Cindy Sheehan, Kim Jong Il, and Me

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

I will restrain the expression of  views on  Cindy Sheehan herself.  I’m one who makes allowances for the fact that she’s traumatized by her son’s death, an event that quite obviously and understandably blew a few of her circuits.  And while I’m sure that Casey  Sheehan  wouldn’t appreciate his mother’s hard work to render his sacrifice meaningless, I’m just as sure he’d want  those of us who support the cause for which he gave his  life  to at least limit  our criticism of his mother to her choice of rhetoric.  That rhetoric, however, must be seen to be believed.  Sheehan has made herself  a reflexive and visceral  sympathizer with all  declared enemies of  the United States.  For  reasons that ought to be obvious, the same media that made  Ms. Sheehan a celebrity and crowned her with absolute  moral authority have, shall we say, redeployed their adoring lenses elsewhere.

What, I wondered, were Cindy Sheehan and her droopy friend  doing at Camp Humphreys, Korea, my former home and duty station, at the very gate through which a few thousand other American underachievers and I entered and left that  especially unpleasant  “bsae” each day,  in my case,  for seven irrecoverable months?  She would say that she’s protesting the expansion of a U.S. Army post there.

This rampant, arrogant, and care-less US militarism has nowhere been more evident than here in South Korea, especially in the village of Daechuri, near Pyong-taek City. The loathing for George Bush, America, Americans, irresponsible capitalism, corporatism, imperialism and militarism is a planetary phenomenon, but above what the US is doing to the wretched countries of Iraq and Afghanistan, I have never been more ashamed of the US government than when I visited the village of Daechuri ….

What Ms. Sheehan either doesn’t know or isn’t telling us is that this “expansion,” negotiated between the U.S. and South Korean governments, is part of a plan that will close dozens of U.S. Army posts in  Korea,  including a large one in the heart of Seoul.  The Army is  returning 30,000 acres  to Korea  in exchange for  a  few thousand  in less populated areas, primarily at Camp Humphreys, which lies among rice fields, run-down villages, and according to GI rumor, dog farms.   This drawdown will reduce U.S. forces in Korea by a third  in the five-year period ending in 2008.   After years of  caustic  negotiations  that drew  U.S. threats to unilaterally  pull out  even more  forces, the Koreans agreed to the deal, which  required them to relocate and compensate  their citizens in the area slated for expansion.  A minority refused the compensation offered them,  so Cindy Sheehan  misdirects her  righteous irony on their behalf.

The village of Daechuri has the unmitigated gall to be located next to a US military base, Camp Humphreys, which is slated for an eleven-billion dollar expansion that would include a golf course for the use of soldiers stationed there. The only problem is (not for the governments) that the village of Daechuri and their thousands of acres of farmland, mostly rice paddies, are in the way of the juggernaut of US military expansion.

It’s almost a sure thing that  Daechu-Ri,  like Seoul and most other towns next to U.S. Army posts in Korea,  actually grew up around the  post.  In poorer times, most of its residents probably could not have survived without the paychecks of soldiers.   Humphreys and nearby Osan Air Base continue to drive a good portion of the area’s economy to this day.  They drove 20% of the economy of Tongduchon, which sits next to one very large post that’s being shut down, and which faces economic ruin as a result.  The ironic name of that post:  Camp Casey. 

Humphreys also hosts a South Korean military installation.  Its personnel, one presumes, will  share in these  golf course privileges, as they shared the former  golf course at Yongsan Garrison  in Seoul  (now the site of a Korean museum).   Am I actually going to defend kicking people off their land to  build a golf  course?  Presuming the adequacy of compensation, yes.   That and the water park, too.  If you’re going to put tens of thousands of Americans on unfriendly foreign soil with their families,  those people need something to do.   They can only spend so much time off post before running into this sort of  warm Korean hospitality.  Of course, some places near Camp Humphreys welcome our service members, but if recreational opportunities are limited to whores and liquor, you’ll have neither  a wholesome family life nor  good community relations.  I don’t actually advocate keeping our soldiers in Korea, for what it’s worth, but if we do, we  owe it to them to make their lives bearable. 

What I find harder to defend is South Korea’s haggling  over each acre, including space for a huge new HQ for Combined Forces Command,  then clearing out residents for the post expansion, and  finally,  announcing  its withdrawal from said command. 

The people of Daechuri have been cut-off from their farmlands by razor wire, guard towers, and armed foot patrols. Over two-thirds of the residents have the small village, but that leaves about one-third of them there to stand against the mightiest Army and the greediest government in world history.

After most of the locals were long gone,  South Korea’s radical left deployed  a force of thousands of professional radicals and union goons armed with pipes, rocks, and bamboo poles to Daechu-ri.  Most of the muscle was supplied by Korea’s largest union, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, which has a long pedigree for violence and  the espousal of  North Korean ideology.  Other groups that were well represented were the extremist student group Hanchongryon and the Democratic Labor Party, a minor far-left opposition party with its stronghold in the country’s southwest.  The radicals first embraced, then hijacked, the cause of the few remaining locals.  Soon, their thugs were  policing the boundaries of the liberated zone; one damaged the cars  of two locals he suspected of being police “spies.”   Radicals  then  launched a series of violent protests that left hundreds injured.  The toll from the bloody  Saturday after May  Day  alone was  117 police and 93 demonstrators injured (13 of the injuries were serious) and  524 arrests. 

After our tour bus pulled up into the village, we were ushered into a large warehouse where the villagers were holding their 811th nightly candlelight vigil in protest of the US incursion. We joined their vigil and heard their stories. We heard stories of May 4th, when 20,000 Korean olice descended on the village with heavy-hands and strong arm tactics hat allowed the barbed wire fences to be constructed, thereby effectively cutting the farmers off from tens of thousands of dollars worth of un-harvested rice.

Never mind that,  according  to a protest leader,  the rice was planted for reasons that were political,  not agricultural, and in calculated defiance of a Korean government order in order  to block new  construction.  This is not a case of heavy-handed police descended on a peaceful village.  Peaceful protestors don’t bring weapons; they bring signs.  The Humphreys protests are part of a trend of increasing political violence  on South Korean streets.  That violence is often directed by radical, pro-North Korean  leftists against those who want to start a national conversation about human rights in North Korea.  Which brings us to Kim Jong Il’s role in this.

Meet  Lee Jung  Hun.  Lee is a former member of the Central Committee of the Democratic Labor Party.  Until last month, Choi Ki Young, one of the party’s founders, was its  Vice General Secretary and an “executive” in  the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions.  Lee, Choi, and several others  are now both under arrest  for having been members of a well-placed  North Korean spy ring, known as Il Shim Hue,  for the last decade.  This inconvenient development so embarrassed the ruling party, also leftist and deeply fearful of offending Kim Jong Il, that President Roh Moo Hyun quickly replaced the head of the National Intelligence Service who exposed the ring, installing an old political crony instead.   Lee, Choi, and other  members of the spy ring  are suspected of traveling to a safe house at 3089 Dongxuhuayuan, 18 Shuangqiaodong-lu, Zahoyang-qu, Beijing, where they met with and received money and instructions from North Korean intelligence agents.  One of their assigned duties was to try to throw their party’s votes to the ruling party candidate and help Kim Jong Il pick the next mayor of Seoul.  That effort failed, but  another  was far more successful:   lending the  Dear Leader’s guidance to  an radical and often violent anti-American movement in South Korea.  And, as  Kim Tae Il,  the  General Secretary  of the KCTU delicately put it,

“During the May 1 North-South Workers’ Rally in Pyongyang, the workers of North and South agreed to unify to carry out the anti-American struggle”¦. The center of that struggle with the United States is Daechu-ri, Pyeongtaek.  

Choi in particular was a leader of the Humphreys protests.  The National Intelligence Service thinks that Lee and Choi used  their positions in the DLP and KCTU to  help North Korea neutralize the  South Korean government  and incite hatred toward the United States and its soldiers.  Those two organizations supplied much of the manpower to demonstrations against the expansion of my former duty station, Camp Humphreys, last Spring. 

I’ll add a few more interesting  details about the Il Shim Hue ring.  Its alleged leader is a 44 year-old Korean-American businessman and former U.S. soldier who goes by the name of Michael Chang, and who, like me, was formerly stationed at the Yongsan Garrison in Seoul.  Since then, reporters tracked down his wife.  She was working as a secretary for a Lieutenant Colonel on the post.  One member planned a series of violent attacks on conservative politicians and media figures, and helped carry out at least one of them.  So imagine the sense of irony when I read this quote by Ms. Sheehan:

You can bet your turkey left-overs that North Korea is watching these developments very closely and only the people of Korea and this region will pay for US infiltrations in South Korea.

You can read much, more more about  South Korea’s  radical left, its embrace of North Korean ideology, its racially-charged hatred and violence against Americans, and the ruling party’s tactit and active support for it here.  One point on which I’ll agree with Ms. Sheehan, to a point:  the North Koreans have had some success.

My heart broke for the people of Daechuri and was filled with disgust for whom the people of Korea call “Georgie Bushie” and whom I call “BushCo.”

Ciindy, who did her own informal straw poll,  is out of her statistical depth, but the numbers are indeed bleak.  In a 2003 Pew survey, for example, 58% of Koreans expressed regret that the Iraqi Army didn’t fight us harder to defend Baghdad, and a  disturbingly high percentage of  young Koreans say they’d take North Korea’s side in a  U.S.-North Korean conflict.   South Korea’s level of anti-Americanism is actually more typical of numbers for the Middle East than those in Europe or Asia.  I also believe  that the withdrawal of  most of our soldiers from Korea is overdue for political, strategic, economic, and military reasons, such as the fact that we need  those  soldiers  more in Iraq than we need instant  entanglement in another Asian ground war (when the use of  air power could serve our interests  almost as well, and at a much lower political and human cost).  More fundamentally, South  Korea has the resources to defend itself.  And when it needs more land to expand its own military bases, it doesn’t become a magnet for nationalist, socialist goons.

Confoundingly, most Koreans also want U.S. forces to stay in Korea, at least in most surveys, and most of them have little use for the protestors or their violent methods, with one survey finding 80% opposed.  While a minority of those in Daechu-ri are understandably unhappy,  sentiment in the broader local area is also  distinctly against the protests, and those in the nearby village of Anjung-ri are particularly eager for the extra business they are expecting from the expansion of Humphreys.  It’s a mixed picture, but it’s not the picture of an ally we can depend on to protect our flanks.

Daechuri has become “ground zero” in the struggle against violent US military extremism. We Americans can no longer sit idly by and turn ignorant blind eyes to what Georgie Bushie does around the globe. The people of such places as Daechuri, Shannon, Pearl Harbor and Iraq are our brothers and sisters whom we are allowing our governments to oppress and suppress.

… and we have officially lost contact with Mission Control.

Each contradiction is surrounded by another.  Ms. Sheehan echoes the radicals’ line  and blames all of this on Bush.  But the relocation — the decision to keep U.S. forces in Korea at all — is a decision made by the most leftist, anti-American  government South Korea has ever elected … a government that still desperately desires the incalculable economic benefit of having 25,000 American military personnel on its soil, but which won’t speak up to tell the South Korean people why.

Throughout the protests and notwithstanding their ferocious violence, the South Korean government never seemed sure which side it was on.  The Prime Minister, for example,  called for both the police and demonstrators to show restraint.  The Defense Minister, who has since quit, made exasperated demands for an end to the violence and threatened  to court-martial protest leaders.  The Justice Ministry  arrested some protest leaders,  but prosecutors bungled the evidence, judges dismissed the charges, and the prosecutors responded with some unprofessional criticism of the courts.   One influential  ruling party parliamentarian stood  beside  the protest leaders while chatting with party bosses on his cellphone, apparently to make sure that none of the  leaders  were held accountable for the violence they orchestrated.  That same parliamentarian had previously called for ending the National Intelligence Service’s power to investigate suspected  North Korean spies like Choi Ki Young, Lee Jae Won, and a third protest leader, Kang Soon-Jeong.  Kang,  a co-chairman of another pro-North Korean group, the Pan-Korean Alliance for Reuinification,  helped lead  a violent  attempt to tear down a statue  of General Douglas MacArthur at Incheon.  The date of that attempt:  September 11, 2005.  The Pan-Korean Alliance  also  had a major presence at the Humphreys protests.  Today, Kang is — you guessed it — under arrest on suspicion of being a North Korean agent.

Granted, oversimplication is Cindy Sheehan’s stock in trade, but there is a point at which we all bear responsibility for the harm we cause through our stupidity.  Not content to make Iraq into the new Cambodia, she has allied herself with the agents of Kim Jong Il, a man who is probably responsible for more death and suffering than any other living person.  An exhaustive  new report commissioned by Elie Wiesel and Vaclav Havel accuses Kim of “crimes against humanity” for allowing millions of his people to starve to death.  That report helped persuade even  the U.N. General Assembly to condemn Kim Jong Il for  his atrocious human rights record.  This,  just  a week  before Ms. Sheehan joined up with a movement that now appears to have been directed in large part by North Korean intelligence.

Ht:  The Marmot.  (updated post)