Why Korea Cares About Iraq

...After serving a successful single term as mayor of Seoul, he now is the front-runner in the political jockeying leading to South Korea’s December presidential election...

...Nonetheless, although the vast majority of Koreans, judging from those to whom I have spoken, think the war is terrible, some are quietly proud of their country’s role...

...troops from South Korea...

...Meanwhile, South Korea would like somehow to give an appearance of cooperating with the United States at a time when anti-American sentiment is straining the historic U.S.Korean alliance...

...Again, Hill was the point man...

...Some further talks, conducted by a contingent from Treasury, appear to have ironed out transfer technicalities...

...Even those who accept the Bush-Cheney justifications for persevering believe the coalition will not prevail for a long time—longer than the patience of the South Koreans will allow...

...On the contrary, it can point to its record in Kurdistan as proof of a desire to do good without taking sides in the sectarian strife that is sure to go on dividing the country...

...Hyundai Engineering and Construction, the “mother company” of the group prior to its division among the sons of the founder, also built a major medical center as well as the apartment blocks on Haifa Street, scene of some of the worst street fighting in Baghdad...

...This may come as a surprise, since the Koreans are ensconced in the Kurdish city of Irbil, where they tend to the medical needs of civilians, build schools and provide vocational training...

...The contingent is committed for the rest of this year, despite periodic demonstrations in central Seoul by placard-waving, sloganshouting radical activists who demand its withdrawal, just as they demand the withdrawal of U.S...

...Furthermore, the U.S...

...Donald Kirk, who began writing on Asian affairs for the NL in 1966, is the author most recently of Korean Crisis...

...The order effectively put an end to North Korea’s financial activities worldwide, because no one else would have anything to do with it either...

...But few Koreans see much difference between the likely responses of a Democratic or a Republican administration...

...Watching the TV news and reading the headlines, people around me ask how the U.S...

...faces the possibility that the fighting will overflow into Iran if it is clearly established that Tehran is smuggling arms to Shiites battling Sunnis in Iraq, while carrying on with a nuclear program that America is convinced is for more than peaceful purposes...

...Enough of your lies and cheatings...

...Moreover, Lee may have shrewder ideas about how to operate in Iraq than do most people making policy in Washington...

...Exactly what Kang did say, and how he said it, became a subject of constant dispute...

...Still, the government here has held fast despite a sickening act of terror perpetrated against a young Korean working for a company delivering food to U.S...

...troops...

...if the Americans are staying, the Koreans would probably stay a bit longer...

...Hill already knew Kim well from previous meetings in Beijing, plus three days of one-on-one discussions in Berlin before returning to Beijing for another round of six-party dialogue—involving China, Japan, Russia, the U.S., North Korea, and South Korea—that produced the celebrated February 13 agreement...

...Reminded of the tremendous American investment in defending the South, he reluctantly agreed to join the coalition—provided the Koreans operated in complete security, with no commitment to engage in military operations beyond the defense of their base in Irbil and their missions: Half of the troops would be devoted to defending the other half doing good works...

...Iraq is not a real and present danger...

...But in fact it weighs heavily on their consciousness as well...

...Koreans realize the Bush Administration is focusing on what has become known as “the surge” in Baghdad—possibly the last chance for U.S...

...So if the Americans are going, the Koreans would like to depart before them...

...When that person emerges, from whatever side, you can count on the South’s companies coming back and building as before...

...Kim Sunil, captured on the highway between Fallujah and Baghdad was beheaded in June 2004 by Abu Musab al Zarqawi and his henchmen, whose hands were already bloodied by their beheading the American entrepreneur Nicholas Berg the previous month...

...by South Korea and China, the February accord is viewed by them as reducing the awful possibility of a second Korean War...

...After the U. S. stopped shipping heavy oil in accordance with the 1994 arrangement, North Korea kicked out the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and proudly reactivated the Yongbyon operations while denying any enriched uranium activity...

...forces to prop up the Iraqi regime on more than a temporary basis...

...An Unwilling Coalition Partner Why Ko r e a C ares About Iraq By Donald Kirk SEOUL IT IS WIDELY presumed that because South Koreans have enough trouble wor rying about events in neighboring North Korea, they pay little attention to the war in distant Iraq...

...adopted in October 2002...

...Your soldiers are here not for the sake of the Iraqis but for the cursed America...

...The name of the Korean contingent, Zaytun—Arabic for “olive,” as in olive branch—clearly identifies its peaceful purposes...

...As head of Hyundai Engineering and Construction during the Persian Gulf War in 1990, he was not an enthusiastic supporter of the U.S...

...It was,” said Kong Sun Gyung of the People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, “only wishful thinking on the government’s part that the deployment will help solve pending issues between Seoul and Washington, including how to deal with North Korea’s nuclear weapons program...

...Koreans young and old seem more concerned about the economy, domestic politics and North Korea, in that order...

...From the time they arrived more than two years ago—after much debate and political posturing on the home front— they have been far from the combat areas or even roadside bombings...

...Indeed, Koreans see no reason to compromise their own self-interest by active involvement in a struggle doomed, like their own efforts at reconciliation and rapprochement with North Korea, to simmer on with no foreseeable ending...

...Forced On the U.S...

...No one can predict how the next American President would respond to an intransigent North mingling menacing moves with rhetorical riffs...

...can be both unpredictable and violent...

...If George W Bush’s greatest triumph was the invasion of Iraq, with the hubristic claim “Mission Accomplished” emblazoned on an aircraft carrier when he landed in full pilot’s regalia, his successor might also want to prove her or his machismo with a military campaign to wipe out North Korea’s nukes...

...One reason is that with 2,300 troops in Iraq, South Korea is the third-largest member of what the George W. Bush Administration calls “the coalition of the willing...

...Possibly influenced by the fact that Iraq under Saddam still owed his company $1 billion, he would have preferred that Washington and Baghdad somehow negotiate a solution to their differences after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait...

...The Korean War, they recall, broke out when a Democrat, Harry S. Truman, was President and did not end until after the election of a Republican, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who ran on the pledge, “I will go to Korea...

...Nobody I know believes the North will ultimately do so, even after shutting down the reactor at Yongbyon...

...Korean big business, led by the Hyundai Group, was responsible for enormous projects, including much of the network of expressways linking Iraq to Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and Iran, the bitter war with Iran notwithstanding...

...The second reason for the concern here about Iraq is more complicated...

...That was when his predecessor, James A. Kelly, claimed North Korea’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kang Seok Ju acknowledged the enriched uranium program in their meeting in Pyongyang...

...Repeatedly, Hill said he merely wanted North Korea to come clean about all its nuclear activities—a stance far less threatening than the one the U.S...

...But the fear here remains that Kim Jong Il will eventually revert to form and throw up all kinds of excuses for postponing the “dismantlement,” let alone coming clean about the enriched uranium program...

...Regardless of Lee’s feelings about participating in the war, he is sure to want Korea to maintain its stake in Iraq’s future...

...And following discussions with the North, he announced on March 18 that the $25 million was no longer a problem...

...got bogged down there and why it dragged Korea into the maelstrom...

...If the object was to get President Roh Moo Hyun to pull out, it undoubtedly had the opposite effect: He could hardly bow to such vicious intimidation...

...Neither Sunnis nor Shiites will be able to accuse its troops of fighting and killing...

...Polls show him considerably ahead in the race for nomination by the conservative Grand National Party, while the Uri Party of President Roh has fragmented and the Democratic Party of Roh’s predecessor, Kim Dae Jung, has largely disappeared...

...The bait is hundreds of thousands of tons of heavy fuel oil in measured exchange for the shutdown of the Yongbyon complex...

...The admission set off a chain reaction that blew apart the 1994 Geneva framework agreement under which North Korea had indeed stopped developing warheads with plutonium at their core in Yongbyon, 60 miles north of the capital, in return for the promise of twin lightwater nuclear energy reactors to help fulfill the country’s energy needs...

...In the process of trying to win over Pyongyang, however, the Treasury Department reviewed the whole situation...

...This desire is not the stuff of everyday conversation...

...Pyongyang, it is noted, has so far refused to sign any piece of paper mentioning its development of warheads with highly enriched uranium...

...In what appears to have been a serious concession to Pyongyang, the chief U. S. negotiator with North Korea, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Christopher R. Hill, sat down in New York early this March with his Korean counterpart, Kim Kye Gwan, to talk about putting a new spin on the uranium issue: Could it be that North Korea simply happened to have imported from Pakistan some of the components for making highly enriched uranium but had actually done very little about using them...

...This is a result of your own doings,” said the message broadcast on Al Jazeera...

...Hyundai did not particularly care who took over what as long as it got paid, and clearly it was going to have a lot of trouble persuading Saddam to cough up the cash if he had to spend all his resources in a losing war against the Americans...

...True, a Republican may no longer occupy the Oval Office by the time tensions reach the stage where a second Korean conflict looms darkly on the horizon...

...But that is not expected to happen in the near future...

...banks halted their dealings with Banco Delta Asia, bringing about its collapse, and authorities in Macao, a semiautonomous Chinese province, froze all North Korean accounts...

...But the first wave of Korean soldiers had to train for a year at a base in South Korea made to look like an Arab village before the government finally rammed a bill through the National Assembly authorizing their deployment...

...Consequently, U.S...

...Initially, the United States wanted South Korea to assume a combat role on the outskirts of Baghdad or Basra, but Roh would have none of it...

...The War Aside, many here remember that the South has its own stake in Iraq...

...The problem as things stand is not having anyone to negotiate with...

...The objective is to be there when the time comes for handing out the lucrative restoration contracts...

...Certainly returning Korean soldiers are proud to have an Iraq service ribbon, which places them on a level quite different from that of the troops consigned to the often rough discipline of bases at home...

...At its peak Zaytun had over 3,000 troops in Iraq, then the number was scaled down in deference to radical protests and the growing sense, among conservatives too, that the war was a waste...

...In that event, the reasoning goes, the United States might turn Korea into the next front of the global war on terrorism—especially if the Administration has yielded to rising political pressures and withdrawn most American troops from Iraq...

...Almost everybody knows that, as a Korean Army officer politely put it, “The longstanding alliance between Seoul and Washington is the most important factor in [our] deployment...

...People can’t help wondering whether the war in Iraq will somehow lead to a similar conflict on this end of the “axis of evil” that President Bush condemned in his now infamous January 2002 State of the Union address...

...A separate conflict standing in the way of North Korea’s beginning to implement the latest agreement centered on some $25 million tied up in an obscure Macao bank, Banco Delta Asia...

...Now that North Korea had learned its lesson, he suggested the Treasury Department was ready “to resolve the matter...

...Similarly, a negotiated solution in Iraq that enabled Korean companies to form comfortable relationships once more with the government, any government, would be best from Seoul’s viewpoint...

...In fact, it was largely because of such preoccupations that Washington basically capitulated to Pyongyang this past February 13 and agreed to an arrangement that is supposed to result in North Korea giving up its nuclear weapons...

...capital...

...Late in 2005 the Treasury Department accused the bank of serving as a conduit for counterfeiting $100 bills printed in Pyongyang, money laundering, and drug and weapons trafficking...

...The answer to the first question may be too complex and mysterious to fathom in Seoul—or, it increasingly appears, even the U.S...

...From the Koreans’ perspective, the U.S...

...Right now, though, most Koreans to whom I have spoken about the war in Iraq just want it to go away—and Korean troops to come home...

...If American forces invaded Iraq to drive out an entrenched dictator, might they not stage a strike against the North’s nuclear facilities and attack the bases above the demilitarized zone that has divided it from the South since the Korean War...

...Lee may have reason to concern himself again with Iraq...

...No recording or transcript was made, as one might have expected at so critical an encounter...

...Hyundai people worked zealously to establish good relations with Saddam Hussein—especially Lee Myung Bak, the hotshot young chairman of Hyundai Engineering and Construction during the 1980s and early 1990s...

...intervention by President George H. W. Bush...

...Korea, remember, imports all of its oil and has nothing to gain from alienating the world’s second-largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia...

...The second question is really a complaint...