Why the Pentagon Hates Peace in Korea
Young Kim
By Bill Mesler, September 2000
http://www.kimsoft.com/
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You might have missed the significance if you live in the United States, but
South Korean President Kim Dae Jung's summit meeting with North Korean
President Kim Jong Il in mid-June was heralded around the world as the
historic beginning of the end of the Cold War in Asia.
For a half century, the two countries have engaged in one of the globe's
tensest military standoffs. Their mutual border -- a no-man's land of mines,
booby traps, and entrenchments with two huge armies on either side of the
"demilitarized zone" -- had just last year been labeled by President Clinton
as "the most dangerous spot in the world." In the days prior to the June
summit, former South Korean President Kim Yung Sam revealed in an interview
with Agence France-Presse that he had to personally plead with President
Clinton not to launch an air strike against North Korea in 1994, a move he
says would have ignited "a second Korean war."
Yet when current President Kim Dae Jung returned from his three-day,
televised love fest in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, he was able to
announce that, for the first time since World War II, there was no longer
any danger of a war between the two Koreas. After Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong
Il held hands and sang "our wish is unification," the rapprochement has been
so rapid that recent polls show the South Korean public now holding a 90
percent favorable rating of North Korea. Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro
Mori likened the changes to the "collapse of the Berlin Wall," a comparison
heard frequently in Asia.
So why aren't policymakers in the United States celebrating?
Sure, there have been the requisite public congratulations issued to the
South Koreans. But while the rest of the world marvels at recent events,
U.S. officials fret.
"The threat of war is still there," comments one unenthusiastic State
Department official, who asked not to be identified by name. "In terms of
[the North Koreans'] military capability, they still have over a million
troops ready to go."
The legacy-obsessed State Department, which has bent over backwards to
produce a peace treaty -- any peace treaty -- in the Middle East, has done
next to nothing to support the peace process taking place in East Asia.
"The Americans are behaving in a truly surly manner," says Chalmers Johnson,
former head of the University of California Berkeley political science and
Chinese studies departments and author of the book Blowback: The Costs and
Consequences of American Empire (Metropolitan Books, 2000). "What they
desperately dislike is that peace has broken out in East Asia."
The problem is that peace in Korea upsets the Pentagon's applecart. For
years, North Korea has been the Pentagon's dream come true, a perfect
bogeyman to drum up support for obscene defense spending. Tiny,
impoverished, technologically backward North Korea was built up into a
threat so insidious it could be used to justify the additional $60 billion
the Pentagon plans to spend on a National Missile Defense (NMD) shield over
the next fifteen years. But the accord has already helped take the steam out
of Star Wars (as did the recent missile test failure).
"The proponents of missile defense are true believers. They would believe in
it if Iraq, Korea, and Iran disappeared tomorrow," says John Isaacs,
president of the Council for a Livable World. "But North Korea is and has
always been the number one excuse for building this shield. So, politically,
[the Korean summit] has changed the landscape for NMD somewhat."
But State Department officials have gone out of their way to say that the
Korean summit does nothing to alter their perception that a hugely expensive
missile defense system is needed. "I don't think we see in this [summit] as
a seed of anything that would change the possibility of a missile threat to
the United States," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told the
Associated Press.
Perhaps even more important than providing a rationale for Star Wars, a
hostile North Korea has justified the extension of American military power
into the Far East. The disappearance of North Korea could eventually mean
the withdrawal of the Pentagon's highly valued U.S. bases in South Korea and
Japan. It is a nightmare scenario for military planners, especially as the
Pentagon looks at China as the next enemy on the horizon.
The U.S. bases in South Korea, and the 37,000 U.S. troops stationed there,
represent the Pentagon's only deployment on mainland Asia. Strategically,
they place U.S. soldiers and weapons virtually at China's door.
In recent years, however, pressure has been mounting in South Korea itself
for the removal of the troops. Since the mid-June summit between the Koreas,
protests against U.S. troops stationed in Korea have increased dramatically.
"There is real hostility because people don't see the need for these troops
to be stationed there," says Tim Shorrock, editor of Asia Trade and
Investment Online. (When he was with the Journal of Commerce, Shorrock broke
stories on U.S. involvement in South Korea's 1980 military coup, especially
the Kwangju massacre, when Korean troops massacred 2,000 people.)
"This is our land! Let's drive out U.S. troops!" protesters chanted on June
17 at a U.S. military base fifty miles southwest of Seoul, according to the
AP. "The protesters threw rocks and dirt and wielded bamboo sticks when riot
police officers locked their plastic shields and batons to block them from
marching on the range."
The protests have forced the Pentagon to place restrictions on its units in
Korea. "We are concerned for the safety of the troops," says Department of
Defense spokesman Terry Sutherland. "Soldiers have been told to keep
together, keep low profiles, and avoid crowds."
The Pentagon has long worried that a thaw between North Korea and South
Korea could cause problems. According to one Defense Department official
quoted in The Washington Post, William Cohen's first question to policy
officials when he became Defense Secretary in 1997 was, "How can we change
the assumption that U.S. troops will be withdrawn after peace comes to the
Korean peninsula?"
Those worries took center stage as the United States scrambled to react to
the unexpected success of Kim's June visit to Pyongyang. No sooner had Kim
returned to Seoul than he started hearing the tough questions from Americans
about the maintenance of U.S. troops in Asia. Within weeks, Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright had shuffled off to the South Korean capital. In a
telling press conference held with the South Korean foreign minister, nearly
every statement -- and nearly every question from reporters -- revolved
around the issue of maintaining U.S. troops.
"Any discussions of lowering numbers or withdrawal are not appropriate,"
said Albright, noting that "the United States is a Pacific power as well as
an Atlantic power." Added Albright, "We don't put a time limit on our
responsibilities or on pursuing our national interest."
A month later, she was off to Bangkok to meet with North Korea's Foreign
Minister Paek Nam Sun. The North Koreans had just made a dramatic
announcement to Russian President Vladimir Putin that they were willing to
abandon their missile program in exchange for Western aid in building
scientific satellites. But Albright said Paek Nam Sun would not confirm the
offer. This was the highest-level meeting ever between the United States and
North Korea, but Washington downplayed it.
Washington did one other odd thing. Just days after the Korean leaders'
summit, the State Department confirmed that it had lifted restrictions in
place since 1977 that had limited the range of South Korean missiles. For
the last twenty years, the United States has had an agreement with South
Korea prohibiting it from having missiles that could reach beyond 112 miles.
This limitation meant that South Korean missiles could "target North Korean
forces near the border but put the North Korean capital just outside range,"
The Washington Post reported. "Now, the United States has agreed that South
Korea can extend the range up to 300 kilometers, or 186 miles," more than
enough to hit Pyongyang. The timing of this disclosure was peculiar, to say
the least. The South Koreans did not want it to stall the peace process, so
it decided to suspend any new missile development. But why did Washington
change the policy, and why did it confirm it now?
It was, in the words of the Council for a Livable World's John Isaacs, "a
crazy time to make a decision like that."
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Bill Mesler is a writer in Washington, D.C.