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SPEAKING
FREELY
Why Kim Jong-il hates George W
Bush
By Sung-Yoon Lee
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click here if you are
interested in contributing.
How US
President George W Bush feels about Kim Jong-il we
already know, from statements like "I loathe Kim
Jong-il" and "axis of evil" and name-calling like
"pygmy". What much of the world might not so
readily know is that the loathsome, evil,
less-than-statuesque North Korean leader hates the
swaggering Texan with equal, or even greater,
passion.
Over the past four years, North
Korea's name-calling of Bush has been, well,
colorful, to say the least. Belittled variously as
"human trash", "political idiot" and "the world's
worst violator of human rights", and besmirched as
"lacking even an iota of elementary reason,
morality and ability to judge as a human being",
President Bush has attained a special place in the
pantheon of North Korea's villains: South Korean
monitors of the North's propaganda machinery tell
us that of all the US presidents the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has lived with
since its inception in 1948, George W Bush has
been bombarded by the most North Korean invective
and labeled with by far the greatest number of
insulting epithets.
Why the obsession?
What has George W Bush done to North Korea to set
himself apart from all his predecessors? Could it
be that Kim's fear and hatred of Bush is the
culprit in the ongoing nuclear saga, as so many of
us believe?
Has President Bush been so
much more "hostile" toward Kim - as North Korea
insists - than, say, his immediate predecessor,
Bill Clinton? Bush hasn't been nice, but at the
same time, Bush has never blurted out that he
would, in case of North Korean nuclear
provocation, "erase North Korea from the map of
the world", as president Clinton did in 1993.
Neither has Bush, as far as we know, ever
seriously toyed with the idea of bombing Kim's
magical kingdom, as did Clinton, or with nukes, as
did president Dwight D Eisenhower, or really
bombed it, as did Eisenhower and president Harry
Truman.
What about during the Lyndon
Johnson and Richard Nixon years while the United
States was bombing Vietnam? Was the bilateral
relationship back then all touchy-feely? Didn't
North Korea in January 1968 seize a US naval
vessel and keep its crew of more than 80 men in
captivity for almost a year? Didn't it in April
1969 shoot down a US spy plane, killing all 31
servicemen on board? And, come to think of it,
didn't North Korean soldiers in August 1976 beat
to death with axes two US soldiers patrolling the
North-South border?
It is strange, this
unusual hatred of Bush.
Perhaps, then, the
roots of Kim's feelings for Bush are to be found
in more esoteric concerns. Could it be that Kim
Jong-il hates the US president for the same
reasons that so many Americans disapprove of him -
for Bush's perceived self-righteous Manichean
(black and white) view of the world? Maybe, but
isn't Kim himself in his own kingdom the ultimate
arbiter of life and death, of good and evil; isn't
he the high priest of revolutionary ideology? Hmm.
Perhaps, then, Kim hates Bush so intensely
for the US president's less-than-Hamlet-like
psychology, for his inability to wrestle with
life's more complex moral ambiguity. Well, is it
not true that in the Kim country, those who
deviate from the state orthodoxy - those foolhardy
souls who speculate on democracy or the
utilitarian value of a state-planned economy -
don't they almost certainly end up in a penal
colony, quite often with their entire family, for
a life of hunger and hard penal labor in
perpetuity?
Could it be, then, that the
North Korean loathes the American for his stance
on the Kyoto Protocol and the International Court
of Justice, or would it be more for his views on
stem-cell research and gay rights and a woman's
right to choose, or for domestic policy on taxes
and social security? Or would it be for his
cowboy-like public image, his past troubled youth,
or his less-than-perfect grasp of the fine nuances
of public oratory?
There must be a good
reason that North Korea, caught in a nuclear
quagmire, keeps beating around the bush while with
unfailing regularity laying all the blame on Bush.
The day after North Korea declared to the
world that it was bidding adieu to the six-party
talks and that it had been forced to manufacture
"nukes for self-defense to cope with the Bush
administration's evermore undisguised policy",
major daily newspapers in my vicinity, true to
their political proclivity, squarely laid the
blame on Bush. One editorial pointed out that the
chief impediment to making a reasonable offer to
North Korea would be Bush's "ideological
rigidity".
Who knows? A "rigid ideologue"
the US president very well may be; but could that
really be why we haven't yet reached a happy
ending with that man he called "pygmy"? Could it
really be that what drives North Korea to build
secret nuclear weaponry is the "hostility" coming
out of Bush and his hard-nosed coterie? Could it
really be, as they persistently plead, that the
poor paranoid proud people of the DPRK, pressured
by a most patronizing and pugnacious USA, can only
parade their nuclear arms, and that if they were
ever courted with greater civility, they would
most happily embrace diplomacy?
Could it
really be Bush's name-calling and bombing of
Saddam Hussein's Iraq that suddenly drove Kim
Jong-il to bet his future on the nuclear industry?
Didn't Kim's daddy pursue nukes when Bush was not
even of the legal drinking age back in the
mid-1960s? Could it really be that Bush, enraged
by the weapons-of-mass-destruction disappearance
act by the Iraqi leader, now will go after the
Asian dictator who unabashedly flaunts his nuclear
capacity? Wouldn't that be the height of
hypocrisy? Wasn't it wrong of Bush to go chasing
after the oil-rich Iraqi, while the loathsome evil
bully was left alone to raise his nuclear stock in
secrecy? Well, then, just why did he?
Could it be that the answer is as
stunningly simple as that which my college
roommate once gave me? Barging into his room one
afternoon, inspired by Samuel Johnson's cheerful
audacity, "I have, all my life long, been lying in
till noon; yet I tell all young men, and tell them
with great sincerity, that nobody who does not
rise early will ever do any good," I blurted out,
my own bed still warm and unmade. "Hey, what's
wrong with you?" I continued. "Why are you still
sleeping past noon?" His half-shut eyes exuding a
mix of bewilderment and indignation, Victor
mumbled, "Because - I can?"
Could it be
that Bush invaded Iraq because he could - because
the risks were relatively low, while to his
chagrin he just could not and cannot risk invading
Kim's Korea, with its 1.2-million-strong military?
Could it be that this inadmissible fact Kim
Jong-il knows and exploits to the best of his
ability, declaiming defiantly that he must not let
his nukes go because of Bush's bellicosity? Could
it be that Americans are acting a bit overly
solipsistically, blaming Bush with equal passion
for his hostility and passivity, while making the
same mistakes again in assessing Asian identity,
and presuming that the rest of the world revolves
around one US president's ideology?
After
all, doesn't the United States have a long record
in East Asia of overestimating its own role and
misreading the power of Asian nationalism, from
the Chinese Civil War to the Korean War to the
Vietnam War in recent history? Isn't it true that
the US in the Chinese Civil War between the
Nationalists and Communists bet its future on the
losing party, while thinking that it could play
the role of peacemaker successfully? Didn't the US
in the Korean War and the Vietnam War hypnotize
itself and see an evil communist monolith, the
Soviets and the Red Chinese controlling the
puppets Kim Il-sung and Ho Chi Minh ever so
insidiously? Is it not true that through the murky
lens of paranoia and racism the US saw a
"pan-Asian Mongoloid-Slavism" that just wasn't to
be?
Could the view that holds sway today
that Kim Jong-il is forced to hold on to his nukes
because of an inflexible George W Bush be also a
bit ethnocentric? By the standards of those days
in Asia when the US was largely bungling the
situation on the ground, before the days when one
was to convert to a "politically correct"
orthodoxy, wouldn't the cynic have called such
widely held American views today "racist"
implicitly?
Let's, please, get serious
now. Stop overestimating Bush and let's give the
Koreans some credit too.
Could it be that
Kim Jong-il loathes George W Bush because of
something Bush did closer to home than lambasting
him from afar? Could it be that Bush - perhaps
inadvertently - spoiled Kim's joyride in the park
by pouring cold water on South Korean president
Kim Dae-jung's so-called "Sunshine Policy" of
engagement with the North?
Could it be
that, just as Kim had survived the trying times of
massive floods and famine and starvation in the
mid- to late 1990s, just as he was poised to bask
in Southern hospitality while enriching uranium
ever so discreetly, Bush popped up on the scene
and placed the entire Korean Peninsula under
tighter scrutiny? Isn't it true that since 1998
hundreds of millions of dollars have flown into
Kim's personal depository, from chaperoned tours
of Mount Geumgang to secret payment of US$500
million from one Kim to the other Kim in June of
2000 as an admission fee for the North-South
summit?
Could it be that as vicissitudes
of political fortune would have it, just when
long-term prospects were looking all hunky-dory,
just as the world was showering Kim with food aid
while turning a blind eye to the nuclear query,
George W Bush fluttered in with an attitude a bit
too dreary and demanded of the reclusive leader
far greater accountability?
Well, what
about the question of transparency? If not for
someone as ideologically rigid as Bush, could the
US or anyone else really take away from Kim that
which he most needs for survival by promise of
short-term rewards and security?
Couldn't
it just be that the Dear Leader has his own dear
reasons for betting on his nukes the future of his
dynasty. independent of Bush's hostility?
Could it possibly be that Kim Jong-il
actually just might have some pressing concerns
and plans ahead irrespective of Bush's Land of the
Free? Couldn't it be that Kim is planning to hand
down his mythical kingdom to a son among his
three, moved by filial piety and by a strong
desire to be himself, too, one day a considerate
daddy? Or would it be more in the hope of
safeguarding his own lasting legacy? Could it be
that Kim might see even long after Bush is gone
still a huge challenge in perpetuating his
peculiar dynasty? Could it be that without his
nukes his economically moribund kingdom would,
say, vis-a-vis the South, be doomed to a permanent
status of inferiority?
Could it be that
Kim might see the possibility, years down the
road, of his own people choosing to join the far
richer folks in the South in hopes of peace and
prosperity? Isn't the artificial divide on the
Korean Peninsula in the end a contest for
pan-Korean legitimacy? How on earth will the
bankrupt North compete with the immeasurably
richer South, say 50 years hence, even in the
buying and making of conventional military
gadgetry, if not for the one cure that can
overturn all other indices of gloomy inferiority?
Offer up his nukes and entrust the future of his
sons and the legacy of his daddy and of himself to
the benevolent care of the international
community? Why, I should think that would be very
poor national policy.
Isn't all this even
a remote possibility?
You never know, it
just very well may be.
Sung-Yoon Lee
is a professor of international politics and
Korean history at the Fletcher School of Law and
Diplomacy, Tufts University, Boston.
(Copyright 2005 Sung-Yoon Lee.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click here if you are
interested in contributing. |
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