B2
Worst Week inWashington
The Fix’s By Chris Cillizza B
etween “The Decision” by LeBron James and the alleged texting habits of Brett Favre (ick), the expectations bar for professional athletes is remarkably low.
But Albert Haynesworth still managed to squeeze under it. Haynesworth, theWashington Redskins’ prized free agent who was
signed—for a mere $100 million!—in the 2009 offseason, has been a problem from the start. This year, he repeatedly failed the mandatory conditioning test at
training camp, a story that went national as Skins head coach Mike Shanahan refused to budge. From there, things only went downhill. Haynesworth didn’t want to play
in Shanahan’s defensive scheme. He made that point repeatedly and loudly. He missed practices and a game to attend his brother’s funeral— totally understandable—but stayed away so long that Shanahan benched him for the next game, too. The pot boiled over this past week when the team announced that
Haynesworth would be suspended without pay for the final four games of the season. The move came after Shanahan deactivated him for Sunday’s game following two poor days of practice. (Shanahan deserves some of the blame in this saga as well, for
turning it into a public battle of egos that distracted a struggling team.) The suspension, which Haynesworth plans to appeal, almost certainly
means the end of the player’s time as a member of the burgundy and gold. And, while Haynesworth managed to extract $41 million from owner Dan Snyder for a total of 20 games played, he also almost certainly did severe damage to his image around the league. Albert Haynesworth, for setting a new (low) standard for how a
professional athlete should act, you had the WorstWeek in Washington. Congrats, or something.
Have a candidate for theWorstWeek in Washington? E-mail
chris.cillizza@
wpost.com with your nominees.
PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES In France, hackers working in support of WikiLeaks created mirror versions of the site after the government called for a ban. Meet the Internet’s standing army wikileaks from B1
collaborative project to create a free and sharable operating system. His efforts sparked a widespread movement chal- lenging the restriction of access to soft- ware through patents. Supporters assert- ed that they had a right to control the code in their own computers. The battle reached far beyond Stall-
man, eventually pitting corporations and patent-holders against this early genera- tion of free-software advocates. The bulk of most software is still private, though open-source projects have gained popu- larity and even dominance in some are- nas. Stallman continues to advocate for free software. Another major milestone in the con-
THE WASHINGTON POST
JONATHAN NEWTON/
flict arose in 1999, when Shawn Fanning launched Napster, allowing for seamless peer-to-peer sharing of content. The ser- vice ballooned, claiming more than 25 million users at its peak and resulting in mountains of copyrighted content flow- ing freely across the Web. The site was suedandshutdownin2001.However, the ensuing battle over copyright law drew a line between industry representatives, such as the Recording Industry Associa- tion of America, and the “hacker” advo- cates for the free flowof content. Though Napster was forced to stop operating as a free service, the culture
Myths about North Korea
5 BY VICTOR D. CHA For years, experienced diplomats have referred to North Korea as
the land of lousy options. That description has never been more apt than over the past month, as Pyongyang has made a series of deliberate escalations, first unveiling a vast new nuclear fuel plant, then shelling an island in South Korea, killing two civilians and a pair of South Korean marines. With tensions between North and South Korea running higher and higher, and America’s options only getting lousier, it is worth taking a moment to look closely at what’s happening on the Korean Peninsula—and what isn’t.
1 The North Koreans are crazy.
Theymay beweird, but they are not crazy. Yes, the unpredictable, nuke-totingKimJong Il puppet
in the 2004movie “TeamAmerica” has come to define the realKimJong Il inmany people’sminds.But in truth, the country’s diplomats are savvy andwell-educated about the United States, and have an epicurean taste for California’s redwines. Inmy negotiationswith themas an official in PresidentGeorgeW.Bush’s administration, I always found them to be rational. Of course, it is possible to be both
rational and belligerent. InNorth Korea’s case, belligerence is part of a calculated effort towin concessions of food, fuel and political recognition— an effort that has repeatedly paid off. Astudy I recently directed at the Center for Strategic and International Studies examined negotiations dating
back toMarch 1984 and found that everyNorthKorean provocation has been followed, sooner or later, by talks,many ofwhich led to goodies for Pyongyang. NorthKorea is behaving perfectly
rationally, then—much in the manner of a losing gamblerwho increasingly takes onmore risk. If you have “winnings” to protect (as do most countries), then you value the peaceful status quo. You don’t fire off missiles every time youwant attention, because you have toomuch to lose if the situation gets out of control.But if you have little to lose (likeNorthKorea), you aremore willing to double down (by taking risky actions such as lobbingmissiles) to achieve
somewinnings.North Korean brinksmanshipmay be dangerous and escalatory, but from their perspective, itmakes sense.
and innovation that it launched contin- ued to grow. This led to the creation in 2001 of BitTorrent, a distributed and difficult-to-track peer-to-peer method of transferring large files. Large-scale use of this technology
emerged in 2003 in the formof the Pirate Bay, which indexes BitTorrent files en masse. The site’s founders and operators, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lund- strom, Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde, would emerge as the Assanges of this battle, permitting amassive and continu- ous leak of copyrighted content in the face ofwaves of police raids and lawsuits — persisting even beyond their eventual conviction on infringement charges in 2009.
T
he WikiLeaks fight is in the tradi- tion of these conflicts, just on a much vaster scale. As the Internet
has become an integral part of our every- day lives,narrowand technical questions aboutwho gets to run and edit computer code havemorphed first into battles over copyrighted content, and nowinto fights at the highest levels of government secre- cy and corporate power. Assange’s efforts to undermine the secrecy and control of establishedinstitutions—andtheattacks hisdefendershavelaunchedagainstMas- terCard, a Swedish prosecutor and possi- bly Sarah Palin’s political action commit-
tee—are the latest and highest formof a war that has beenwaged for decades. Sowhat is the future of this LongWar? In his recent book “The Master
Switch,” Columbia lawprofessor TimWu makes the case that the Internet, on its most basic level, is just like any other communications medium. As such, we shouldn’t be surprised to see consolida- tion and government control over the Web. It’s true that most other media — movies, radio and television—have gone throughphasesofwildgrowthandexper- imentation, eventually settling into apat- tern of consolidation and control. Why should we expect any different of
theWeb? Is the arc of the Internet’s Long War predetermined? One key factor is embedded in the
history of the Web and the many itera- tions of the LongWar itself: The Internet has cultivated a public vested in its free- dom. Each round of conflict draws in additional supporters, from hackers to the growing numbers of open-govern- ment activists and everyday users who believe, more and more, that the radical openness of the Web should set the pat- tern for everything. As the battlefield has become more
vast — from laser printer code to trans- parency in global diplomacy—the Inter- net’s standing army continues to grow, and is spoiling for a fight.
EZ BD
KLMNO
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2010
2
KimJong Eun is too young and inexperienced to successfully replace his father.
It’s true thatKimJongEun, KimJong Il’s son and heir apparent, is only in his
mid-20s (we believe he is somewhere between 25 and 27, thoughwe don’t knowfor sure).But if the planned succession fails, itwon’t be because of his
youth.KimIl Sung, the first leader ofNorthKorea, came to power in 1948,when hewas only 36 years old. His sonKimJong Ilwas anointed leader-in-waiting in 1980,when he was in his late 30s. In theNorth Korean system,where theKimfamily is basically royalty, the idea is to pick leaderswhile they’re still young, in hopes that theywill rule for 40 to 50
years.Moreover,KimJongEun appears to be surrounded by regents whowill help ease himinto place, includingKimJong Il’s sister, brother- in-lawand a handful of loyal generals. If the planned succession fails, it
will be because the newregime is incapable ofmaking the reforms it needs to
survive.DespiteKimJong Eun’s Swiss education, there are indications that he is not progressive but rather a hard-linerwho is associatedwith a revival of “juche,” the ideology of self-reliance that dominated the country in the 1950s and 1960s,when theNorthwas doing well relative to the South. Thosewho subscribe to this ideology blame the past 15 years of poor performance on a fewpiecemeal efforts at economic liberalization in themid-1990s, reforms they regard asmisguided and deviant.
3
Negotiations can get us out of this crisis.
Negotiations can contain the crisis, but only temporarily. Some pundits say that all
NorthKoreawants is a return to the six-party talks (a suspended series of negotiations among China, theUnited States,North and SouthKorea, Japan andRussia over Pyongyang’s nuclear program) or to bilateral negotiations withWashington over food, fuel and security.But having sat downwith the NorthKoreans to negotiate exactly these things during the six-party talks, the prospect givesme deja vu. Such enticements have been part of everyU.S. negotiating package dating back to theGeorgeH.W.Bush administration and have netted the regime $30 billionworth of assistance,most of it in the formof food and energy. The dilemma for theObama
administration is that it knows Pyongyangwants to use negotiations to again extort assistance for its starving economy, but it also knows thatKimis notwilling to give up his country’s nuclear programverifiably and irreversibly. This iswhyU.S. diplomats often use the phrase “hold your nose and negotiatewith them” in talking about theNorthKoreans— they knowthat discussionsmay bring an agreement and a temporary reprieve fromthe crisis at hand, but they also knowthat in time, that agreementwill be broken by the North, only to be followed by another crisis. Sowhy dowe keep renegotiating
withNorthKorea?Mostly becausewe have no other
options.Amilitary response could ignite awar on the peninsula, resulting in hundreds of thousands of casualties. Trying to topple the regime by othermeans is difficultwithout Chinese support. And slappingmore sanctions on a country that has been underU.S. sanctions formore than half a century may be a tactic, but it clearly isn’t a solution.
China is the key to getting North Korea to cooperate.
applied—and China has reason to be timid about exercising itsmuscle. The demise of the SovietUnion and,more recently, the end of SouthKorea’s “sunshine policy” of unconditional engagementwith theNorth have left the Chinese as Pyongyang’s only supporters. PresidentGeorgeW.Bush used to tellBeijing that it needed to step up and use its influence to push NorthKorea to denuclearize. The Obama administration has rightly continued thatmessage. But China’smotives are frequently
4
misunderstood.Many see its stance towardNorthKorea as deriving mostly fromideology (“China is supporting its little communist brother”), incompetence (“China does not knowhowto discipline its neighbor”) or tacticalmaneuvering (“Beijingwants to keep theUnited States preoccupiedwithNorthKorea while China grows stronger” and “China likes havingNorthKorea as a buffer between itself and South Korea”). While there is some truth to each of
these perceptions,Beijing faces a deeper dilemma. Yes, China can cut off oil supplies to try to pressure Pyongyang.But because they are the
Chinamay have leverage over NorthKorea, but leverage doesn’twork unless it’s
only ones helping theNorth, China’s leaders are afraid that such amove would collapse the regime and send millions of starving refugees flooding over its border. The Chinese have no easyway of determining howmuch pressure they should use, so they remain paralyzed,making ineffectual gestures (Chinese diplomatDai Bingguo’s visit to Pyongyang lastweek falls in this category) and issuing meaningless calls for calm.
5
Since Korean unification is not in any regional power’s interests, the Northwill continue tomuddle along.
For the past decade, the fear of chaos following aNorth Korean collapse ledmany
experts and diplomats inAsia and the United States to conclude that unificationwas too dangerous to pursue. Instead, they supported gradual engagement,with the hope that reformsmight lead to a “soft landing” thatwould eventually reintegrate the twoKoreas.However, asNorthKorea growsmore belligerent, as its nuclear ambitions advance and asKimJong Il’s health deteriorates,more observers have started thinking seriously about unification as the only real long-term solution. In SouthKorea, President Lee
Myung-bak has lectured his nation on the need to be prepared for such an eventuality and has even proposed a unification tax, to be levied on South Korean income today to help cover the costs of future unification. Seoul’s UnificationMinistry,which used to be the designated agency for economic handouts to theNorth, is nowusing its funds to supportDavos-style international conferences to educate Koreans and people around theworld about the benefits of unification. Last year, PresidentObama and Lee issued a joint statement calling for a united Korea that is free and at peace. Japan andRussia,which traditionally had reservations about unification, have also come to see theNorth’s current path as potentiallymore costly and threatening than unification. As a result, China is increasingly
alone in clinging to the idea of a divided peninsula.
VictorD. Cha is a professor atGeorgetown University and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.He served on theNational Security Council staff as director of Asian affairs during theGeorgeW. Bush administration.
Outlook’s editors welcome comments and suggestions.Write to us at
outlook@washpost.com.
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