Kerry of Korea

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

So Senator Kerry has finally found an issue on which to attempt to outflank President Bush on the hawkish side: American troops in Korea.


Mr. Kerry made his comment yesterday in a speech in Cincinnati to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “Why are we withdrawing unilaterally 12,000 troops from the Korean peninsula, at the very time we are negotiating with North Korea, a country that really has nuclear weapons?” Mr. Kerry said. “Kerry: Bush’s Troop Pullback Undermines Our Security,” was the headline the Kerry campaign put on its press release about the speech.


It’s breathtaking. Here is a politician who became infamous for calling, amid a desperate struggle for freedom in Indochina, for the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. A politician who is running for president by promising, with respect to Iraq, to “get our troops home where they belong.” Here’s a politician who has often voted against funding for missile defense programs that would protect America and South Korea from nuclear missile strikes by the likes of North Korea. Now he wants to second guess the commander-in-chief on a strategic redeployment designed to strengthen our hand in a new global war against terrorism from Islamic extremists.


As the experience with Iraq shows, estimating enemy nuclear capabilities is an inexact art. But if North Korea “really has nuclear weapons,” as Mr. Kerry claims – and there is scant reason to think it does not – then it obtained them notwithstanding the presence of American troops in South Korea. Were the North Koreans actually to use the nuclear weapons, the American troops wouldn’t be much use as anything other than glo-sticks. They’d be dead.


So goes part of the logic to reducing the American troop strength in Korea and moving the troops, as President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld have suggested, to aircraft carriers and bases at the American mainland where they can be rapidly deployed to trouble spots. There’s even a logic to, as America is doing, moving the American troops within South Korea away from the 38th parallel. The virtues go beyond preservation of American lives. The hope is that reducing the American buffer would focus South Korea on the threat from the North and perhaps shake Seoul from its current appeasement-oriented policy. That policy is so invertebrate that South Korea is denying travel visas to North Korean defectors hoping to visit America to testify before Congress about the horrors of the communist regime in Pyongyang.


Mr. Rumsfeld explained some of this on Wednesday on PBS’s “NewsHour” program, when the secretary said that what America was doing is to “transfer over time carefully in a measured way responsibilities to the South Korean military. They have an enormous military. They have a vibrant economy.” He also cautioned against measuring America’s deterrent capability merely in terms of troop strength. “The numbers of troops is interesting, but the capability of the troops or the capability of the precision aircraft, precision bombs and the aircraft, the capability of the naval power, all of that is what creates the deterrent and the defense capability. And people who understand these things see that,” Mr. Rumsfeld said.


Mr. Bush’s policy in respecct of Kim Jong Il and the Pyongyang camarilla hasn’t been anything about which to write home. But Mr. Kerry’s attempt at a harder line doesn’t extend actually to doing anything to liberate the people stuck under Kim Jong Il’s boot. “We must be prepared to talk directly with North Korea,” the Kerry platform in Boston said, in a softer line than the Bush administration has hewn. It’d be one thing if the American troops in Korea were helping to free the North, or even helping refugees escape from the North. But to have the Americans sitting there as a human tripwire to assure the safety of a South Korea that is now, in contrast to the early years after the armistice, prosperous yet unwilling to take full responsibility for its own defense – there’s a use of the American military that only a John Kerry would favor.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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