Lee Myung-Bak Proposes ‘Kaesong Archipelago’

Would you trust this man?  If you were one of those hoping that the next South  Korean election would be the end of our long international nightmare, you were mistaken:

Former Seoul Mayor Lee Myung-bak, the front-running opposition presidential aspirant in December’s election, proposed Monday creating a “Manhattan-like” island near the border with North Korea and building an inter-Korean industrial park there to ease military tension.

Dubbed “Na-deul,” which means a narrow waterway in Korean, the manmade island would be home to a 30- million-square-meter industrial park aimed at “combining North Korean labor and South Korean capital” and helping the communist country open up, Lee told a news conference at his Seoul office.  [Yonhap]

Lee makes token appearances at “Yoduk Story” and human rights events, makes encouraging statements about raising the subject of human rights in the North for once,  and then he proposes  crap like this. 

Part of the problem is that Lee is so enthralled with the grandiose, statist, and quixotic that he may leave South Korea looking a lot more like North Korea.  What’s more,  my gut tells me  the man will show a nasty authoritarian streak during his first year in office.  The deeper problem with Lee is what his past tells us:  the only constant things about him seem to be megalomania and ambition.  Instead of core values, he has a finely tuned sensitivity toward the political winds.

Nor is there any South Korean candidate who appears to be any less bad than Lee, though they’re all bad for slightly different reasons.

This proposal also illustrates just how rudderless the Korean right really is.  By adopting some of the left’s worst ideas, they send the message to the voters that Roh was right about them.  Rather than propose a fundamentally different approach to the North — one which promises more aid, trade, and benefits, but strictly conditioned on tangible reforms and the  reduction of tensions — they show that six months from Election Day, they’ve  expended all their mental acuity on internecine intrigues and have no original agenda to offer.  One gets the sense that their style of governance would be  a more corporatist, and marginally more competent, and slightly more corrupt version of the Roh years.  In which case, why not just bring back DJ?

For all of its high moral cost and limited financial benefits, Kaesong looks to have just imposed one very  big  price on South Korea:  it appears to be killing a proposed free trade agreement with  the United States.  It now looks as though the Democrats dislike Kaesong as much as the Republicans ever did, and one of the strongest opponests is Brad Sherman  of  California, hands-down my favorite Democrat in the House:

Immediately after the hearing, Brad J. Sherman (D. California), committee chairman, said, “For South Korea, the Iranian nuclear development may not be threatening, but for the U.S., the nuclear issues of North Korea and Iran are equally serious non-proliferation problems.

 

. . . .

Before the FTA conclusion, Republicans were vehemently against the idea to include the Gaesong Industrial Complex issue in the deal. Now, the Democrats are taking the lead.

 

Committee Chairman Sherman said, “It is unacceptable given our serious efforts to prevent North Korea’s nuclear development.

 

“If goods produced in the Gaesong complex are recognized as the products of South Korea, it will be no different to handing out cash to the North. This is unacceptable,” [David Scott, D. Ga.] added.  [Dong-A Ilbo]

Democrats are focusing not just on the issue of how Kaesong supports North Korea, but they’re also alerting me to an issue I wasn’t aware of — a  troubling South Korean contract with Iran.  Both are legitimate issues for our national security and the prevention of proliferation, and in fact, Republicans really didn’t raise either issue in hearings to the same extent.  To their credit, Democrats have been quicker to make the link between our support for the South and the South’s support for the North.  It’s about time someone did.

Read the entire article, and it’s apparent the Democrats have caucused about the FTA and decided to oppose it.  Nor  are the Republicans universally supportive.  Now, as Bruce Klinger pointed out below, it’s not just Kaesong that’s killing the FTA, but a series of other  special interests that the FTA failed to appease.  That’s how  politics works.  But it’s Kaesong, not all those other issues, that is becoming the banner behind which opposition to the FTA is marching.  It’s a troubling development for the Korea Lobby, which was counting on Democrats to support its approach to the North, at least in theory.  Instead, it looks like the Dems  took a hard look at Kaesong and turned away in disgust.  Worse, they’re creating a rare unanimity among conservatives and liberals in a direction that must worry them. 

Lee Myung-Bak wants to build another one of those, even though the costs are so much more manifest than the gains.  And if the idea isn’t stange enough, North Korea has about 300 miles of wasteland — just look on Google Earth —  on which it could be built.  Instead, Lee insists on helping Kim Jong Il isolate any reforming influence by building an island to put it on, which reveals just how insincere the reform-through-slave-labor theory really is.

I’ll close with this prediction:  South Korea is going to launch a massive P.R. and lobbying offensive to save this deal, but they probably won’t bend much in renegotiations.

Some anju links:

*   Drip, drip:   AF 2.0 is winning Bush praise from all the wrong people for “going the extra mile,” but another former Administration official is sounding critical about its execution:

Michael Green, a former Bush Asia adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Reuters he was encouraged that six-country talks on more far-reaching aspects of the February accord could resume.

But he worries that “we now have, in some ways, a harder position vis-a-vis the North Koreans than before because they’ve probably taken the lesson that we’re not going to put pressure on them if they delay and — quite the opposite — we’re going to be accommodating.”

Although Treasury officials long insisted they could not endorse releasing the accounts until North Korea and the BDA bank changed their ways, they went along when Bush, urged by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Hill, backed the Feb. 13 accord.

Bush, long known for a visceral dislike of North Korean leaders, had grown increasingly frustrated that Pyongyang used the dispute to delay the agreement.

His conservative supporters detest the deal and in recent months, Bush voiced displeasure with Rice and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson for putting him in a position of making commitments to Pyongyang that he found distasteful, U.S. officials and diplomats told Reuters.   [Reuters]

Bush, probably hoping to appease the rest of us, is expressing his frustration about the BDA funds transfer and the delay that it invited.  Two grafs:

*   This Seems Premature:   As Yongbyon hums along and before U.N. inspectors even know the times and terms under which the North will let them in, South Korea is also making arrangement to ship 50,000 tons of fuel oil to North Korea.

*   North Korea has increased its public  executions of  people  caught in  possession of cell phones.  [AP; Daily NK]