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Korean nukes mean (bad)
business
By Gary LaMoshi
To:
Roh Moo-hyun, President-elect, Republic of Korea
From:
Gary LaMoshi, Asia Times Online, Hong Kong
Re: Your
role in derailing North Korea's nuclear madness
Congratulations on your election victory. You
have a received a mandate to carry on the work of
President Kim Dae-jung in reforming the South Korean
economy and ensuring that democracy sinks roots deeper
into the soil of your wonderful nation.
As your
inauguration date approaches, the shadow of North
Korea's nuclear-weapons program hangs menacingly over
the peninsula. This crisis comes at an inconvenient time
for Seoul, just as it does for Washington. The White
House has drawn deserved criticism for failing to let
the real crisis in Korea interfere with the crisis it
seeks to create in Iraq. But the Blue House hasn't
covered itself in glory with its reaction to Pyongyang's
game of atomic blackmail, either.
Outgoing
President Kim treats North Korea's reopening of its
bomb-building facilities as a temporary cloud over his
Nobel Prize-winning Sunshine Policy of detente with the
rogue regime, and you have pledged that the issue will
not be resolved with force. Caution about confronting
the North is understandable; even without nuclear
weapons, North Korea has the capability to reduce Seoul
to the "sea of fire" its propaganda machine threatens.
But South Korea's leaders, not US President George W
Bush, must lead the way to stop North Korea from
developing nuclear weapons.
Hearts and
minds
As you know, your nation's heart
often overrules its brain when it comes to Pyongyang.
Despite a half-century at war, highlighted by
periodic belligerent outbursts such as last June's sea
battle, South Koreans still view the North as wayward
brothers and sisters and yearn to hug them to the national
bosom. Kim Jong-il's regime may be responsible for tens
of thousands of Korean deaths on both sides of
the Demilitarized Zone, but if the Dear Leader lets a
couple dozen families in the South (or Japan) meet their
long-lost cousins, he's a hero.
A recent poll
found that South Koreans overwhelmingly, and
ludicrously, consider the United States a greater threat
than North Korea. Longstanding resentment about the
37,000 US troops in South Korea that help defend your
nation from North Korea boiled over when an American
military court acquitted two soldiers in the accidental
road deaths of two teenage girls. Your presidential
campaign capitalized on these anti-American sentiments,
if it did not heighten them.
Peter Tasker's
recent thriller, Dragon Dance (see review, Japan's right rising from Koizumi's
ashes, December 7, 2002), describes secret agents
framing a US serviceman in Japan for a grisly murder. It
would be surprising if North Korea's covert operatives,
with a resume that includes civilian kidnappings and
bomb attacks against South Korean cabinet members,
weren't working to produce a similar incident to drive a
wedge deeper between your nation and its most reliable
ally.
Foreign troops, no matter their mission,
are inevitably a source of resentment in the host
country and a tinderbox, but Korean history complicates
the picture. Your fierce national pride is the legacy of
centuries of colonization first by China and then, more
brutally, by Japan. The twin national pastimes of hating
the Japanese and emulating them - from economic models
to cheering sections at baseball games - underscore a
conflicted national psyche when it comes to foreigners.
Korean bomb
That conflict provides
fertile ground for North Korean propaganda that paints
Washington as Korea's real enemy. In that formulation,
it's "US imperialism" that keeps the Korean people
divided and their national destiny unfulfilled. Oh,
sure, North Korea would unleash that "sea of fire" in
Seoul, but it would be the Americans' fault.
South Korea's ultranationalist political fringe,
and, I suspect, the ultranationalist fringe in every
South Korean mind, can find several things to cheer in
the crisis. Perhaps nuclear arms will finally drive the
latest foreign occupiers off the peninsula and leave
Koreans to settle matters for themselves without foreign
interference. (Good luck.) Let's face it, disliking
foreigners is as Korean as be bim bap.
A Korean bomb would make your
people a force to reckoned with, not colonized and
patronized. Even a handful of nukes would serve as
powerful persuaders for the Japanese, who still try to
cover up their documented atrocities in Korea to
pander to their own ultranationalists, to apologize and
compensate for damages wrought. You need to tackle this brand of fuzzy
thinking head-on.
You must emphasize that the
only country North Korea has ever made war on is South
Korea and that nuclear weapons only make that regime
more dangerous to all, no matter what the propaganda
broadcasts say. For its own safety, South Korea must
ensure that North Korea honors its pledge not to develop
nukes.
Disarming logic
To counter this
real and dangerous threat from North Korea effectively,
Seoul needs the help of the United States, the only
nation with the requisite might, as well as an unbroken
history, written in blood, of friendship and cooperation
with South Korea. Washington and Seoul must be full
partners in formulating and carrying out the appropriate
policy to end North Korea's nuclear adventurism. That is
only road to security on the peninsula and to peaceful
reconciliation between the Korean people.
Many
South Koreans are reluctant to accept this message. So
instead it appears you are trying take a back-door
approach to the situation by demonstrating that the
crisis is bad business for South Korea.
Your
recent dalliance with lawyer Jeffrey D Jones, a partner
at Kim & Chang and last year's American Chamber of
Commerce president in Seoul, hinting a possible advisory
position in your administration, is a clever idea to
build the feeling of partnership with the United States.
So is highlighting the 24 percent fall in foreign
investment in South Korea last year, a 42 percent
decline compared with 2000.
However, these moves
may well heighten ambivalent attitudes toward the US and
foreign investment rather than foster a consensus for
cooperation. Portraying the crisis as a drag on South
Korea's economy will spur calls for ending it by any
means, even capitulation to the North's nuclear
ambitions. You cannot accept that.
Casting the
crisis as an economic issue also carries grave danger.
You also must recognize that the chaebol will
lead the parade to appease North Korea. They dabble in
tourism and infrastructure projects now, but their real
goal is to see North Korea become their version of China
or Vietnam: a low-price production center where workers
are under the thumb of an oppressive regime that grants
these Korean conglomerates special privileges. That's
how they envisage regaining their former glory and
reasserting their dominance over your economy. They
couldn't care less what Kim Jong-il does with his nukes,
as long as he doesn't aim them at their factories.
Your nation is facing a grave challenge, and you
must confront it. That means uniting your nation behind
an effort with the US and other international partners
to keep the Korean Peninsula nuclear-free. That means
convincing your people that North Korean nuclear weapons
pose an intolerable threat, and it means convincing the
Bush administration that it must act decisively with
your nation to end that threat. You have a lot of work
to do on both fronts.
Unlike Dear Leaders, great
leaders are not born with that mantle, they are forged
by difficult times such as these.
(©2003 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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