The MacArthur Controversy Won’t Die Down in America

A month after the fact, the Heritage Foundation’s Peter Brookes has written about the 9/11 riot in the New York Post:

THIS time, South Korea’s anti-American crowd has gone too far. Uncle Sam-bashing is, unfortunately, quite popular these days among South Korea’s left, teachers and youth–burning the Stars and Stripes and massive anti-U.S. street protests are all too common. But now South Korean radicals–many of them de facto North Korean pawns–are threatening to tear down the 15-foot tall statue of U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur at Inchon, the site of the intrepid landing that changed the course of the bloody Korean War. With U.S.-South Korean relations already on the skids from disagreements over North Korea’s nuclear program to the future of U.S. troop basing, it’s a propitious time to bring our Old Soldier home and place him where he belongs – among other American heroes on the Mall in the nation’s capital.

For the last six months, activists have gathered around MacArthur’s statue above Inchon harbor for anti-American/anti-alliance hate-fests, including violent attempts to topple the monument. The latest rally was on Sept. 11, a date plainly chosen to sting Americans.

Just four days before the 55th anniversary of the Sept. 15, 1950 landing, 4,000 anti-U.S. activists, armed with bamboo poles and metal pipes, led assaults on the statue in Inchon’s Freedom Park, calling MacArthur “a war criminal who massacred numerous [Korean] civilians.”

Brookes raises some uncomfortable truths further down:

Actually, MacArthur liberated Korea twice – the first time, at the end of World War II, from a 35-year Japanese occupation and, then, from North Korean, Chinese and Soviet communist aggression during the Korean War. It wasn’t just Americans and Korean vets that the protestors offended. The U.K. ambassador to South Korea said that any attack on the MacArthur statue denigrates soldiers from the 20 nations who fought and died under MacArthur’s U.N. command so that South Korea would remain free.

Unlike the red-vests, Brookes bothers to compare South Korea’s vibrant free speech and properity to the gulags and famine conditions under which it would most likely live (if you can call it that) had MacArthur not succeeded at Incheon. That–and the Korean government’s strange ambivalence about the protestors’ irrational views and violent methods–reminds Americans that their public funds and military manpower are finite. More and more Americans are starting to notice, although it’s been a slow burn.

That’s the tough part about places like Korea that get far less American media attention than they deserve–the bad press tends to have staying power.