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Why the Pentagon Hates Peace in Korea
Progressive, The, Sept, 2000 by Bill Mesler
You might have missed the significance if you live in the United States, but South Korean President Kim Dae Jungs 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.
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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 high 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.)
