The Marmot’s Hole

“I may look like a right-winger from the far left of the ideological spectrum and like a left-winger from the far right.”

So said Unification Minister-designate Lee Jong-seok, the National Security Council deputy chairman who has been one of the godfathers of Korean foreign policy under the Roh administration.

And he might be right. During his confirmation hearing, Lee was castigated as a pro-North Korean leftist by several Grand National Party lawmakers. At the same time, hard-core unificationistas slammed him as a pro-American flunky for giving the OK to the principle of “strategic flexibility” of U.S. forces on the Korean Peninsula.

Tough crowd.

Anyway, the Korea Herald ran a pretty decent analysis piece on Lee and what perhaps to expect from the man should he be confirmed as Unification Minister.

I noted previously that while I generally dislike Lee, one had to admit he was a legitimate expert on North Korea and would probably make a decent Unification Minister, or at least the amount of damage he could do would be minimized once his area of operations was limited to North Korea and North Korea only. This will not be the case, apparently. President Roh plans to make Lee the chairman of the National Security Council, essentially putting him in charge of Korea’s entire foreign policy. This will certainly prove interesting, although to put as positive a spin as possible on it, Lee’s expertise might be limited to North Korea, but at least that’s one more area of expertise than his predecessor, former anchorman Chung Dong-young.