This is actually quite surpising considering the South Korean government’s past policies of being North Korean apologists:

Seoul has for the first time decided to support a UN resolution on North Korea’s human rights abuses when it comes up for the vote in the UN General Assembly. The government has been absent or abstained from votes on resolutions condemning the rights situation in the Stalinist country, three times in the UN Commission on Human Rights between 2003 and 2005 and once in the General Assembly. “We expect that the decision will contribute to promoting human rights as a universal value in North Korea,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement Thursday but added, “We will maintain the principle of reconciliation and cooperation toward the North and make continuous efforts to bring about real improvements in the human rights situation there including food issues.”

Don’t read too much into this because this vote was only to save face for newly elected South Korean born UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. I don’t expect anything of any substance from the South Korean government to materialize that would actually promote human rights in North Korea. Like One Free Korea I remain very skeptical about these UN Human Rights resolutions when these international diplomats show more outrage about false accusations by terrorists of Korans being flushed down the toilet at Gitmo than about the slow, starvation, and murder of hundreds of thousands of North Koreans.

More over at the Marmot’s Hole as well.

As you can tell there has been light posting here due to being out of the loop for the past two weeks but regular blogging will resume once again. A lot has actually happened the past two weeks.

I’m glad I had no access to TV or the internet the past two weeks so I didn’t have to listen to the congressional election nonsense. Hopefully sanity will return to the US media now that the election is over and the Democrats won. The results may actually be a good thing if the Democrats don’t turn the next two years into nothing but revenge politics. Now that they are in control of Congress they now have to play a constructive role on issues such as Iraq instead of doing everything possible to criticize and undermine.

I for one seriously doubt the Democrats will force a withdrawal of troops from Iraq like many of them and their opponents claimed during the election run up. A US troop withdrawal followed by the evacuation of the Green Zone that brings back images of the fall of Saigon would be political suicide for the Democrats. Americans don’t want to lose the war in Iraq they just don’t like the status quo where it appears the US is losing. So look for a bunch of talk to happen about changing strategies but I really don’t expect any grand change in strategy besides what the US is already doing, which is training Iraqis and handing over areas of responsibility when ready. If the politicians really want to help they need to get the Iraqi government to allow the US military to go after Sadr and his thugs.

A great thing that happened just this past week was that Secretary Rumsfeld was removed. It was about time. Rumsfeld actually did some good things shaking up the Pentagon and as Robert mentioned his USFK policies were very sound, but he has out lived his usefulness because he has pretty much alienated himself from the military leadership at the Pentagon. I think President Bush actually kept him around this long just because he didn’t want to be seen as caving into Democratic demands, but he definitely needed to go and the election results gave the President the cover he needed to get rid of him.

Also as Nomad pointed out, this blog was mentioned in the Korea Times in a rather badly edited article but thanks none the less to the author for mentioning this exactive duty soldier who operates the GI in Korea site.

Then:

1955 marketplace

Now:

Modern day marketplace

The Axels

In 69-70 I was assigned to 1/12th Arty. We were located at Cp
Snow in Pobwonni just south of Mickey Mouse Corner.
Once we were on maneuvers only about 30 min from base and stayed
overnight. I broke the rules and had my trucks pulled in close to each other
not more than 18 inches apart.
Other sections in the battalion did not. Consequently even though guards
were posted and roving around, some of the other sections had all the
axels removed from their trucks and had to be towed back to based by
mine and a few other trucks that escaped losing their axels.

Submitted By ; George Sackett
1/12 Artillery
1969 – 1970

This slicky boy story was from Korea, A Tour of Duty.
If you have your own slicky boy story to share e-mail me your story at gikoreaonline@yahoo.com and I will be happy to post it.

Then:

Now:

The Radio:

I remember one time we were in the field on an FTX, and our
mess hall was bivouaced in a semi permanent position to serve us chow,
wither when we were in the AO, or by MerMites.
Anyway, it was the late ’70s and big boom boxes were very popular. One
of the cooks had brought a boom box that was only slightly smaller than a
fully loaded duffel bag. He plugged it into their generator and had an
ample supply of his favorite tunes which could be heard across the
deserted Korean countryside.
One night he went to sleep with his box tuned to the AFKN radio station,
and when he awoke the next morning his box was gone, but there was a
small battery powered transistor radio about the size of a pack of
cigarettes (worth about $2) tuned to AFKN radio where his had been.

Apparently Slicky Boy considered it a fair trade.

The Target:

We were on tank gunnery and I was assigned as a loader
because the tankers were short a few warm bodies. It was nighttime and
we were organized with tanks to the right and left of the one firing to
provide alternate illumination. The target was a large canvas bulls eye
stretched over a two by four frame that was atop a berm a few hundred
meters out. Got the picture?
So there we were, firing away, when the gunner has a problem acquiring
the target. Turns out the target is moving!! Some slicky boys had crept out
to the berm, and were in the process of stealing the target while we were
shooting at the damn thing.
The Lt in charge calls a cease fire and we tried to go get the governments
property back. Personally I think they should have let it be, as I’ve always
preferred the challenge of a moving target………

Submitted By ; Sgt Horace Carder
`A` Troop, 4/7 Cav
This slicky boy story was from Korea, A Tour of Duty.
If you have your own slicky boy story to share e-mail me your story at gikoreaonline@yahoo.com and I will be happy to post it.

I don’t know about everyone else out there but I don’t like the new CAC system:

The new IDs feature a hard-to-copy blue background instead of white and have an additional watermark-type print to thwart would-be forgers.

In addition, Dixon said, the chips embedded in the cards will contain digital photographs, digital fingerprint scans and other identifying information to help officials make sure the person carrying the card is actually its lawful holder.

Plans for which employees or servicemembers will see the first new sets have not been announced, but eventually everyone will get a new card when their old one expires. But, Dixon said, no one will have to turn in their old cards before they expire.

The reason I don’t like the CAC system is that to access your computer at work or even your Army AKO E-mail account from home you need to have a CAC reader to put your card into. What happens is that at work people forget their ID card in the reader and then go off post for lunch and can’t get back on post because their ID card is sitting in the CAC reader. I can’t remember how many times people called me to go and get them signed in on post because they forgot their ID cards in the reader. Maybe it is just me.

From the Stars and Stripes:

Harriet Hodges has a lot of heart — at least 3,017, not counting her own.

It started in the early 1970s when Hodges learned the daughter of the chef at the former golf course on Yongsan Garrison couldn’t get proper treatment here for a heart problem.

By the time she left South Korea in the mid-1990s, Hodges had convinced major air carriers to give up seats, local nurses to serve as translators and escorts, and American cardiologists to book operating rooms for free — all for South Korean children who had little access to specialized health care here.

Last week, Hodges returned to Seoul for a visit, including reunions with the families of the children she helped. Many of them now have families and children of their own. On Oct. 22, Korean families from Busan, Daegu, Incheon, Seoul and other cities gathered to honor her.

“They said, ‘Look at what you have done,’ ” she recalled Thursday morning over coffee at the Dragon Hill Lodge on Yongsan. “They all call me Halmonie” — the Korean word for grandmother.

She also received an award this week from Gen. B.B. Bell, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, for her contributions during the past three decades.

Maybe Kerry was right:

Maybe we are unedumucated?

The media loves to manufacture scandals and here is the latest scandal courtesy of the Washington Post, that the US is planning pre-emptive war against North Korea:

In light of North Korea’s nuclear test, the United States and South Korea have agreed to develop a new contingency plan to take military action against North Korea in scenarios short of North Korea attack or in response to a catastrophic “collapse” in the North.

The new revised plan – CONPLAN 5029 -focuses on preemptive action to thwart North Korean moves involving potential export of weapons of mass destruction.

Pentagon sources confirm that the new plan will be the first joint U.S.-South Korean plan to take action against North Korea even if the North does not invade or attack the South first.

The article is implying that the US is planning some kind of pre-emptive war on North Korea. However, it is a CONPLAN not an OPLAN. A CONPLAN is a non-detailed plan for possible US military contingency missions. If the Pentagon wasn’t drafting a CONPLAN for a pre-emptive strike on North Korea they should be considered derelict of their duties. They probably have people drafting up CONPLANs to invade Iceland much less North Korea.

Now this latest pre-emptive strike “scandal” even caused USFK commander General B.B. Bell to have a press conference to put an end to the speculation that the US is planning to invade North Korea:

The general, who took command of the 29,500 USFK servicemembers in February, said the U.S. military here is under no orders to implement a specific nuclear strategy or pre-emptive strike plans in response to North Korea’s nuclear test last month, Bell said, disputing local news reports to the contrary.

Instead, both the U.S. and South Korean military continue to position weaponry and manpower as deterrents against any invasion and to prepare in case provoked by the North, Bell said.

“We’re in the business of deterring through strength, and should deterrence fail and North Korea attack, to quickly and decisively defeat the aggressor, which we will do and, trust me, we’re quite capable of doing,” Bell said.

This is what the Washington Post columnist had to say in response to General Bell’s press conference:

Groundless. No intention. Our business. Preemptive strike. Is Gen. Bell merely parsing words to calm the political water in Seoul? He may say that Combined Forces Command has neither plan nor intention and in this he is probably covered by fact. But the general ignores what he knows to be the web of preemptive plans and options developed not only in Pacific Command’s CONPLAN 5029, in unilateral U.S. plans (including parts of 5029) developed elsewhere, in other preemption possibilities falling under programs like the Proliferation Security Initiative and even in actual unilateral preemption plans of other commands, such as U.S. Strategic Command.

It is silliness like this from the media that is partly to blame in my opinion for the crappy post-war planning in Iraq. Here is what I think happened. Before the Iraq War the Pentagon couldn’t go into in-depth post-war planning because then it would have looked like that the administration had made up it’s mind to go to war. The media would have gotten wind of this because of all the Pentagon leaks. So post-war planning was put on the back burner because the US government was still trying to convince the international community that the US was exploring all options to avoid war and OPLANs for a post-war Iraq would have signaled that the US was fully committed to war.

So it is with a sense of irony that the same media that has been bashing the military over not doing enough prior planning before the Iraq are now criticizing the military over prior planning to deal with possible North Korean war scenarios. But really the media is just being the media by causing controversy and inflating threats to sell papers. The real problem here are the leakers in the Pentagon who gave the Washington Post the information that they were working on CONPLAN-5029 to begin with. No leakers would mean no controversy, which would mean Generals like B.B Bell would have less headaches dealing with this stupid stuff.

Yet with all the leakers in the Pentagon, who is the Pentagon going after and trying to shut up? Milbloggers. Go figure.