South Korea: No Worse Friend, No Better Enemy
By now you’ve heard that the Taliban have murdered their first Korean hostage, and so Korea has now wheeled as one in spontaneous rage at the Taliban, as though they’d issued postage stamps with images of Tokdo, right? Well, not exactly. There are many things I could say about the reactions of Roh Moo Hyun, his government, and his country’s media, but Robert Kohler has pretty much already said those things, and a few others.
Two lessons bears repeating: first, when trying to predict Korea’s reactions to any given event, never underestimate Korea’s instinct for anti-Americanism; second, when dealing with South Korea — as a few of our generals have learned — being nice gets you nowhere. Those two lessons are extensions of one principle that’s not uniquely applicable to Korea: people tend to show their “courage” by standing up to people they know won’t hurt them. Korea just happens to have a special talent for this.
As for a wave of anti-Americanism that some “experts” in Korea are threatening, I’m hoping they’re right. The diplomatic classes of both nations have done a fairly expert job of papering over the depth of anti-Americanism there, and I’d be perfectly content to see a reaction that outrageously irrational get enough press for a few U.S. presidential candidates to start talking about troop withdrawals (remember this?). First, such talk would almost immediately shut up some of Korea’s professional demagogues, whose conniving calculations we tend to underestimate. They know what a precipitous withdrawal could do to their economy. Second, a major U.S. troop presence in Korea doesn’t serve sufficient U.S. interests to be worth its financial cost, or to be worth tying soldiers down where they’re no longer needed. Third, our troop presence is doing us more political and diplomatic harm than it does us diplomatic and military good. Finally, our troop presence puts American hostages within the range of hostile guns and thus limits our options in dealing with North Korea.
As for the Taliban, they must be thinking that they chose the perfect hostages. Not only were their captives turned on by their own people, their government tried to engineer ransom payments to the terrorists and throw all of the blame on their American enemy (my thanks to Michelle Malkin for linking this humble blog). Meanwhile, hardly a word of complaint about the Taliban can be heard in Seoul for, you know, kidnapping and/or murdering Korean civilians.
I’d have preferred to link to more information about the murdered man, Bae Hyung-Kyu, but oddly enough, no one is really writing much about him, and I still don’t have a clear idea of just what his group was doing in Afghanistan. He had a young daughter, and as of this article’s publication, she still didn’t know that her father was dead. Sometimes, you just have to reconcile yourself to contradiction, and for me, this is one of those times. I can simultaneously see this murder for the tragedy it is, chide the hostages from my safe home for putting themselves and others in danger through their choice of venues and methods, and still believe that paying ransom and freeing terrorists only begets more tragedy. And what I’m left with is the breathtaking intolerance of murdering someone for proposing to worship God in a different way than their death cult demands. No layer of hell is low enough them. I wish them a swift arrival.
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* Not wanting to feel even momentarily upstaged at the game of extorting money from South Korea, the industry leader has stomped away (again) from talks aimed at reducing its massive military buildup along the DMZ. These talks have been going on for years without a perceptible reduction in the military threat, and for good reason.