SEOUL - Fighting talk from Republican US presidential candidate Senator John
McCain is apparently spurring a frantic search by President George W Bush's
administration to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue before the end of his
presidency in January.
US envoy Christopher Hill, currently in Beijing, holds out hope North Korea
will agree on the protocol for the disablement of its nuclear facilities,
although the North Korean negotiator, Kim Kye-gwan, failed to show up for the
latest talks. The reward, as Hill made clear, would be for Bush to take North
Korea's name "immediately" from the State Department's list of nations
sponsoring terrorism.
South Korean analysts believe North Korea is balking at US
demands in hopes they will be softened as Bush anxiously seeks signs of
progress before the end of his presidency. North Korea sees removal from the
terrorist list as a prerequisite to any agreement on a protocol, while US and
South Korean diplomats believe this move would damage it.
Negotiations assumed fresh urgency after McCain signaled his lack of interest
in negotiations with America's enemies. Although McCain did not mention North
Korea, anyone listening to his remarks at the close of the Republican
convention in St Paul, Minnesota, would have to think he opposes any agreement
that fails to verify that the North had given up all its nuclear activities.
McCain suggested what he thought of negotiations in remarks on the Russian
invasion of Georgia. "I will work to establish good relations with Russia so we
need not fear a return of the Cold War," he said, "but we can't turn a blind
eye to aggression and international lawlessness."
Clearly, McCain had memories of Vietnam in mind. Less clear was how he proposed
to carry on the fight. In his speech he said nothing about building up US
forces in case of a breakdown in negotiations with enemies near and far. Nor
did he talk up the danger of war on numerous fronts or nuclear war - other than
to say that Iran "remains the chief state sponsor of terrorism and on the path
to acquiring nuclear weapons".
Does McCain envision a military buildup? That conclusion hardly seems an
exaggeration, at least to judge from his final invocation to glory. "Stand up,
stand up, stand up and fight," he told the wildly applauding throng. "We're
Americans, and we never give up. We never quit."
McCain resurrected the ghosts of the Vietnam War in an appeal to old-fashioned
patriotism that raises the question of whether major segments of the US voting
public see his candidacy as a machine for revenge for America's greatest
humiliation on foreign soil. Although McCain did not cast his plea in
revanchist terms, he delivered a classic message of a revival of fighting
spirit that might as well have been entitled "Never again".
Some war veterans, wearing American Legion caps and medals earned in Vietnam,
seemed close to tears as he vowed "to keep the country I love safe" if elected
in November.
If those remarks were not exactly a call to arms, they came across as fighting
talk which neither Bush, who flew in the Air National Guard at home when he
bothered to show up, nor his surrogate, Vice President Richard Cheney, who
avoided military service with five student deferrals, would dream of making.
McCain dramatized the point with the fullest description he's given so far of
the suffering he endured in five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi
after his navy plane was shot down. He was "dumped in a dark cell and left to
die", he said, after parachuting into a lake in the middle of the Vietnamese
capital with two broken arms and a broken leg.
In the rhetorical tradition of seemingly all US military leaders, McCain
professed to "hate war", to find it "terrible beyond imagination", but his
story of imprisonment and torture was bound to feed the martial instincts of
right-wingers who have never gotten used to US defeat in Vietnam and believe
the nation should stand up to foes from the Middle East to North Korea.
The fact that he turned to the Vietnam example reflected a nagging belief among
many Americans that the US should have "finished the job" in Vietnam, just as
it should "stay the course" in Iraq and Afghanistan. In playing on this
sentiment, McCain's tone contrasted with that of the Democratic Party nominee,
Barack Obama, who has called for withdrawal of US combat forces from Iraq by
early 2010.
Although he refrained from pillorying Obama for his views, McCain left no doubt
of what he thinks of signs of weakness. "I'd rather lose an election than see
my country lose a war," he said, boasting of having "fought for the right
strategy and more troops in Iraq when it wasn't a popular thing to do."
McCain's tone set the stage for a campaign featuring right versus left, doves
versus hawks, anti-war crusaders against pro-war zealots in divisive factions
reminiscent of the Vietnam War period. No American presidential candidate,
including Republicans, has dared talk about war in such emotion-laden terms.
After all they have had difficulty shaking the legacy of Gerald Ford, who as
Richard Nixon's successor in the White House failed to stop North Vietnam's
final offensive in the first four months of 1975.
While anti-war protesters demonstrated outside, McCain made no attempt to
distance his memories of Vietnam with observations on the country's relative
prosperity since Hanoi's victory over the US-backed Saigon regime on April 30,
1975. He had no kind words for the Vietnamese people - and certainly no hint of
whether he thought the US was justified for fighting there until the withdrawal
of the last US combat forces in 1973.
Instead, he presented a saga of endurance and willpower against the enemy - the
kind of story that he and his strategists obviously believe should stand as an
example for all Americans. As delegates cheered again and again, he spoke of
the agonies he survived, of how his weight fell to 100 pounds (45 kilograms),
of the torture inflicted by his captors.
"I was in solitary confinement when my captors offered to release me," he said,
but "I knew why. If I went home, they would use it as propaganda to demoralize
my fellow prisoners." When he refused the offer, he said, "they worked me over
harder than they ever had before - and they broke me." Back in his cell, "hurt
and ashamed", he said, he was rescued in terms of morale by the tapping on the
wall of another prisoner of war in the next cell. "He told me to get back up
and fight again for our country and for the men I had the honor to serve with."
McCain portrayed the ordeal as having deepened his patriotism, his will to
fight - and inspired the core line of his appeal for votes in November. "I fell
in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else's," he said. To
waves of applause and cheers, he went on. "My country saved me, and I cannot
forget it." He would, he said, "fight for her as long as I draw breath, so help
me God."
Such remarks sharpened comparisons with Obama, who was a child in the care of
his grandparents when McCain was in prison in Hanoi and who never served in the
armed forces. One purpose, besides tapping into old-fashioned American
patriotism, was to show McCain's qualifications to serve as US
commander-in-chief.
"We face many threats in this dangerous world, but I'm not afraid of them," he
said, in a none-too-subtle dig at his foe. "I know how the military works, what
it can do, what it can do better, and what it should not do. I know how the
world works. I know the good and the evil in it."
Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of
forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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