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War and Terror: "Runaway Ally" Joins "the Axis of Evil"
Posted on Sunday, November 28 @ 16:48:51 UTC
Topic: South Korea
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 One More Neocon Target: South Korea
By Gary Leupp, counterpunch.org
The neocons have added yet another country to their hit list, another one targeted for regime change: the Republic of Korea. Yes, that's South Korea, long-time U.S. ally, host to around 34,000 U.S. troops. William Kristol, editor of the neocon Weekly Standard and chair of the highly influential Project for the New American Century, has issued a memo (addressed to "opinion-leaders") on behalf of the PNAC. This is a
highly significant and alarming document. It alludes to
"the problems created by the government now in office in
Seoul" and the need for a "strategy to deal with"
them. These "problems" involve South Korea's failure
to sufficiently cooperate with Washington's efforts to topple
the regime in North Korea. Kristol draws attention to a long
Weekly Standard article by Nicholas Eberstadt, an economist
with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, entitled
"Tear
Down this Tyranny: a Korea Strategy for Bush's Second Term."
This article is must reading as a clear statement of neocon plans
for Northeast Asia.
Eberstadt declares that the
Bush administration must "[work] around the pro-appeasement
crowd in the South Korean government" of Roh Moo-hyun,
elected president in December 2002. With that election, Eberstadt
asserts, "U.S. policy on the North Korean crisis suffered
a setback, and a serious onethanks to which a coterie of New
Left-style academics and activists assumed great influence over
their government's security policies." The "core of
this new governmenthas remained implacably anti-American and
reflexively pro-appeasement toward Pyongyang." Thus South
Korea is "now a runaway ally: a country bordering a state
committed to its destruction, and yet governed increasingly in
accordance with graduate-school 'peace studies' desiderata--while
at the same time relying on forward-positioned American troops
and a security treaty with Washington to guarantee its safety.
It is not too much to describe this utterly unnatural and unviable
situation as our 'second crisis' on the Korean peninsula."
Neocon Links Seoul "Sabotage" with the Taliban, Urges Regime Change
So there are two crises:
one caused by North Korea's (very understandable) desire to develop
nuclear weapons as a deterrent to U.S. attack, another by South
Korea's unwillingness to embrace what Eberstadt terms "a
North Korea threat-reduction policy." The AEI ideologue
notes that "the South Korean press" has dubbed "the
core of the new government. 'the Taliban.'" (Actually,
this epithet originated among "sunshine" foes in the
Foreign Ministry in late 2003, and while some major Seoul dailies
dislike Roh, it's an overstatement to suggest that the press
in general characterizes Roh's team this way.) Eberstadt himself
shamelessly applies this term to Roh's officials and their aims.
Thus he says the U.S. must "salvage" the crisis-ridden
alliance with the South Koreans "while avoiding 'Taliban'
sabotage" of U.S. policy on their peninsula. The preposterous
linkage between Mullah Omar and President Roh can be dismissed
as simply facetious, but the point is clear: "You're either
for us or against us in the War on Terror, and the regime in
South Korea is against us." The language throughout the
piece is undiplomatic, and State Department officials are unlikely
to echo it publicly. But surely Eberstadt reflects the views
of John Bolton, the State Department's leading attack dog on
Korea and top candidate to serve as chief deputy to new Secretary
of State Condoleeza Rice. This is the guy the North Koreans (and
no doubt some South Koreans) poetically call "Human
Scum."
This extraordinary trashing
of an allied regime, bizarrely castigated as both "Taliban"
and "New Left," is followed by the observation that
its "anti-American" stand is not an insurmountable
challenge. Here is the truly remarkable climax of the piece:
Over the past decade, some
giant South Korean conglomerates that once boasted they were
'too big to fail' have completely disappeared from the corporate
scene. Everyone in South Korea today remembers this---so they
can also intuit the hollowness of their current president's strange
claim just last week that the U.S.-South Korean relationship
is likewise too big to fail. Public opinion in South Korea is
deeply---and quite evenly---divided on the North Korea question,
and the current government earns consistently low approval ratings.
Instead of appeasing South Korea's appeasers (as our policy to
date has attempted to do, albeit clumsily) America should be
speaking over their heads directly to the Korean people, building
and nurturing the coalitions in South Korean domestic politics
that will ultimately bring a prodigal ally back into the fold.
An interesting and telling
analogy. The Korean people know how badly the South Korean capitalism
has been hit by the imperialist globalization championed by Washington.
They should know, too, that relations between Seoul and Washington
can suddenly deteriorate due to Washington's displeasure. Eberstadt
seems to be saying, "If we strike fear into the South Korean
public, encouraging them to get this Taliban gang out and support
forces who will abet U.S. plans for the peninsula, if we pump
money into the most pro-American parties and newspapers, we can
bring the prodigal home!" But Roh's term ends in February
2008, and Washington surely wants to move on North Korea before
then. Obviously Eberstadt wants vigorous U.S. interference in
South Korean politics, and "regime change" in both
halves of the peninsula during the interim.
Such interference may have
been at work in the very odd impeachment process that removed
Roh from power from March to May of this year. Roh is a human
rights lawyer, an activist who organized against the Chun Doo-hwan
dictatorship in 1987, and was jailed for supporting striking
workers that year. In 2003 he succeeded Kim Dae-jung, as a member
of the Millenium Democratic Party, a spin-off of the party that
Kim had founded. He continued the "sunshine
policy" towards the North of his predecessor, which
George W. Bush had summarily rejected, to Kim's great chagrin,
in 2001.
In March 2004 opposition parties
in the parliament impeached Roh, charging him with violating
a minor election law, forcing him to step down. But he was returned
to power by the Constitutional Court in May. (Kind of reminiscent
to what happened to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, toppled then returned
to power in April 2002.) At the time the official North Korean
news agency charged, "It was none other than the United
States that sparked such a disturbing development." Not
so implausible, actually. The Bush administration, which had
sought to sabotage Kim's efforts at rapprochement with North
Korea, was not real happy with Roh, even though under great pressure
he'd agreed to send South Korean troops to Iraq. They can't be
happy that Roh told the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles
recently that North Korea's desire to obtain nukes was not irrational
given the threats it confronts. Eberstadt's probably just saying
what the neocon Bushites have been thinking all along.
Korean Nationalism vs. Hyperpower Plans
I have known many Koreans,
in various capacities, for many years. There's no people I more
admire, or for whom I feel greater affection. Temperamentally,
I relate to Korean friends' expansiveness, love of song and
drama, capacity for indignation over matters of principle, and
their pugnacity. One thing I've noticed: there is no people with
a greater sense of national pride or unity. The inclination of
many South Koreans to reject U.S. policy towards the North is
not "unnatural" as Eberstadt opines. It's the exact
opposite. It's very natural for them to work for unity that preserves
all Koreans' self-respect, built on a long shared, tragic history
of complex relations with China, Russia, Japan and the U.S.
It's natural for them to hope for U.S. cooperation in the reunification
all earnestly desire.
But the neocons only want to cooperate in a scenario that destroys
the North Korean regime, discredits forever anyone in the South
who feels any sympathy with it, and suppresses the "anti-American"
attitudes of those who want to negotiate with someone they label
a "tyrannical dictator." These neocons are best understood
as thugs whose judgment and morality are exactly the reverse
of what they should be. Good for them is evil, and evil good.
So the U.S. takes action that leads to a repeat of the Korean
War on 1950-53, which killed 4 million? Wouldn't it be good,
they fantasize, if the North was destroyed this time, and in
the end the U.S. was there in charge, throughout the peninsula,
"nurturing coalitions in domestic politics" and correcting
all which is so currently out of control?
The article and memo attack
both the Seoul and Pyongyang governments. They disparage
Korean solutions, Korean sovereignty, Koreans in general, to
say nothing of graduate students, peace studies folks, and the
whole "reality-based community." Will these attacks
meet with a deferential bow from the people these neocons want
to address over Roh's yet unbowed head? Or will they meet with
a taekwondo roundhouse kick, which to properly execute
from a forward stance, requires one to employ both south
and north feet?
* *
* * *
"The bad plowman quarrels
with his ox," runs the Korean proverb. South Korea has been
a serviceable, loyal beast of burden for the U.S. plowman. It
will soon have 3600 troops in Iraq, the third largest "Coalition"
contingent, contributing them because, according
to UPI's Jong-Heon Lee, this is "necessary to win Washington's
backing for a peaceful resolution of the North Korean nuclear
weapons crisis." The Faustian bargain here requires that
Korean boys get sent to Iraq to kill Iraqis, so that the U.S.
will agree to refrain for the time being from attacking part
of Korea. There is widespread domestic opposition to the bargain,
which the U.S. might break anyway. Should that happen, according
to a recent poll, at least 20% of South Koreans would side
with North Korea, while 30% are undecided on the issue. The
plowman, in quarreling with the ox, seems to act against his
own interests. Maybe he knows how to cow the ox with whippings
and threats; maybe there is method in his madness. But maybe,
being stupid or crazy, he will so provoke the ox that the animal
quite naturally and reasonably bolts or gores him.
Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University,
and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author
of Servants,
Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan;
Male
Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan;
and Interracial
Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900.
He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle
of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial
Crusades.
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