WASHINGTON - United States President George W Bush and South Korea's President
Lee Myung-bak may be talking at cross purposes when they meet in Seoul on
Wednesday, two days before they show up in Beijing for the opening of the
Summer Olympic Games on Friday.
Bush, still hoping to inspire US allies in his "war on terror", would like to
see a quantum leap in South Korea's reluctant support in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Lee, however, is stuck on problems much closer to home.
As the White House is painfully aware, a great deal has happened since Bush and
Lee appeared to have cemented a close
relationship during their meetings at Camp David in April. As a prelude to the
hoopla in China, Bush will have to run a gauntlet of prickly problems before
and during the summit in Seoul.
In the months since all those smiling photo-ops at Camp David, Lee has had to
deal with an explosion of protests against his decision to open the country to
the import of US beef as a condition for approval by the US of the free trade
agreement laboriously worked out in a year and a half of negotiations.
Anti-US demonstrators see Bush's visit as a great chance to rev up the
protests, just as they appeared to have tapered off since outbursts of violence
in June and July.
The protests show the depth of anti-US pressure as exerted by radicals who
can't seem to digest the conservative victory in last December's presidential
election. Bush, making life easier for Lee, has had to tread carefully around
the beef issue, assuring him in a telephone chat that US exporters won't ship
beef from cattle more than 30 months old.
The protesters, moreover, have another issue to rally around - fresh
revelations by South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the killing
of hundreds if not thousands of South Korean civilians by US air strikes,
mainly on targets thought to be under North Korean control during the Korean
War in the early 1950s. Survivors of the victims, with the backing of the
commission, are demanding compensation.
Bush and Lee may put off questions on this topic by referring them to
investigators, but the timing of the commission's reports is sure to add fuel
to the beef protests.
Lee, however, is far more concerned about rising confrontation between North
and South Korea while the US focuses on getting the North to move on to the
next phase of abandonment of its nuclear weapons program. North Korea is
hurling nasty rhetoric at Lee in the aftermath of the shooting by North Korean
soldiers of a South Korean woman who had strayed off the beaten track in the
Mount Kumkang tourist zone.
In response to South Korea's suspension of the Kumkang tours and demands for a
joint investigation, North Korea says it will expel South Korean workers from
the zone. One North Korean commentary last weekend accused Lee of "driving the
frozen inter-Korean relations to a catastrophic phase".
North Korea, refusing to resume North-South dialogue, demands that Lee endorse
all the agreements reached in the two inter-Korean summits hosted by Dear
Leader Kim Jong-il for Lee's two left-leaning presidential predecessors, Kim
Dae-jung, who initiated the "Sunshine" policy of reconciliation with the North,
and his successor, Roh Moo-hyun. The conservative Lee has not repudiated the
agreements of June 2000 or October 2007, but clearly sees them as concessionary
and wants to set an independent policy.
The great paradox in US relations with Korea is that Lee has set a relatively
tough policy while Bush, after appearing hardline during his first term, has
sought to appease North Korea by promising to remove the North from a list of
terrorist countries.
The issue now is the degree to which Bush will ease Lee's worries about the
wavering US position in light of the Kumkang incident and the impasse in
North-South dialogue. It may be due to such concerns that the White House now
says removal of North Korea from the terrorist list will have to wait until
North Korea agrees to verify whatever it does to get rid of its nuclear
arsenal.
South Korean officials, hoping for firm US support in the wake of both the beef
demonstrations and the killing of the housewife, want to see a shift in US
policy that includes a promise not to scale down US forces below the current
level of 28,000 troops, as well as postponement of plans to pull all combat
troops to a new base about 60 kilometers south of the capital Seoul.
They would also like to put off the US scheme for transferring troop leadership
to South Korea in the event of war, and they want the US to forget about North
Korea's repeated calls for a peace treaty to replace the armistice that ended
the Korean War in July 1953. That idea is seen in Seoul as critical to a North
Korean effort to isolate South Korea, since the South was not a signatory to
the truce.
Bush, however, has his own special agenda to pursue - his desire for South
Korea to respond by strengthening its vastly diminished commitment to the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That's a treacherous topic that South Korean politicians, even conservatives,
prefer to play down, if not avoid. About 500 South Korean troops remain in
Iraq, down from 3,000 at their peak in 2004. South Korea withdrew the 200
troops from Afghanistan after one death in a suicide bomb attack and the
abduction of 23 South Korean church workers, two of whom were killed.
The Korean troops in Iraq are involved in engineering projects. The force in
Afghanistan was on a medical mission. Bush believes South Korea should renew -
and increase - its commitment to both countries in exchange for renewed
guarantees of unwavering American military support.
The US, well before Bush got to Korea, turned aside what promised to be another
terribly difficult problem, namely that of the US position on the Dokdo islets,
the rocky outcroppings in waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan. The
Bush administration was basically blind-sided when the little-known US Board on
Geographic Names decreed that sovereignty of the islets was "undesignated" and
wanted to call them the Liancourt Rocks after the name of a French whaling ship
that ventured on them in the 19th century.
The suspicion is that Japanese diplomats and scholars had subtly gotten through
to members of the US geographic board, unbeknown to the US State Department or
the White House. If the islets could not go by the Japanese name of Takeshima,
as Japan identifies them, then the Japanese at least wanted recognition that
their status was "unsettled" and the name Dokdo represented only the Korean
side of the argument..
The Korean Embassy in Washington was caught by surprise. With the ruckus over
Dokdo likely to ruin Bush's visit to Korea, the White House had the sense to
reverse the geographic board's decision and have the islets listed as firmly
under South Korean control.
Dokdo, for all the headlines, was easy. The White House will have more trouble
with beef.
It's not at all clear if the US Congress will ratify the free trade agreement,
even if Lee pushes it through South Korea's National Assembly. Influential
American conservatives as well as liberals, including the presumptive
Democratic Party presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama, oppose it. The
best shot is for Congress to vote on it in the window between the US
presidential election in November and the end of Bush's term.
While Bush promises to press for ratification, he can make no promises - any
more than he can guarantee the continuity of US policy after his successor
takes over in January.
Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of
forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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