TROUBLESOME
SATELLITES
In
April of 1997, defense secretary William Cohen declared, in
a visit to Seoul, that American troops would stay stationed
on the peninsula even if North and South Korea were reunified
– a statement that was met with widespread shock, not
only by the Chinese but by the South Koreans, who increasingly
view the GIs in their midst as more of a threat than North
Korea's million-man army. Nationalism is on the rise throughout
East Asia, but Korea – once known as the "Hermit Kingdom"
– is a special case. Proud to the point of arrogance,
insular to the point of xenophobia, Koreans north and south
have injected their own national characteristics into whatever
social system was forced on them by outsiders. Kim Il Sung
gave Stalin plenty of trouble, launching the Korean war without
authorization from the Kremlin and playing the Chinese against
the Russians. South Korean strongman Gen. Park Chung-hee,
who seized power in 1961, was even less docile. . . .
THE
RISE AND FALL OF GENERAL PARK
Having
watched the US abandon its South Vietnamese ally, Gen. Park
decided that it was time for South Korea to acquire nuclear
weapons – just in case. Shortly afterward, on October
16, 1979, Park met the chief of the KCIA (South Korea's intelligence
service) Kim Jae-kyu for dinner: as they got to the cocktails,
instead of proposing a toast, Kim pulled out a pistol and
shot Park dead. His alleged motive was anger at the General's
"repression" of the people – a repression that had been
enforced by none other than his assassin. A more likely motive,
in the eyes of many, was that Park was too independent for
the Americans, who wanted him out of the way. The KCIA chief,
as Park's chief link to the US government, was widely perceived
– by Koreans, at any rate – as acting at the behest
of his US overlords.
KOREA
FIRST
Park
was an authoritarian nationalist whose chief concern was the
survival of his nation: in Park's day, the chief threat was
from North Korea, and the Chinese Communists, and he was willing
to play the role of the dutiful satellite – but only
up to a certain point. Park was an implacable anti-Communist,
but he was a Korean first. This has been the leitmotif of
Korean history: a stubborn independence that Western commentators
invariably call "isolationism." It is the heritage of a long
series of attempted Japanese invasions, beginning in the 1590s,
what our politically correct journalists call "xenophobia"
which has persisted to this day – and even been accelerated,
in the south, by the US army of occupation.
THE
MAD BOMBER
The
main concern of South Korea's rulers in the post-cold war
world is not the danger of an invasion from the north, but
a provocation from Washington that would turn the entire peninsula
into a flaming battleground. In June 1994, reports
former South Korean President Kim Young-Sam, he stopped
Mad Bomber Clinton from launching a strike against North Korea's
alleged nuclear facilities – and only a last-minute phone
conversation prevented the incineration of the Korea nation.
"At the time," said Kim to the Hankyoreh Daily, "the
situation was really dangerous. The Clinton government was
preparing a war." With a US aircraft carrier positioned off
the eastern coast, the plan was to hit the North Korean facility
at Yongbyon. "One day I heard [then US Ambassador James] Laney
was about to hold a press conference the following day and
announce the withdrawal of relatives of US embassy staff"
– a step taken only on the eve of war. Kim called in
Laney, and pointed out that between 20 to 30 million people
would die in a war. "I told him that I would not move even
a single soldier of our 650,000 troops in case a war broke
out." Then he got on the phone with Clinton and argued for
32 minutes, standing up to the American Caligula and telling
him in no uncertain terms that "there would be no inter-Korean
war while I was the president. Clinton tried to persuade me
to change my mind, but I criticized the United States for
planning to stage a war with the North on our land."
THIS
LAND IS OUR LAND
Our
land, he says emphatically – but is it? In a village
not far from a US military base, the fishermen
call American jets "shriekers" as they engage in target
practice 550 yards away. "The whole house shakes. I can't
watch TV. Babies are startled. It gets worse in the summer
when I have to leave the windows open," complains Choi Joon-bin,
a 64-year-old resident of the South Korean village of Mae
Hyang, some 50 miles south of Seoul. Protests over the effects
of US bases on the quality of life in surrounding communities
have hit an all-time high, and demonstrations calling for
US withdrawal from the country were an
almost daily occurrence: leading up to the two Koreas
summit. What's more, the peak of rising anti-American sentiment
in South Korea has yet to be reached. As the prospects of
reunification become more tangible, and the north undergoes
a "soft" collapse with some form of federation uniting these
long-lost halves of a nation, the momentum of revitalized
Korean nationalism will run smack up against secretary Cohen's
unilateral announcement of a permanent "Pax Americana" in
the Far East.
A
COVERT ALLIANCE
Former
President Kim Young-Sam sent a message to Kim IL Sung, the
north Korean dictator, through Jimmy Carter, warning him that
the maniac Clinton was on the warpath – and the message
got through. This was the catalyst that set off the chain
of events leading up to the summit, the beginning of the "conversion"
process whereby we subsidized the conversion of Soviet-style
nuclear reactors to the "lighter" model that can only be used
for industrial purposes. This, and the election of Kim Dae
Jung, led to renewed contacts and created an unlikely (but
perfectly logical) alliance. In order to save the nation from
foreigners who would unleash a bloodbath, the two leaders
were in effect uniting against the main danger to the independence
and even the existence of Korea – Mad Bomber Clinton.
This working alliance, tentatively taking shape under President
Young-Sam, continued when Kim Dae-Jung, the democratic reformer
who was jailed under the military regime, was elected to the
Presidency. The Korean military rulers initially sentenced
Kim Dae-Jung to death for alleged pro-North Korean sympathies.
Ronald Reagan personally interceded to spare Kim Dae-Jung's
life, who was instead sentenced to life imprisonment: the
price was a visit to the White House by South Korea's then
ruler Gen. Chun. The election of this former prisoner of the
US puppet regime, who has come up with his own reunification
plan, marked a turning point that culminated in this truly
historic summit. The covert North-South alliance against the
foreign occupiers is now coming out into the open: this is
the real meaning of the two Koreas summit – and the reason
why the US has been distinctly cool toward the prospect of
anything coming of it.
THE
SKEPTICS
The
skeptics are already
out in droves, predicting that the optimism and personal
rapport between the two Korean leaders on prominent display
at the summit will run up against the intransigence of the
North: an advisor to the Bush campaign opined that the North
Koreans are focused on our electoral process: "He [Kim Jong
IL] has made a determination there's not much more he can
get from the United States, because of the elections," says
Richard L. Armitage, a former Pentagon official. "He's not
stupid." And the Clinton administration, while formally hailing
the talks, downplayed
their significance in any but the long term sense. In
the official US view, this could be the beginning of a reunification
process that could (and should) take decades. The Koreans,
however, may have other plans. . . .
REMEMBER
THEN
The
collapse of Communism took the US intelligence community,
and both "right" and "left" wings of the foreign policy establishment,
completely by surprise. Even as the Berlin Wall came tumbling
down, and the Soviet bloc was imploding, the US government
(and "expert" opinion) oscillated wildly between disbelief
and sheer panic over the possible "destabilizing" consequences.
The US initially opposed the reunification of Germany, as
well as the rollback of Soviet power in Eastern Europe and
Balkans. Who can forget then secretary of state James Baker
admonishing Gorbachev when the Soviet leader refused to send
in Russian troops to keep "order" in Romania as the dictator
Nicolae Ceausescu
was overthrown and executed? It was Christmas, 1989, when
Romanians decided to give themselves a Christmas present:
freedom. But the Grinch soon showed up in the person
of Baker, who, in a December 24 Meet the Press interview,
announced his approval in advance of a Warsaw Pact intervention
to support "pro-democracy" forces – who would simultaneously
restore order. While he was sympathetic, he said, because
Romanians were "attempting to put off the yoke of a very,
very oppressive and repressive dictatorship," nonetheless
"I think that we would be inclined probably to follow the
example of France, who today has said that if the Warsaw Pact
felt it necessary to intervene on behalf of the opposition,
that it would support that action." When Gorbachev balked,
and cracked down in the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania,
and Estonia, the Bush administration sided with the Soviet
dictator and tried to push the subject of independence into
the indefinite future. It didn't work there, and it won't
work in Korea.
A
DESPERATE GAMBLE
The
collapse of North Korean communism, while
not exactly a secret, has nonetheless taken everyone by
surprise in the sense that the so-called "playboy" and "recluse"
– an odd characterization of Kim
Jong IL, Kim IL Sung's son and successor, for how can
you be both? – has turned out to be neither a lightweight
nor a mini-Stalin, but essentially an old-fashioned Korean
patriot. Desperate to save his nation from mass starvation
– which has radically reduced the caloric intake and
physical condition of ordinary people and even decimated the
military – the North Korean dictator is clearly moving
toward some kind of de facto merger with the south –
and in pretty short order. For the stricken economy of the
north is in free fall, and the price of delay could be high.
But the North Koreans have moved quickly to avert disaster:
the long awaited invasion from the north has come in the form
of a peace offensive, a desperate last measure to ensure that
the collapse of Stalinism in North Korea will not follow the
Romanian example.
INDEPENDENT
– OF WHAT?
While
the language of the agreement reached at the summit –
signed, sealed, and delivered after only three hours of formal
negotiations – has been described in the American news
media as "vague" (the New York Times so characterized
the agreement in their headline) its language is striking.
The very first point is the declaration that: "The South and
the North, as masters of national unification, will join hands
in efforts to resolve the issue of national unification independently."
Independently of whom – or of what? China certainly
poses no threat of intervention, and Japan lacks the will
if not the capacity: this leaves only the US, the dominant
power in the region, as the one and only possible threat to
Korean national self-determination.
THERE'S
THE DOOR – WHAT'S YOUR HURRY?
The
other aspects of the agreement – the exchange of dispersed
relatives, the renewal of cross-border ties, the reopening
of the old railroad system that used to connect prewar Korea
– can only lead to the erasure of the border, and this
could happen as rapidly and dramatically as the downing of
the Berlin Wall. However, the wall that divides the two Koreas
in not made of brick and mortar, but of tens of thousands
of US soldiers stationed at the edge of the so-called Demilitarized
Zone. Will these troops be caught in the middle of a joyous
reunion, unwanted foreigners who could easily become the focus
of a new Korean nationalism? That possibility is clearly imminent,
and this raises an important question: why must US
troops remain in Korea even after reunification, as secretary
Cohen insists? The war between Soviet-style Communism and
capitalism is over, and even the heirs of Kim IL Sung, the
last Stalinist dictator on earth, are finally coming in from
the cold. Now is the time to bring our own troops home –
before they are asked to leave.
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