At this time last year I made a list of predictions for 2007 and felt it would be interesting to see how they turned out at the end of the year.  Here is the list of predictions I made and how they turned out.  The ones that were correct I have added comments in green; the ones that were incorrect I added comments in red. 

South Korea

- President Roh Moo-hyun will not resign. – (I was correct here as much as I hoped he would resign.)

- Lee Myung-bak will win the South Korean presidency. (Lee dominated the polls all throughout 2007 and won the election.)

- President Roh will continue to squash the spy scandal investigation.  (Roh got rid of the national intelligence director and replaced him with a Blue House hack who did nothing to further the investigation.)

- Ban Ki-moon will have little impact on the UN. (This was an easy prediction but I think argument could be made that the UN is even more ineffective with Ban in charge than Kofi Anan.)

- Zaytun unit will be redeployed from Iraq. (I was wrong on this one though major force cuts were announced and I wish they would just redeploy them.)

- Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe does not visit war shrine. (Abe never did visit the war shrine but then again he wasn’t Prime Minister very long either.)

- There will be no Japanese invasion of Dokdo. (The evil Japanese armada hasn’t invaded yet, maybe next year.)

North Korea

- Six party talks will make about as much progress next year as it did this year (Despite the rhetoric from the White House very little has been accomplished and North Korea is about to miss their year end deadline to declare their nuclear programs).

- North Korea will do something before the South Korean election in order to sway the vote towards whoever is running on the Sunshine Policy platform.  (The North Koreans tried the summit to sway the election but it didn’t work.)

- North Korea will not conduct another nuclear test (It won’t make as much headlines as the first test did; best to save what little nuclear material they have.)

- North Korea will conduct another missile test (The North Koreans have conducted multiple missiles tests throughout the year of their shorter range missiles.)

- Kim Jong-il will not name a successor (Kim Jong-il won’t name successor until he is really ill because it would only encourage the successor to get rid of him, kind of like what he probably did to his father Kim Il-sung.)

- Kim Jong-il won’t get a hair cut anytime soon (Goes without saying.)

Korea-US Issues

- Some kind of anti-US incident will happen that will be manipulated for political purposes (USFK was actually able to stay off the anti-US radar with only one major incident earlier in the year, the grandma rape case.)

- USFK will handle it much better than they did in 2002 (USFK has handled incidents much better even since 2002.)

- The Camp Humphreys location will officially be delayed by the Pentagon.  (Camp Humphreys relocation was delayed until 2012.)

- US announces further reductions of forces on the peninsula (No further force reductions have been announced in 2007 despite much rhetoric from politicians and journalists back in the states.)

- Operational control will be handed to the ROK Army at 2009 (With Rumsfeld gone the Operational Control actually got delayed all the way to 2012 as well.)

- There will be no FTA (The FTA was never agreed upon and may be dead for some time.)

- US beef will continued to be blocked from the South Korean market.  (US beef has been blocked periodically throughout the year by the Korean government that effected the FTA talks.)

- South Korea will not get a visa waiver (Still too much visa fraud.)

My predictions actually came out pretty good with only a few misses.  My biggest misses had to do with the Camp Humphreys relocation and the operational control issue.  I really thought the Pentagon would push hard to get the Korean government to quickly take operational control and get USFK transformed.  Instead they caved and now with a new president taking power in Korea there is talk of delaying it even more. 

North Korea issues are the easiest to predict because the North Koreans are so consistent in what they do.  When they receive free stuff with no conditions they behave better; you take away their free stuff until they improve conditions inside North Korea than they misbehave until you give them free stuff again to get them off the front page of the newspaper.  It doesn’t matter if it is Clinton or Bush in charge the game remains the same with the same results. 

Tomorrow I will offer my predictions for 2008, stay tuned.