Just for the Paulbots: Why the U.S. Army Should Leave South Korea
Even an imbecile like Ron Paul accidentally happens on the truth now and then. And while the election of Lee Myung Bak has reduced the degree to which South Korea actively undermines U.S. policy toward North Korea, the continued existence of Kaesong and Kumgang up to this moment refutes any suggestion that South Korea has really joined it, either, or restored South Korea as a bona fide U.S. ally on a global or regional scale, or tapped into South Korea’s considerable tax revenue to modernize its own Army and relieve U.S. taxpayers of the cost of defending one of the world’s richest nations from one of the world’s poorest. Instead, South Korea seems to have decided that dependence is cheaper than — and therefore, superior to — independence, and that it can sleep under America’s blanket without contributing anything to America’s own security.
I’m not blind to the fact that for the moment, South Korea’s anti-Americanism seems dormant, until it isn’t, and that either the soldiers in Hongdae are on their best behavior or the Korean press is more occupied with its other xenophobic obsession: hippie Canadian English teachers who goes to bars and hit on Korean girls. Fine, but does anyone expect that trend to continue through the next election season?
Go here to read the rest.
Ron Paul is hardly an imbecile.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUGVPBO9_cA
Joshua, this is one of those times I will disagree w/ you, and strongly, I might add. I do agree w/ Ron Paul on US forces in the ROK; I applaud your reasoning for getting USFK out of the ROK; but, I don’t see why you think he’s an “imbecile.”
Ron Paul is an advocate of fiscal conservatism, and for a long time he’s been warning about the death of the USD. Big government’s economic policies under Bush and Obama are only contributing to the accuracy of his predictions. And the fact that Paul is a critic of Israel by no means makes him a racist. I don’t know your views on the State of Israel, but as a stalwart advocate of democracy, freedom, and human rights (given your virulent hatred of the government of North Korea, a hatred so strong you have advocated its violent overthrow and also borne out of the terrible human rights abuses conducted by the DPRK authorities), shouldn’t you also be critical of Israeli abuses?
Granted, Israel’s leadership doesn’t intentionally starve its own citizens and it doesn’t consign them to lives of misery in prison camps. But it’s not as if Israel is an embodiment of the American values that USFK is in Korea ostensibly to protect.
Speaking of adolenscence, WH is occupied by adolescents. Ron Paul and his crowd are National security adolescents, too. They are one-trick pony. All human interactions are business deals, in which conflict would cease as soon as you name a right price.\
American adolescents came of age during Vietnam anti-war hippie days, and they aged but not much changed. They now occupy all branches of government and export their ideology to four corners of earth in tandem with so-called European intellectuals.
SK adolescents imbued with these ideological imports from the West and add another twist with mindless Juche cults. Chomsky and Ayers may be old men, but they are still mental adolescents. So are some libertarians.
World wallowing in specters from 19th-century German ideological monsters as messianic message. It ran its course in about 200 years and now going big bang along helped by deranged financial elites. And U.S. military is caught right in the middle tied down by doctrine of politically correct war forced on them from aging boomer left and their well-indoctrinated toys such as the one in WH.
‘Juche ttorais’ are also doing their part. Then there are go-along-to-get-along crowd, well-educated wimps(many of them in U.S.) from affluent family. As a matter of fact, many are leaning to libertarian idea in the face of Kim Jong-il regime. Hot house plants grow in SK, too. A kind of escapism from dirty grimy reality. Years of education put to use for weaving comfortable escapism and erecting strong defense mechanism of sophisticated rationalization.
There are 20 million N. Koreans who will enslave these crowds with crushing guilt for next 50 years. Wonderful bourgeois lefties will be crushed by scary reality. They don’t know yet though. Prospects are not good for ‘hope and change’ crowds in D.C., either.
many of them in U.S. –> should be ‘many of them educated in U.S.’
This is the response I’m trying to leave at the site:
If Mr Stanton’s conclusion is that we withdraw our army units from South Korea, while keeping our air force and naval bases, I think a warning that could be a warning to the current ROK government that they need to spend some money to modernize their own military, consider keeping mandatory military service at two years instead of dropping it to eventually to eighteen months, expand ROK naval assistance in pirate-infested waters, and more substantially help out in other places. And if President Lee’s government balks at this, we’d be within reason to make good on the threat of withdrawing the army units.
But the air force and navy should remain, not only to make it clear to North Korea that any invasion would be met with the full force of two militaries, but also to keep China hemmed in throughout the region, something of value not just to South Korea, but to America and all its other allies in the region. The Pax Americana has been the most successful source of stability in the region for centuries, and its very effectiveness should not be seen as a reason to dismantle it.
So if the distinction between removing the US Army and removing the US military is made, my only real quibble with this article is the copious use of examples from four or five years ago or earlier, a lifetime of change in Korean time and back when a highly unpopular, blindly North Korea-sympathetic administration was in Seoul’s Blue House. So many things are so different from then, including an increasing commitment to aid America’s efforts on the high seas and help rebuild Afghanistan (a large medical center and job training facility opened this week near Bagram), that the article is somewhat outdated.
Of course, things can change, but for now the fifth-columnist chinboista forces that infect public sentiment are largely at bay, but even when they are raging or manipulating, the loud protestors on the vocal fringe do not necessarily represent the public at large. Walking off in a huff because the agenda-driven opposition says bad things about us is not a good way to run military or foreign policy.
Mr. Sonagi, which part of my comments constitute conspiracy theory? I can see that you do not like what I said. Are you really sure I am an aging hippie? You would be sorely disappointed.
Mr. Sonagi, which part of my comments constitutes conspiracy theory? I can see that you do not like what I said. However, are you sure I am an aging hippe? You would be sorely disappointed.
Frankly, until conservatives go back to their limited government roots, they will wallow in the minority. I don’t agree with Ron Paul on everything but on most of these issues, he is right. We should not be empire building or nation building. It will bankrupt the United States sooner or later — probably sooner.
Mr.?
The K-blogosphere is co-ed, Moonie over Namsan. Some of us ladies aren’t into iVillage or Glam.
@Sonagi:
OK. Anyhow, you do another name-calling. Is that all you can do?
[OFK: Did I just hear you drawing a comparison between (a) North Korea putting hundreds of thousands of men, women, and kids in gulags to starve and die because they or a member of their family committed some thoughtcrime, and (b) Israel bombing the the places — often schools, hospitals, villages, and homes — from which Hamas fires rockets at Israeli civilians?]
Israel’s leadership does not approach the Korean Workers’ Party when it comes to human rights abuses. However, let’s not make Israel out to be some kind of paragon of democracy. It engages in discrimination, and let me quote the Haaretz article I linked:
Israel discriminates against groups including Muslims, Jehova’s Witnesses, Reform Jews, Christians, women and Bedouin.
Ron Paul criticizes Israeli policies, and this by no means makes him an anti-Semite. It is not anti-Semitic and it is certainly not racist nor bigoted for one to be critical of the policies of the State of Israel.
Again, Joshua, I agree with you very strongly on your assessments and analyses of DPRK issues, and I find your blog to be a very valuable asset to anybody who wants to keep up with DPRK issues. But to call Ron Paul an imbecile is a bit excessive. Christine Ahn, Alejandro Cao de Benos – folks like these are imbeciles. But not Ron Paul.
Or do you find this policy by Israel to be something that should not be criticized by defenders of human rights, democracy, and freedom? Would you label Ron Paul an imbecile if he were to be critical of it?
Joshua,
Not to divert from my reply to you re: Ron Paul and Israel, but I found this piece in The Korea Times courtesy of The Marmot. You may wish to blog about it… does the ROK consider this treason? If so, could he be hanged or executed via firing squad? He’d deserve it.
This is not a blog about Israel, and this is not a thread about Israel. I blog about North Korea because there’s far too little attention to the abuses there in light of their scale. I often disagree with things Israel does, but I don’t blog about those issues there because there’s far too much attention to them there in light of their scale. There’s vastly more coverage of Israel/Gaza than far greater evils in North Korea because Israel made the “mistake” of being an open society that lets TV crews run freely; thus, Gaza is low-hanging for fruit every journo and activists who wants a Combat Infrantry Badge. But there’s something else to this, too.
Here’s a thought experiment for you: did Turkish “discrimination” against the Kurds and the PKK ever become a cri-de-coeur for what I’ll call certain elements and the far left and the far right? Why not? Seems to me that the level of violence and “discrimination” against the people officially called “Mountain Turks” was at least as great as anything we ever saw in Gaza. For that matter, does anyone give a fig about discrimination against Copts in Egypt, or the Bahai’i or the Kurds in Iran? Why not?
Look, I don’t have to agree with the Israelis on settlements, or their ultimately counterproductive 2006 attack on Lebanon, or the specific tactics of the Israelis in Gaza — justifiable as the use of force may be overall — to see that there’s an unhealthy obsession that drives this exclusive focus on Israel by the Far Left and the Far Right, two groups that become less distinguishable and more solicitous of terrorism each year.
This distorted view really can’t defend its selective obsession with Israel (and almost always, America) on any objective basis with regard to objective standards of behavior, scale, or severity, so it depends on its adherents either not knowing or not caring about things that happen in places like, say, Egypt, Turkey, or North Korea. To a good share of the Paulbots and this angry new breed of hippies, the entire issue of human rights is viewed through a soda straw that points only at
Iraq andGaza, and even then, has no eyes for the deliberate and premeditated atrocities of the terrorists.Finally, what would the Paulbots and the hippies have us do with Israel? Pull out of Gaza and the West Bank? Check. Two-state solution? Check. Give the Palestinians a shot at self-government? Check, done, and done. Sure, there are issues like settlements at the margins, but what these extremists really want is for the United States to unilaterally end aid to Israel and abrogate its alliance with Israel (something I do not advocate for South Korea, which, unlike Israel, still insists on the basing of U.S. troops). The unspoken sequitur of Paul, Buchanan, and their counterparts on the Far Left is that Israel should become military vulnerable until it’s overrun by some Syrian-Iranian-Hamas coalition. No one can really deny what that means: another Holocaust. It’s unconscionable that some people wish for that, but it’s a hard conclusion for me to escape.
Joshua, Turkey does not enjoy benefits from its relationship with the US the way Israel does. Israel is the top receiver of US aid every year; it gets its aid before other countries and in one lump sum; etc.
Israel, IMO, gets special “attention” from critics like Ron Paul because it claims to be a victim surrounded by evil powers which will easily tear it asunder should US aid cease. As a military man, you know full well the capacities of the IDF; you know that Israel has a nuclear arsenal (far larger than the DPRK’s, I might add); and, Israel feeds off of Holocaust pity when its government has been guilty of terrible actions against Palestinian civilians. Israel’s allies in the US propagate myths, such as that Israel is a weak, vulnerable state surrounded by hostile states. Yes, it does have enemies nearby, but Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties with Israel. Israel can win a war easily if it has to fight.
I for one as a “Paulbot” have no intention to see Israel be destroyed, but neither do I approve of the virtually unchallenged and unconditional aid it gets from the United States, and I certainly take issue with the “sacred” status it gets in the US media. Saying anything against Israel reflexively brings about accusations of anti-Semitism.
I may be an ethnic Korean, but I’m a US citizen and I do not like to see my tax dollars being used by Israel to oppress Palestinians any more than I like to see my tax dollars supporting USFK given that, as you have skillfully demonstrated, much of the ROK public detests and resents USFK while selfishly depending on it for security. So, if the case can be made that the ROK doesn’t have our back, neither does Israel. If the ROK can be criticized for its lax treatment of military intelligence, the same should target Israel, since it like the ROK is a “US ally” – I needn’t remind you of how aggressively Israel spies in the United States of how Israel refused to return military secrets that Jonathan Pollard took from America. And for the many deplorable behaviors the ROK has been guilty of given the US-ROK alliance, at least the ROK never deliberately attacked a US navy ship.
I agree – this is not a blog about Israel. So, I will cease writing about it, but I maintain that Ron Paul is no imbecile. I’d beg to differ were you referring to certain recent occupants of the Blue and/or White Houses.
But U.S. aid to Turkey has been very substantial — close to the top of the recipient list — particularly in the years when the PKK was the most active. Ditto Egypt. And frankly, I question what all of this is buying for the taxpayers. I just don’t see the far left or the far right dwelling on those examples in proportion to their financial or policy costs. I see an Israel fixation.
Furthermore, your statement that Israel is “the top receiver of U.S. aid every year” just isn’t accurate:
Then, beyond this, the calculus for U.S. aid to both Turkey and South Korea is understated, because those countries (unlike Israel) have American troops on their soil. I can give Turkey a break on this account, because we’re not in Turkey for Turkey, we’re in Turkey for us, and we pay for it. Fine, then. But we’re in Korea much more for Korea than for America, so let’s question what we get in return for the cost of keeping the USFK there, to the tune of $15 billion a year by some of the lower estimates. That amount absolutely dwarfs what we give to Israel each year. I don’t mind asking the same question about Israel, either, but in addition to the appropriate moral context, let’s put this into the proper financial context, too.
No, applying a double standard and an unhealthy selective obsession to Israel brings about suspicions of anti-Semitism, even from those of us who criticize some of the things Israel does, and who have been to the region and met both Israel and Hamas up close. But what on earth would inspire such dark thoughts?
As if there is any comparison whatsoever.
Regarding the recent diversion in the comments section toward the Middle East, I’d just like to say one thing: Despite so many fundamentalist Christians traipsing into Israel and Palestinian-held territories, the situation there has not changed one iota. 😉
Good post OFK at 5.25am – actually 100% agree. This bit is actually what Berkeley, European countries, and the rest of the pot smoking brigade fail to appreciate :
‘The unspoken sequitur of Paul, Buchanan, and their counterparts on the Far Left is that Israel should become military vulnerable until it’s overrun by some Syrian-Iranian-Hamas coalition. No one can really deny what that means: another Holocaust. It’s unconscionable that some people wish for that, but it’s a hard conclusion for me to escape. ‘
Egypt started receiving large amounts of aid after signing the peace accords. One purpose of this aid to help Egypt remain a relatively friendly border state to Israel.
Is that bad?
I tend to avoid online debates about Israel, except to make factual corrections. Aid to Egypt is indirect aid to Israel for better or worse.
Joshua, I will not speak of Israel again on this blurb after this post.
As you and I both hold strong views regarding both Ron Paul and Israel, we’ll just have to appeal to the proverbial “we agree to disagree.”
I will only suggest, and respectfully so, that you check out Stephen Walt’s and John Mearsheimer’s masterpiece on Israel and its lobby here in the United States.
In which case, aid to Israel is indirect aid to Iran (which we prevented Israel from attacking), Iraq (ditto), Lebanon (many times over, no doubt), and the Palestinian Authority, whatever that happens to be on any given week. I think you’re introducing an abstraction that makes the discussion meaningless. The question is, “What are we paying to Government X?”
Walt and Mearshimer have been talked to death everywhere else. You call it a masterpiece; others with more knowledge than you or me call it counterfactual, illogical conspiracy theory. That’s already further off topic than I’m willing to go. But given the relative amounts spent by U.S. taxpayers on each client, why isn’t there 7.5 times as much angst and hissing about our aid to South Korea, simply from a fiscal perspective? And if the issue is what our aid is paying for, then let’s talk about the billions in U.S. tax dollars South Korea forked over to Kim Jong Il. When Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan get their knickers twisted into a knot about that, I’ll believe in the purity of their motives.
Aid to Israel preceded any threat to Iran, Iraq, or Lebanon by decades. Aid to Egypt began as a direct consequence of the peace accords. Continued aid to Israel is contingent upon Israel’s cooperation with the United States, and that includes not launching military attacks on neighbors that might draw the US into an armed conflict. However, this is a condition, not a purpose. That is, the US has not been providing Israel with aid for decades to keep it from attacking its neighbors the way former enemies of Israel receive annual peace dividends not to attack or support attacks against Israel.
Not sure how that is “aid to Israel”. If they were to directly attack Israel, they would get their asses handed to them. Therefore, it is clearly direct aid to those nations and not indirectly to the benefit if Israel.
Well, if that really were the case, we could save ourselves billions of dollars a year in aid to the region by letting Israel quickly sort things out.
Please tell me you aren’t serious when you say such hideous things so casually.
On Ron Paul: You’re going to have to show me how Paul singles out Israel. He wants to cut aid to just about everyone, including our other Middle Eastern “friends.” As far as I can tell, he holds no particular malice for Israel:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/rosnerBlog.jhtml?itemNo=921350&contrassID=25&subContrassID=0&sbSubContrassID=1&listSrc=Y&art=1
As for some other paleocons, sure, there’s definitely an unsightly Israel/Jew obsession at play. As far as I know, I’ve never read Pat Buchanan call Washington DC a “Saudi-occupied zone,” “Pakistani-occupied zone” or “Japanese-occupied zone,” despite the tons of military, economic and political support we provide those countries.
This is true. But many Middle East states got lots of US aid, and not all of them were friendly to Israel (in particular, I’m thinking about Saudi Arabia). And Egypt got rewarded for another reason, too — it flipped on Soviets, a major Cold War geopolitical coup for the US.
Are you addressing Thomas’ real conditional statement or my unreal conditional statement, Joshua?
In any case, aid to Israel and its friends is preferable to the alternative.
correction: Thomas’ untrue but possible conditional statement or my impossible conditional statement.
Much of the argument about Paul’s anti-Semitism depends on whether you really believe that Ron Paul could have been ignorant of the Ron Paul Freedom Newsletter, published for at least 15 years under his name while he was serving in Congress, no less. James Kirchik quotes him here, in The New Republic:
Paul says he didn’t even know the newsletters existed, but they were largely written in the first-person narrative, and the circulation topped 100,000 at some point. I simply can’t believe that a professional politician would be so blithe and ignorant about his political image that he could really be ignorant about this. But maybe you can. Kirchik suggests that some of the newsletters were actually ghost-written by Paul’s then-aide and long-time associate Lew Rockwell. That’s really the same thing if you ask me, but Paul’s denial is the equivalent of you trying to run for Congress one day, and then, when someone accuses you of linking to pictures of Francine Prieto’s tits, disavowing your blog and claiming that Sheldon Bumgarner actually wrote it clandestinely and without your knowledge.
Paul’s more recent statements about Israel have been careful in their substance. I haven’t done the empirical research to say, one way or another, whether I agree with the blog post you linked on the issue of Paul singling out Israel. It is apparent that many of Paul’s supporters have an undue fixation with Israel. It may or may not be fair to blame Paul for the cult that grew in his circus tent, but some of Paul’s most fanatical follows (the Catholic Shinja being a good example) believe and want him to share that, and Paul certainly hasn’t done anything to distance himself from those views. There are so many rants like this posted on the internet, it’s nearly impossible to sort through these and pick just one good example:
So why does Ron Paul attract so many of these nuts? There’s a pattern here. For example, after watching these videos, I don’t think Paul is a Truther, no matter how some of his supporters want him to be, and no matter how careful he is to throw the Truthers enough crumbs to keep them under his porch. What this video tells me is that Paul, while an imbecile on some levels, yes, is much more clever than some of us give him credit for being. He explicitly rejects the theory that the U.S. government carried out 9/11, but when the Truthers ask him about the 9/11 Commission, he meets them halfway and concedes that it could be a cover-up … like the Kennedy Assassination, but to protect the government from accusations of incompetence (which the 9/11 Commission Report actually validated). Paul is careful not to adopt the Truthers’ views outright, on the one hand, but he’s just as careful not to disavow the Truthers. He sounds very much like a man who knows they’re a large segment of his support, who then goes on the Alex Jones show to recruit more of it.
Again, I haven’t found any recent statements about Paul that I would call anti-Semitic, but Paul gives his Israel-deranged supporters just enough to keep them under the porch and feed their belief that we’re all managed by the Illuminati of Zion:
And this, from the blog post you linked:
This is open to different interpretations, but what do you suppose a guy like the Catholic Shinja is going to understand in this context? Certainly nothing contrary to positions Paul has clearly stated. Paul is, after all, a politician.
Sonagi,
So, is the aid that Israel gets, based on your point of view, indirect aid to Egypt?
I really wish the important topic at hand hadn’t been derailed into a discussion about Israel. Maybe OFK needs an open thread every now and again. Just sayin’. It’s not my blog.
I wish Israel would stop making more settlements, and I hope South Korea reverses some of the Roh policies on length of military service and moves toward more aggressive military modernization, but the one thing of value I can really take away from this discussion is that — whether South Korea, Israel, or other long-time allies — something as major as withdrawal of some key aspect of support shouldn’t hinge on something like that when in the whole scheme of things both need and deserve US support.
That said, I think Lee and the conservatives are amenable to such suggestions, though I don’t know how easy it would be to get Israel to give up on the building of more settlements.
As for Ron Paul, my feelings about him are about the same — that stuff about the newsletter seemed rather damning when I read about it a few years ago. Whether he’s an anti-Semite or not, I think his overriding message of simplistic approaches to complex problems appeals to people who either don’t understand or don’t like the complexities of the real world, which for many is part of a concomitant view that some “wall of Jews” in positions of power is behind the drive for complexity, for their own power and reward.
It’s an easy sell.
Israel has stopped building settlements. The supposed “new settlements” announced when Biden was in town was not what it was made out to be. It was an announcement of the approval of building plans for a long planned apartment complex in a long-standing, ultra-Orthodox, Jewish neighborhood. The building permit process has been in the works for three years.
Got a link to that? That sounds a bit like hair-splitting.
Please see my response to Joshua just above your earlier display of bravado.
*yawn*
“I think his overriding message of simplistic approaches to complex problems appeals to people who either don’t understand or don’t like the complexities of the real world….”
Bingo, Kushibo. Paul holds his own quite well on domestic U.S. fiscal and governance issues, but on foreign policy, it’s frog-in-the-well utopianism and anti-war pitches that play well on an emotional level.