will be in town to speak at the General Assembly alongside our own president and other world leaders. In other words, I expect to be sitting right here in two more years, telling you all that I’ve never held any other job for as long.

Are we looking to cut and run in Iraq? That’s what General George Casey, our commander in Iraq, seems to be saying. I think the administration is floating this as a trial balloon to see how people react. If the response is negative, they can always disown the general’s words. If there’s not a big blowback, I expect that we’ll soon be hearing about plans to ditch the country.

It would fit with our general approach, which has been to pretend everything is going swimmingly and stick to our imaginary timetables as if the prewar fantasies about flowers in the streets had actually come true. We pushed forward with the invasion, the occupation, the disbanding of the Iraqi army, the handover of sovereignty, the election. We’re pushing hard to get the constitution done on time. Why not declare victory and leave once that’s done? Sure, there will still be an insurgency, but “freedom is messy,” and it won’t be our problem anymore.

The polls show that the majority of Americans are not confident we’ll win in Iraq, and a majority now — finally — believe the government intentionally misled the public on Saddam’s WMD. There’s a certain sentiment that we should see this thing through, but I don’t think that feeling is strong enough to create any serious resistance to a pullout, in stages, while the White House keeps saying everything is going according to plan. Democrats will mount half-hearted complaints and scold the president, but they know their constituents never wanted the war in the first place.

And despite the evident awfulness of invading a place, creating total chaos and then leaving it to wallow in miserable violence, I’m not sure our hanging around will do much good either. Stay the course? What course? It’s not like we’re winning. I worry that what seems like the ethical approach — cleaning up our own mess — may in fact be something like the ethical approach taken by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in Vietnam, where they couldn’t see any decent way to ditch the allies to whom we’d promised protection and victory. So we spent an unnecessary six years bombing the hell out of Vietnam and widening the war to Laos and Cambodia and tearing American society apart before finally leaving our allies behind anyway.

So, is it time to cut and run in Iraq? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

Check out M.I.A.’s latest video, Bucky Done Gun. It’s a bit of an incoherent mishmash — the theme seems to be some kind of Brazilian favela shipwreck revolution — but hey, the song is great, and it’s a chance to watch Ms. Arulpragasam shake her thing in her charming if peculiar way. Oh, and those horns that sound like something out of Black Orpheus? They’re a sample of “Gonna Fly Now,” better known as the Theme from Rocky (as in Balboa).

In other M.I.A. news, she’s featured on the final track of the new Missy Elliott record, Cookbook, which is fitting. For one thing, Missy’s latest single, “Lose Control,” has the same vocal rhythm as “Bucky Done Gun” (listen to M.I.A. saying, “Mia’s so doable,” then listen to Missy saying, “Make you do a double take”). And if there’s anyone M.I.A. sounds like, it’s Missy, who gets a shout-out on M.I.A.’s “Fire, Fire” (“Click suits and booted in the Timberlands/Freakin’ out to Missy and Timbaland”).

Oh, and don’t forget that M.I.A. and her DJ, Diplo, are playing SummerStage in Central Park on Sunday, August 7, along with DJ Rekha, New York’s reigning queen of bhangra. Get there early!

Bonus: You can watch an audience completely not getting M.I.A. here, in this bizarrely shot clip from Jimmy Kimmel Live.

I posted yesterday about my fear that the wrong man would end up “full of bullets on the subway floor.” It turns out that it had already happened: the London police killed the wrong man, a Brazilian unconnected to any terrorism at all.

One hopes that the NYPD is taking note. And at least this shooting is big news and an international incident, with the Brazilian foreign minister, Celso Amorim, is on his way to London demand an explanation from his counterpart, Jack Straw. Still, how different is this kind of shooting at the wrong man from the overzealous roundups that filled our prisons in Guantanamo, Bagram, Baghdad and elsewhere? The American people have mostly turned a blind eye to these human rights violations abroad, but one wonders whether, by accommodating ourselves to the reality of Guantanamo, we have made it easier to accommodate ourselves to something similar at home. When the first wrong man is cut down in America, will we shrug it off as the price of liberty?

It occurs to me that our response to 9/11 has not been all that different from our response to Pearl Harbor, if you leave out the part where we participated successfully in the major wars that were already underway across Eurasia and North Africa. The glory and cameraderie of that endevor have perhaps helped us to see the internment of the Japanese as a minor incident in a larger drama. And the immediacy of the war delayed the seizure of paranoia that arrived after the victory, when Red purges racked our country and our social politics devolved into a panicked loyalty to a clenched-teeth domesticity.

The analogy is of course limited. You can’t just write off World War II and its impact on America that easily. But there is a pattern in American history of shocks followed by hyperreactive violence: Harper’s Ferry exploding into the Civil War, the explosion of the Maine leading to the conquest of Cuba and the Philippines, the sinking of the Lusitania throwing us into the bloodiest war in history. And too often, these violent periods have been eras of repression at home.

Although, as a friend pointed out recently, this is an unusual convulsion of militarism, in that the young are not, in fact, joining up.

Last night, London police chased an Asian man (which in the UK usually means South Asian) onto a tube train and shot him dead. They had been following him for some time as a terrorist suspect, and when they confronted him, he ran. The worry, expressed by the British Muslim Council, is that the British police will now shoot to kill whenever an Asian, or an Asian terrorist suspect, refuses to halt for a police search, for whatever reason. One witness did describe the victim as wearing a “bomb belt with wires coming out,” and after the second set of blasts in two weeks, the police have very little choice but to react as if they are under attack. But it’s still frightening.

Meanwhile, my subway conductor this morning announced that beginning today, bags will be subject to search, and never mind about that pesky Fourth Amendment (“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized”). I suppose the question is what constitutes “unreasonable.” But what I fear is that people carrying things they shouldn’t be — a bag of pot or coke, say, or large sums of cash — will panic and run and wind up full of bullets on the subway floor.

Another reason I moved to New York City all those years ago: there are enough Jews here that we’re someone’s fetish.

I give enormous credit to the creative thinking that led the South Koreans to offer North Korea not just food aid, but also significant amounts of electricity if the North gives up its nuclear weapons. The surprising offer was enough to get the North Koreans back to the six-party negotiating table, although it remains to be seen whether the North plans to negotiate in anything like good faith.

I’m not an expert on the North Koreans, but it seems to me that their demands and concerns have stayed remarkably consistent over time, at least in recent years. Reuters today, quoting from Xinhua, reported an official of the North Korean Foreign Ministry as saying, “Not a single nuclear weapon will be needed for us if the U.S. nuclear threat is removed and its hostile policy of ‘bringing down the DPRK’s system’ is withdrawn.” This is in line with previous North Korean statements focused on the threat that they justifiably feel from the large U.S. military presence on their border, coupled with our tough talk about the evil of their regime.

Of course, the United States can’t withdraw its nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula because we don’t have any there (or at least that’s been our line for years, though there are dissenting views). In any case, nuclear-armed submarines and missiles on Okinawa could make quick work of Pyongyang if we so chose, and North Korea is not likely to get us to withdraw all our nukes from the region, especially because of our security commitments to Taiwan. Nor are we likely to satisfy the North Koreans by withdrawing our troops from the peninsula, or even from the DMZ.

Nevertheless, there is plenty that we can do, much of it at minimal actual cost. We could, for example, end the Korean war. To us, the distinction between armistice and peace is irrelevant, and we would be watching North Korea closely either way. But to the North Koreans it would be deeply meaningful. The North Koreans’ evident satisfaction at being called a “sovereign state” by various American officials is a reminder that such recognition has not always been forthcoming. Keep in mind that we only allowed North Korea to join the United Nations in 1991, and it was in 1994 that we nearly went to war with them. One can see why they’re nervous, and we could reassure them that our goal is not to topple their regime or destroy their country, but to coax them toward liberalization.

In such a context, the South Korean electricity offer is a step in the right direction. What is needed, above all, is economic engagement with the North, which would gradually raise living standards — and expectations — among its people, at the same time creating webworks of interdependency that would make bellicosity too costly. I have read that many North Koreans want a war with the South, and soon: they are starving anyway, they figure, and they’ve always been told such a war is inevitable, so if they have to die, they might as well get it over with. Even a small amount of economic opportunity would go far in alleviating this popular sentiment in favor of suicide.

This is, more or less, the model that the West followed with China, and it has been enormously successful. No, China is not democratic, and yes, it violates human rights on a massive scale. But hundreds of millions of people have been lifted from dire poverty to middle-class comfort, while China’s complex economic interdependence with the West means that it must consider the consequences before it makes any dramatic move. And certainly a North Korea that resembled today’s China would be a massive improvement on what we’ve got now.

This kind of engagement with North Korea can only happen if the United States is willing to assure the North that its survival is not in doubt. I don’t see why this should be a problem so long as North Korea agrees to dismantle its nuclear weapons and allow thorough inspections for verification. We could still keep our troops at the ready, and there is nothing in such an assurance that would stop us from defending South Korea, or anywhere else, should the North Koreans commit an act of aggression. At present, our main motivation for attacking the North first is to disable its nuclear weapons. If they give them up, why shouldn’t we give a security assurance?

The talks begin on July 25. We’ll see what comes of them.

Good news for fans of Lady Sovereign: her album, Public Warning, is due this October, and in the meantime you can watch her new video, a really funny little ska number called 9 to 5, at her website. (As usual, gotta log in to the VIP section.)