Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com When it comes to judging the performance of deceased national leaders under the icy glare of historical research, strongmen go down in collective memory as tough guys who defeated their enemies and built up their countries. Weak leaders are often regarded as mediocrities, especially if they were overthrown. […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com Some of the terrible problems we read, hear and talk about so often are beyond solution. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated this week that as long as he was in office there would not be a Palestinian state. The two-state idea, he said, was not going to […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com Incredibly, crackpots on the left, quick to echo any line from North Korea, compare the attack on U.S. ambassador Mark Lippert to the assassination of Hirobumi Ito, Japanese resident-general of Korea in the early days of the Japanese colonial era. I’ve received messages to that effect from some […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com WASHINGTON — Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s exhortations to the U.S. Congress to forget about a “bad deal” with Iran avoids one problem. Absent a deal, who believes Iran will scale down its nuclear program? Is Iran likely to give up on the whole idea just because the U.S. […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com President Obama faces a foreign policy predicament of gigantic proportions. The leader of Israel is coming to Washington, doing an end run around the White House, taking his case to a Republican-controlled Congress that’s eager for just about any excuse to pillory the President. With this play for […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com Comparisons between the Korean and Vietnam wars have always been misleading if not ridiculous, never more so than when Henry Kissinger, in a new documentary, “Last Days in Vietnam,” says that he and his boss, President Richard Nixon, believed the Vietnam War would end as had the Korean […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com The murder of journalists at the hands of ISIS forces shows how far a few daring correspondents will go to find out what’s going on. Covering wars has always been hazardous, never more so than when highly resourceful, motivated reporters go beyond the protective cover of military units […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com In sunny Florida, while storms and blizzards rage in the American Northeast, old war correspondents from our days in Vietnam and Cambodia talk about those days of fighting in the jungles, of going down remote roads, of running into the bad guys and coming back alive. One of […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com Defectors from North Korea all have harrowing tales of suffering that are difficult to imagine in real life. Their stories differ widely depending on the circumstances — some have spent time in prisons, most have not. Many have been hungry, or have seen relatives and friends starve to […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com WASHINGTON — Incredibly, President Obama was the missing man among world leaders massed in tight formation in the front rank of the peace march mourning the slaughter of a dozen people at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and four more killed in a kosher supermarket in a […]