THE TWO KOREAS AND THE BOMB

Fafner the Wagnerian Dragon, although a despicable fellow, did not go to Siegfried’s house. Siegfried went to him, and taunted him. Siegfried’s provocation makes sense: he was asking for a fight, fought it, and won, gaining something very tangible as a result. Had he taunted him without the intent to fight, that would have been sheer recklessness.


The two Koreas have a sixty-year history of recklessness and provocation. North Korea, unquestionably, is a worse abuser, with the highlight of her recklessness being the unprovoked start of the Korean War, which was militarily bound to end up in a debacle, except that the United States stopped short of defeating both the reckless Kim Il-Sung and the reluctant Mao, for purely political reasons, which I am elucidating in my book Nunc Dimittis.

South Korea’s recklessness is of a lower caliber, although more frequent, and shows a similar disregard for human life. The 1983 KAL-007 tragic incident was a repeat provocation on South Korea’s part toward the mighty USSR, who in that particular case chose to respond with excessive force, to which South Korea had no response of her own, except for the largely ineffective international propaganda offensive.

Before the most recent incident over Yeonpyeong island, there was the bizarre incident on March 26th 2010, when a South Korean warship sank in the disputed zone between the two Koreas. There were some serious allegations at the time of a direct North Korean involvement, but they were eventually suppressed, and the potentially explosive conflict fizzled out, with the net result of many Korean lives lost, with no explanation or justification whatsoever. It is because of that pathetic outcome that we ought to address every subsequent incident of such nature with a well justified prejudice.
Coming to the subject of the disputed Yeonpyeong island now, the reader may not remember or even know that the selfsame island was the scene of previously fought battles between the two Koreas, as recently as in 1999 and 2002. Generally speaking, the disputed area we are talking about has always been so sensitive for both parties, that an effort was made during the Sunshine Policy interlude of South Korean President Nobel Prize Laureate Kim Dae Jung (1998-2003) and his successor Roh Moo-Hyun (2003-2008) to minimize the danger of another such confrontation and turn the disputed territory into a "zone of peace" (meaning that South Korea would abstain from all provocative action in the area). The Sunshine era ended in 2008 with the accession of President Lee Myung-Bak, who effectively abolished it.

As always in such cases, finding the guilty party in the latest incident is not a matter of facts, but of politics, and there are people on both sides and in the center, blaming either North Korea for shelling the island, or South Korea for provoking the North with a thoughtless military exercise conducted in the disputed area, or those like the South Korean-born current General Secretary of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon, who have “deplored the situation” without assigning the blame to either side.

Leaving all such partisan and non-partisan things aside, it is clear from what we know that South Korea was indeed conducting a military exercise in the disputed area, to which North Korea responded with excessive force. The question remains, though, as to why the South found it prudent to provoke the North into a very predictable overreaction? What did the South hope to achieve by conducting the exercise in that particular area?

Here’s where Wagner’s Siegfried comes back into the picture. He taunted Fafner with the intent to fight, but there is no way South Korea can fight North Korea, on account of the latter having the Bomb. My prediction is therefore that another such incident, another loss of human life will end up in nothing, like in the Cheonan incident earlier this year.

My conclusion is that South Korea might have been better served by continuing the Sunshine Policy started by the previous two Presidents, as there is clearly no reasonable alternative to it.