A Quick Note on Korea

By Gabriel Sean Wallace

This morning CNN had an article about members of the South Korean military protesting outside of the Defence Ministry building in Seoul as if it was a big deal. Allegedly, they were upset that their government wasn’t responding heavier against the artillery shelling by the North Korean armed forces three days ago, even after the resignation of Kim Tae-young, the South Korean Defence Minister at the time. All debates about whose fault it was aside, take note that there are no protests by any non-military civilians. This is not their war. There was no missile fired at the South Korean people from any mysterious uranium-enriching nuclear plant.

Tomorrow, going against advice from the Chinese government, the U.S. and South Korean military will be participating in war games that are scheduled to continue for four days in the Korean peninsula in order to practice drills to be used in the case of another attack. The shots by North Korea on Wednesday were preceded by the mobilisation of 70,000 South Korean soldiers and artillery fire into disputed waters. If that was enough to provoke an attack, the deployment of American military personnel arriving via the USS George Washington is begging for more.

Three days before the incident that has reportedly left four people dead, it came to light that Siegfried S. Hecker, a scientist at Stanford University, was given the privilege of being the only person to be shown a secret nuclear plant in North Korea containing “hundreds and hundreds” of centrifuges. He claims that he was not allowed to take any pictures of the plant, and he did not report this revelation until back in the United States, when he apparently had a private talk with officials from the White House about it. It is known that such a plant definitely did not exist in April 2009, when the last international inspectors were thrown out of the country. It is also known that low-enriched uranium (which the country says that they are producing) is incapable of creating a nuclear bomb – this requires high-enriched uranium.

This could be just the stuff the U.S. need for an excuse to go to war with another country – whilst Congress is out on Thanksgiving weekend. Yes, Kim Jong-il is a dictator and bad for the North Korean people – but the United States has done far more damage to the nation by cutting off trade with them and intimidating them with 30,000 troops in military bases in South Korea. And although North Korea may not be reckless enough to react rashly to the military operations in the next few days, the U.S. are already trying their best to entice North Korea’s only ally – China – to cut off their trade with them, and will doubtless try their best to provoke them to cross that threshold.

So which protests should really make the headlines?