The headline shouldn’t be surprising to those who have read the writings of Bruce Cumings.  To be fair the article isn’t really that bad but his obvious hatred of President Bush really degrades any point he is trying to make.  Let me highlight some of the points Cumings makes in his article with my comments following of course:

At the heart of the problem is the perception that Lee is toadying up to an Administration that runs roughshod over Korean national sovereignty and could care less about the unprecedented warming of relations between North and South over the past decade.  [The Nation via tip from King Baeksu]

Lee was elected on a platform of fixing the Korean economy and he knows full well the best boost to the Korean economy is getting an FTA with the US signed.  If Lee wants an FTA signed he needs to get it signed this year because with the likelihood of a Democrat in the White House next year, an FTA with Korea would probably be dead if it isn’t already now.  Lee’s mistake was appearing to be chummy with Bush which due to the undertone of anti-Americanism in the Korean public was sure not to go over very well.

Cumings makes a very provocative claim that the Bush administration “runs roughshod over Korean national sovereignty” without providing an example of this.  The fact that South Korea was included in a six party talks format and that the Bush administration for years would not talk unilaterally with North Korea despite suggestions from the South Korean government to do so tends to conflict with this assessment.  

Cumings goes on: 

President Kim Dae Jung’s “sunshine policy” did more to enhance peace and reconciliation between the two Koreas than all his predecessors combined and won him the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize.

All Kim Dae-jung did was appear to “enhance peace and reconciliation” on the Korean peninsula.  When Kim Dae-jung took office North Korea was desperate for cash to keep their regime afloat.  The Kim Dae-jung administration provided this cash in return for creating the illusion of reconciliation with the 2000 Inter-Korean summit.  It is interesting that Cumings provides no mention that the summit and the follow on Nobel Peace Prize was only made possible by a secret $500 million dollar bribe to Kim Jong-il from the South Korean government funneled through Hyundai. 

Evidence of the mirage of reconciliation during the Kim Dae-jung administration is the fact that North Korean spy subs were caught infiltrating into South Korea and shootouts along the DMZ were not uncommon. 

The ultimate evidence of the mirage was just a few months before Kim Dae-jung left office, in 2002 North Korea launched a planned strike that murdered six South Korean naval personnel in order to draw attention away from South Korea’s amazing success hosting and playing in the World Cup.  If reconciliation was going on, it was definitely one sided. 

More from Cumings:

His protégé and successor, Roh Moo-hyun, continued this policy through five years of intense American pressure and criticism. Both presidents were ultimately vindicated when the Bush Administration swiveled 180 degrees in early 2007 and talked directly with the North.

What did the Roh administration exactly accomplish in five years in regards to reconciliation on the peninsula?  All they have done is funnel cash up north for little in return.  There were a few family reunions but not enough to justify the amount of cash sent north.  The Kumgang resort was established which really isn’t reconciliation and just another cash cow for the North Koreans considering South Korean tourists are not allowed to interact with North Korean civilians.  The tour scheme is not even economically sound because Hyundai Asan has been losing money on the scheme. 

Roh was able to get a rail line with North Korea linked only after paying for its construction and then paying $80 million dollars for one test ride to be done on it.  Then in the ultimate snub to President Roh, when he wanted to use the rail line to travel to Pyongyang for the 2^nd Inter-Korean summit, the North Koreans told him no and made him travel by car instead, despite all the tens of millions of South Korean money put into constructing the railway line. 

To make matters even worse is that despite all the cash sent to North Korea no progress has been made in reducing North Korea’s military posture.  In fact it appears the more money that is sent to North Korea the more aggressive their military posture towards South Korea becomes.  A higher percentage of the North Korean army is forward deployed along the DMZ then ever before, North Korea has regularly tested tactical ballistic missiles, and has even acquired nuclear weapons and yet people want to call this successful engagement? 

Cumings goes on:

But along came President Lee, blaming his predecessors for coddling the North over “ten lost years.” Beltway pundits fell all over themselves applauding Lee’s sagacity–finally the adults were running Korea again–and Bush rewarded Lee with a weekend visit to Camp David in April. The new Korean president brought with him what appeared to be a modest offering: lifting the ban on American beef imports.

If one looks at Lee Myung-bak’s North Korea policies they are in fact little different from the Roh administration.  Lee supports giving aid to North Korea and lots of it.  In fact he supports creating a possible slave labor island for the North Koreans to use.  The part where Roh’s and Lee’s North Korea policies differ is that Lee expects North Korea to give something in return for aid given to include improving human rights conditions.  Now that would be real reconciliation not the mirage reconciliation practiced during both the Kim and Roh years in power. 

Here is where Cumings is at his most deceiving:

In September 2002 Bush sent an envoy to Pyongyang to accuse the North of having a second nuclear weapons program using highly enriched uranium. The predictable result was the North’s rapid repudiation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the end of the eight-year freeze on its plutonium facility and the recovery of some 8,000 plutonium fuel rods–enough for five or six atomic bombs. (As it happened, US intelligence on the North’s highly enriched uranium was no better than it was on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.) 

The Bush administration withdrew from the original Agreed Framework because North Korea was cheating on the deal with their secret uranium program.  The evidence of the North’s uranium program is quite convincing and far greater then the evidence ever presented in regards to Iraq’s WMD programs.  Documents handed over by the North Koreans to the US were dripping with traces of uranium.

Pakistan nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan.

Some more damning evidence is that Pakistani nuclear scientist AQ Khan has admitted to supplying North Korea with centrifuges and technology.  Plus North Korea has admitted to procuring aluminium tubes that could be used for a uranium program which North claimed were for their missile program.  However, testing showed the tubes to have traces of uranium on them.  The most damning evidence is that the North Koreans admitted to US Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly that they had secretly continued a nuclear weapons program.

The US never had evidence of a secret Iraqi nuclear program that is nearly as compelling as the evidence the US currently has on North Korea’s secret uranium program.  The fact that Cumings would try to link evidence of North Korea’s uranium program to WMD’s in Iraq is a clear indication of how bias he is towards this topic.

Then to top it off Cumings completely ignores the nuclear proliferation to Syria by North Korea where the Israelis literally have pictures of the inside of the nuclear facility and North Korean nuclear scientists smiling for the cameras. 

Next in the article Cumings tries to insinuate that anti-Americanism in Korea is actually anti-Bush because President Bush is deeply unpopular:

In these same years Pew, Gallup and domestic Korean opinion polls uniformly showed a sharp spike in unfavorable views of the United States, clearly a result of the Bush Administration’s policy shift. According to William Watts of Potomac Associates, a Washington consulting firm, Koreans with somewhat or very favorable views of the United States dropped from 75 percent at one point in the 1990s to 53 percent during the Bush Administration, while somewhat or very unfavorable views spiked to 43 percent.

If anti-Americanism in Korea is anti-Bush then that doesn’t explain why Koreans went crazy in 2000 over the Yongsan Water Dumping Incident, which is even more absurd then the US beef issue, (if you can believe it) and Bush wasn’t the President back then.  It doesn’t matter who is in the White House, there is an undercurrent of anti-Americanism within Korea that is indoctrinated at a young age and whoever takes over the White House isn’t going to change it. 

The mere fact that tens of thousands of South Korean citizens would believe the US government would intentionally send beef to Korea to kill them with is a sign of how rampant the undertone of anti-Americanism in Korea is.

In a rare bright spot in the article, Cumings at least mentions in his article that Roh Moo-hyun was actually the one that brought the FTA about in the first place:

Last year, President Roh Moo-hyun’s support for the free trade deal amid a stagnating economy caused his popularity to plummet, thus bringing Lee to power in an election based almost entirely on economic issues. But now “free trade” has heavily politicized Korean-American relations.

Cumings however doesn’t answer why Koreans didn’t hold mass protests in the streets during the Roh administration to stop the opening of markets; why are they protesting Lee instead? 

I’m sure Cumings knows as well as I do that the leftist groups are protesting now against the deal because Roh was their man in the Blue House and Lee is not.  They are trying to politically neuter Lee in order to keep advancing their leftist agenda which was stopped with Lee’s election.  This is just extremely dirty domestic politics being played very effectively by the Korean left.

Here is part of the article that I can actually agree with Cumings on:

Meanwhile George W. Bush decided that Kim Jong Il was a pygmy he could deal with after all, resulting in the February 13, 2007, agreement on denuclearization–the origins of which remain very murky. Recall that Pyongyang celebrated American Independence Day in 2006 by blowing off one long-range Taepodong 2 missile and several medium-range rockets, and followed that in October with its first nuclear test. So why did Bush, who says he does not “reward bad behavior” and had rejected direct talks with North Korea, suddenly embrace negotiations?

If President Bush did have the nerve to stick with a get tough policy with North Korea, then why suspend Agreed Framework 1.0 in the first place, to only to sign an Agreed Framework 2.0 that is even worse then the first one.  To make matters worse North Korea now has a nuclear arsenal to go along with a better deal and has even shown they are willing to proliferate their nuclear technology.  This is the where the Bush administration’s North Korea policy is an absolute failure. 

In the concluding paragraph of Cumings article he actually hints at what I have been saying all along about the beef protests:

Washington’s intentions toward Pyongyang have been at the heart of South Korean perceptions of American sincerity and good will: that’s where the beef is. The past seven years have seen an astonishing spectacle in which an impulsive American President zigzagged from gratuitous insults thrown at the North Korean head of state to charges of new nuclear programs based on flimsy evidence, only to jump on Kim Dae Jung’s merry-go-round of give-and-take diplomacy. Lee Myung-bak’s election appeared to signal a return to the good old days when neither Korean nor American leaders paid much attention to Korean public opinion. But a small matter of beef imports has put masses of Koreans into the streets and threatens to trample the very foundations of Korean-American relations.

First of all as I have already shown the “flimsy evidence” line is false as well as Kim Dae-jung’s “give and take diplomacy”.  There is no give and take with North Korea, it is all give with little to nothing in return.  However, Cumings does show how these protests having nothing to do with beef and are a result of people protesting because Lee is perceived to be too pro-American and not continuing the appeasement policy with North Korea.  This is actually simplifying it too much, but is part of the equation. 

As I have been saying repeatedly here on the ROK Drop these protests are about the Korean left trying to politically neuter Lee Myung-bak in order to continue to advance their leftist agendas that were stopped with Lee’s election.  Anti-US issues and North Korean appeasement are part of their leftist agendas.  Basically they are trying to do through smears, lies, intimidation, and violence what they couldn’t do at the ballot box and have had great success in doing so. 

Popularity: 3%