REGIME CHANGE IN KOREA

Note that neither "North" nor "South" is prefixed to Korea, for we are talking about coming regime change in both. 

The President of South Korea, Roh Moo-hyun, would love to be as unpopular as George Bush – for that would mean his popularity is three times the size it is now.  While Bush's approval rating is at 30%, Roh's is 10%.  Ninety percent of South Koreans don't like their president – whose name is pronounced "No" but he insists it be spelled with an "R."

To avoid this confusion, we'll refer to him correctly as President Noh.  His party, the Yeollin Uri or Our Open Party, is the equivalent of our Democrats:  anti-capitalist, anti-entrepreneur, anti-American, focused on "redistributing" (the euphemism for government theft) wealth rather than its creation, and on appeasing their country's enemies rather than defending their country from them.

Prior to this week, the Uri party was dominant in the National Assembly with 133 seats (out of 299).  But on Tuesday (2/6), 23 Uri lawmakers quit their party, with more to follow so that Uri is splintering into at least two parties.

This leaves the Hannara party (either Grand National or One Nation Party as han can mean either "great" or "one") effectively in charge of the legislature with 127 seats.  Noh has been reduced to a truly impotent lame duck (unlike GW) and stands no chance in the presidential election this November.

South Korea's next president will almost undoubtedly be from Hannara, and will likely be former Hyundai CEO and current Mayor of Seoul, Lee Myung-bak.

His party, Hannara, is like what our Republicans are supposed to be:  pro-capitalist, pro-entrepreneur, pro-American, and anti-appeasement of North Korea.  In private discussions with certain US Congressmen, Hannara leaders have confided their intention to send up to 30,000 ROK (Republic of Korea) soldiers to Iraq.

Any Vietnam Veteran will tell you how tough and ferocious ROK troops were in fighting the Vietnamese Communists.  From 1965 to 1973, up to 50,000 fought in Vietnam alongside with us at a given time, over 300,000 rotating in total.  Now they are about to be alongside us once again, fighting Islamofascists.

And Hannara leaders are determined to precipitate the collapse of North Korea's communist tyranny.  They plan to do it with the help of the Communist Chinese.

It's the Chicoms, of course, that supply most all of North Korea's food, oil, electricity, and just about everything else.  Finally they are getting sick and tired of it.

One reason is that – get ready for this – over 40% of North Korea's entire national budget is spent on monuments to Kim Jong-il and his father Kim Il-song.  There are now more than 140,000 such monuments throughout the country – Revolutionary Spirit Institutes, historical sites (including the Pyongyang golf course where the Dear Leader claims he shot 11 straight holes-in-one the very first time he played golf), Guidance Memorials, Eternal Towers, and 200 Kim Father and Son Research Institutes.

The insanity of it all, while millions of North Koreans starve, is getting to be too much even for the Chicoms.  But even more sobering are the defections of the border guards.

An entire platoon of North Korean border guards at the Hoeryong crossing defected and escaped into Chinese Manchuria a few days ago.  They had made so much money in bribes that they could afford to split themselves. 

Border guard bribery is rampant and uncontrollable now.  Control of the border to prevent folks from escaping is the one thing that keeps Baby Kim's regime from collapsing.  That control is disintegrating and has the Chicoms scared.

Thus a deal is in the works between Hannara and Beijing.  The Chicoms pull Baby Kim's plug and engineer a regime change as a prelude to North-South reunification.  Hannara, with control of the South Korean legislature and presidency, fronts the cost, absorbs the initial deluge of refugees (planning to repatriate them after reunification), dismantles Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program (no Korean nukes that could be aimed at China), and adopts a non-antagonistic foreign policy regarding China.

Oh, and Hannara would guarantee to cede to China Korea's side of the last 11 miles of the Tumen River, which forms its border with Russia and thus blocks all of Chinese Manchuria from sovereign access to the Pacific Ocean:

Notice the deal does not require a Hannara unified-Korea government to be pro-China and thus anti-America (although it obviously entails a quite substantial – but not total — withdrawal of US military forces from the Korean Peninsula).  It requires Seoul not be antagonistic towards Beijing, and to walk a tightrope between China and the US.

Expect this to happen before the end of next year, which means before our November 2008 election.  George Bush is quietly but enthusiastically supporting the Hannara-Beijing deal, for it would liberate the North Korean people, get rid of a second member of his Axis of Evil, and be an enormous contribution to world peace.

President Noh George Bush is not.  The world is going to look different and be safer by the end of his presidency.  And about that third Axis member?  See this week's The Real Surge and the Phony Civil War.