Who can name this famous tree in Korea?:

Here are this year’s current Korea Finder Leader’s Board:

Mark-3

Peekstr – 1

Note that who ever totals the most points at the end of the year, I will purchase for them a Korea related book or DVD of their choice using the proceeds I have accumulated by people purchasing books from Amazon.com on my website.

This is why I tend to like Lee Myung-bak as the next President of Korea:

Lee Myung-bak, the early favorite for the December presidential election, urged North Korea yesterday to completely dismantle its nuclear weapons program, warning that it will otherwise gain nothing from the international community.  Mr. Lee made the remarks amid press reports that the North was prepared to freeze its only operational nuclear reactor in exchange for energy aid and other benefits during six-party disarmament talks set to open in Beijing on Thursday.  “I hope [North Korean leader] Kim Jong-il realizes that he doesn’t have anything to gain unless he dismantles his nuclear program and liberalizes the North’s economy,” Mr. Lee said in a news conference in with foreign correspondents in Seoul. “And even if North Korea agrees to freeze its nuclear facilities during the talks, they should ultimately comply with the precondition that they should be completely dismantled,” he said. “A freeze is not enough.” Mr. Lee, the leading presidential aspirant from the conservative opposition Grand National Party, indicated he would take a harder line on the communist North if he is elected as the next president.

It is good to see him take a hard line on the nuclear weapons program.  No aid should be given to the North Koreans until they verifiably dismantle their nuclear program. 

Lee was not done though:

“In essence, this government’s Sunshine Policy has failed,” Mr. Lee said, referring to President Roh Moo-hyun’s engagement policy with North Korea. “Even when our national security was under threat, they continued with unilateral engagement,” he added. “Incredibly, when North Korea tested ballistic missiles and exploded a nuclear device, the world was in shock. But this government responded as if nothing had changed; it was business as usual.”

The North Koreans could test a nuke off a Dokdo and the Roh government would still conduct business as usual with North Korea.  It is good to see that at least one contender is committed to shifting that paradigm.

Just for everyone’s information the albums What I Like About Korea, What I Do Not Like About Korea, and Only in Korea have been updated and moved to Flickr.  Thanks to everyone who sent pictures and suggestions to update the albums with.

UPDATE: Make sure you check out the Marmot, Nomad, and OFK for more views on the Cheney snub.

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The Chosun is a bit upset that Vice President Dick Cheney is not visiting Korea during a February trip to Asia and Australia:

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney will visit Japan, Australia and Guam between Feb. 20 and 27. The White House says Cheney will meet Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Australian Prime Minister John Howard to discuss security concerns in Asia and the war on terror, while delivering President George W. Bush’s message of thanks for those countries’ efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At the request of the United States, Korea dispatched 3,400 troops to Iraq. The contingent is called the Zaytun Division. Korea also sent 200 soldiers to Afghanistan and 120 to Kuwait. Korea has sent the third-largest contingent of troops those countries following the U.S. and the U.K.

If Korea did not cherish its alliance with the U.S., there would be no reason for young Koreans to go to Iraq and Afghanistan. The only reason the Korean government dispatched troops there is because of our commitment to the alliance.

If the Korean government cherished the US-ROK alliance so much then why did the Korean government unilaterally declare that the Camp Humphreys relocation is going to be delayed by 5 years from the agreed upon date and then not notify the USFK commander?  General Bell first found out about the decision by reading the newspaper.  If the Korean government cared about the US-ROK alliance why did they cut the agreed upon money for the upkeep of the US-ROK alliance only weeks after making a cost sharing agreement? 

If the Korean government cared so much about the US-ROK alliance why are they sending over a billion dollars this year to North Korea while denying USFK the agreed upon money for the upkeep of the US-ROK alliance? 

If the Korean government cared so much about the US-ROK Alliance, why did US pilots have to fly to Thailand to conduct pilot training because the Korean government closed USFK’s only bombing range in Korea due to anti-US protesters?  If the Korean government cared so much about the US-ROK alliance why did the commanding general of the US Air Force in Korea have to threaten to pull the entire US Air Force from Korea just to get co-use of a Korean Air Force bombing range?

If the Korean government cared so much about the US-ROK alliance, can someone explain to me why these leading Korean politicians made all these anti-American statements?  I think once the Korean government can explain all the questions I just posed than maybe Dick Cheney will come visit.

But wait there is more:

That’s why Cheney’s excuse — that he is bypassing Korea since he came here two years ago — is difficult to understand. Australia dispatched 1,400 soldiers and Japan brought back all of its 550 troops last year.

Some Koreans like to make a big deal about the Zaytun unit being a visible sign of Korea’s commitment to the US-ROK alliance.  I appreciate the Zaytun soldiers going to Iraq, but bottom line is that they accomplished little in Iraq.  If the Korean government allowed the ROK Army to take over the Kirkuk sector of Iraq like the Pentagon originally wanted, I have no doubt in my mind that President Bush and Cheney would be visiting Korea just as much as Japan.  However, the Korean government chose the path of being irrelevant by demanding that the Zaytun unit serve in Kurdistan where no harm would come to anyone and they could introduce the Kurds to the wonders of modern indoor plumbing. 

Heck if you believe the YTN reports from Korea, it is more dangerous for Koreans to walk the streets of Seoul than for the Zaytun soldiers to walk the streets of Irbil.  That is why I have been advocating from when they first deployed that if the soldiers were not going to be used to conduct meaningful reconstruction and security in Iraq than send them back home.  They could be used to patrol the streets of Hongdae instead. 

As far as the Chosun trying to compare the Korean contributions to Iraq compared to the Japanese and Australians I found quite humorous.  Japan a country with a pacifist constitution and 550 soldiers did just as much physically in Iraq as over 3,000 ROK Army soldiers did.  Plus politically Japan has been a huge ally of the United States.  The commander of United States Forces Japan doesn’t first find out about the breaking of transformation and funding agreements from the newspapers and no Generals have to make ultimatums to pull the Air Force from Japan to get agreements done. 

Comparing Japanese contributions to Australia is even more absurd.  Australia a country with only a population of 20 million people compared to Korea’s 50 million people sent 1,400 combat troops to Iraq who participated in the initial war and to this day continue to guard facilities in the Green Zone and provide convoy escort for VIPs and diplomats through the mean streets of Baghdad and southern Iraq, while the Zaytun unit had to be pressured to allow 40 soldiers out of over 3,200 to guard a UN building in Irbil, one of the safest cities in Iraq.  I guess they were all to busy making toilet seats. 

Keep in mind as well that Australia only has a standing Army of 25,000 soldiers and along with their Iraq operations, they have seen heavy combat in Afghanistan, while continuing to spearhead peacekeeping operations in the Solomon Islands and East Timor along with participating in UN observer missions in places such as the Egyptian Sinai and Lebanon.  The ROK Army with over 600,000 soldiers cannot match the world wide relevancy of the Australian Defence Force.  This is not a question of capability because the ROK Army is highly capable, it is a matter of governmental policies of irrelevancy. 

So basically my message for anyone who feels Korea is being snubbed by the US government is this, when you implement policies that make you irrelevant, than don’t be surprised when people treat you as being irrelevant.

Here is great Korea 101 video put together by students of a Korean English language academy.  If you have never been to Korea before this video is worth checking out.  Great job by the students and teachers involved.

My recent postings here and here concerning the anti-war movement in America has drawn some heated comments.  It has also drawn the attention of Korea blogger the Metropolitician who has a couple of posts here and here about this topic that I encourage everyone to read. 

Let me make this very clear in my postings I am drawing my criticism towards the face of the anti-war movement which is people like William Arkin, Cindy Sheehan, and their ilk who were out in front of the US capitol a couple of weeks ago.  Like it or not the Sheehans and Code Pinks are the face of the anti-war movement, just as much as President Bush is the face of the movement to stay the course in Iraq.  The people that are the face of the anti-war movement hated the military long before President Bush even came around and I’m calling them on it.  They didn’t just rise up because of the Iraq War, they have always been there as I mentioned in my post and are now just getting the media attention they have been craving for all these years.

If the US never invaded Iraq they would be protesting the war in Afghanistan just as hard as they are protesting Iraq now even though they claim otherwise.  If the US was not in Iraq now, the jihadis would be in Afghanistan trying to kill infidels and incite ethnic violence there instead of in Iraq.  The US would be taking much more casualties in Afghanistan now if the US military wasn’t in Iraq.  If the US was losing 2-3 soldiers a day in Afghanistan and Al Qaida was car bombing mosques and beheading infidels, would people in the anti-war movement still be saying they support the war in Afghanistan?  I think not. 

All the people that now benefit from hindsight as Richardson pointed it out quite clearly, love to practice historical revisionism.  Just look at all the Senators that voted to go to war doing everything they can now to recreate history in order to explain their vote.  They are cowards and that is why I respect politicians like John McCain who make no excuses for their votes.  He is holding himself accountable for what he believes instead of holding his finger in the air to see which way the political wind is blowing.

With that said, the war in Iraq was clearly a war of choice.  This I have no doubts about.  Since this is a Korea blog let me use a Korean War reference for an analogy. Did Truman need to send soldiers to fight in Korea in 1950? No, it was a war of choice that Truman decided to fight, to the communists total surprise, because he wanted to take a stand against communism. After initial setbacks it appeared after the Inchon Landing that Truman was right to send troops to Korea, but once the Chinese got involved it was clear that Truman had overreached and thus was stuck in stalemate against the Chinese Army in order to not provoke the Russians to become involved in the war.  The dismal approval rating of Truman due to the Korean War ultimately led to him not running for reelection in 1952 and Eisenhower taking over and roughly 7 months later he signed a cease fire ending hostilities. 

Now let’s look at Iraq.  Bush fought a war of choice in Iraq because he wanted to send a message to all the tyrants in the Middle East that things weren’t going to be business as usual in the Middle East after 9/11.  He wanted to force change.  Iraq was the easy target to enforce change in the Middle East, because there was already troops in Kuwait including most importantly a logistics system, plus everyone hates Saddam right?  Just because people hated Saddam didn’t mean people would support going to war to remove him.  WMD was used as the primary reason because the administration knew they would get little support from the UN to remove Saddam or spread freedom and democracy to Iraq. The UN is more about protecting tyrants not bringing them down.

The Bush administration felt WMDs were a slam dunk case to win UN approval and thus didn’t bring up anything about freedom and democracy because doing so would cause even more UN disapproval.  Remember before the war everyone wanted Bush to play the UN game.  To this day I have not seen anything to change my mind that Bush knew there was no WMD in Iraq.  I believe Bush legitimately believed there was WMD in Iraq, but he didn’t decide to wage the war simply for WMD.  The more important reason was sending a message to the despots in the Middle East that America was committed to change in the Middle East, just like Truman was committed to standing up to the communists in Korea. 

I think Bush like many people around the world was surprised that no stockpiles were found, however what is little reported is the fact that Saddam kept the capability to produce chemical weapons through stock piling dual use material.  For example during the war my unit secured an Iraqi airbase and on it we found stockpiles of industrial chemicals like chlorine and pesticides.  Why would a military airfield need stockpiles of these industrial chemicals?  They must of had a heck of an insect problem and the chlorine wasn’t for the pool because there was one pool and it had no water in it.  Guess who was selling Saddam all these dual use items in violation of UN sanctions?  Many of our so called allies, especially the French according to this CIA report on the post-war findings of Iraq WMD programs. Actually I didn’t need a CIA report to know which countries were violating UN sanctions because all of us there during the war in 2003 saw for ourselves who was violating UN sanctions. 

Now I’m all for debate about the merits of going to war, but what I don’t like is people using this debate as reason for pulling out of Iraq now.  In my opinion the two are not related.  If the US pulls out now Iraq will crumble and our enemies will be emboldened and will be heading to Afghanistan next, not to mention the massive ethnic cleansing and possibility of regional war breaking out between Iran and the Sunni nations trying to protect Sunnis and Shias in Iraq.  It would be a total disaster that the face of the anti-war crowd and opposition politicians are not providing any answers to solve.  Their arguments continue to be the war is illegal, Bush lied, we need to retreat from Iraq.   This doesn’t solve the problem in Iraq the United States is facing today. 

Let’s go back to the Korean War.  In 1954 should the US have pulled out of Korea because the Korean War was a war of choice?  Look at the post-Korean War years following the 1953 cease fire.  A communist insurgency was still active in the southern mountains of South Korea, the ROK Army was not ready to assume security of their own nation, the political situation was extremely unstable which ultimately led to military coup a few years later, labor strife, mass poverty, and little economic development.  In the early post-war years it was easy to call the US intervention into Korea a total failure especially after 36,000 US soldiers died during the war compared to just over 3,000 in Iraq today.  In 1954 was 36,000 US lives spent in Korea worth it?  The hindsight in 1954 looked way more negatively on staying in Korea compared to hindsight in 2007 in regards to staying in Iraq. 

However, the US stayed the course with Korea despite all the setbacks over the years and Korea is now a model country that rose up from the devastation of the Korean War due to it’s alliance with the US and the hard work of it’s own people to become an economic power and a vibrant democracy.  With the benefit of hindsight today, the US won the Korean War in 1988 when Seoul hosted the Olympic Games.  Who would have thought that in 1954?  It is going to be the same scenario for Iraq, we won’t know if the US "won" the war until 30 years from now if Baghdad is hosting the Olympic Games for example.  It is going to take continued US assistance and hard work from the Iraqis to do it.  For anyone who thinks the Iraqis aren’t doing enough for their own freedom needs to read this and this.  I think soldiers feel so strongly about the Iraq War because the Iraqi people are more than just statistics to us, they are real people that will really die if the United States pulls out.  We in the military don’t have the luxury of staying home and debating the merits of going to war and playing the "I told you so" game.  We are less concerned about the justifications of the war and more concerned with doing the job at hand, which is to help the Iraqis rise up from the grips of despotism and terrorism.  We in the military can’t do that from Okinawa like the Murtha plan advocates just as much as the soldiers in Korea after the Korean War couldn’t help the Koreans rise from the ashes of war if they were left to sit in Japan. 

The biggest failure of the Bush Administration has been communicating all this to the American people. 

Unlike the face of the anti-war crowd that want to silence people in the military I actually encourage everyone to read what the Metropolitician has to say.  Americans need to become better educated about Iraq and I feel if they do they will understand the danger of pulling out of there.  If not and the US military is forced to pull out of Iraq we might as well pull out of Afghanistan as well because every jihadi who was looking to kill an infidel in Iraq will be on a one way Iranian express train to Afghanistan.  After the pull out, we in the military will drive on and follow orders from the next US president, even Hillary, just like soldiers always do, but don’t come blaming us when chaos breaks out, the death count in the Middle East inflates to incredible numbers, Saudia Arabia nuclearizes to defend itself from Iran, oil prices go through the roof, economic recession hits the US, among a host of other possible disasters that can hit America from a US withdrawal from Iraq. 

Even better yet don’t expect us in the military to go back over there to clean it up. 

This story about a "Afghan Rambo" serving with US forces in Afghanistan is incredible.  A real unknown hero of Afghanistan.

William Arkin is back and this time on the John Gibson radio show.  Milblogger Blackfive was on Fox News responding to Arkin’s attacks.  This guy is totally revolting and I find it amazing that the Washington Post and NBC still want this guy to work for them.

Anyone remember this controversy over an ultra-nationalist Korean group writing a book claiming an ancient Korean kingdom was larger than China and included this map in the book that was picked up by Chinese bloggers?

Well now Oh My News who never misses a chance to bash America or the Japanese has come up with a possible explanation to the recent text book controversy between the Chinese and Koreans, by blaming the evil Japs of course!:

Then who posted the original false maps, which caused such an outrage? Why did the maps become such a hit on Chinese BBSs? Some Koreans criticize the extreme perspectives of hoan-bba, a new term to indicate extreme nationalists, for causing these misunderstandings. On the other hand, some notes from Korean language bulletin boards and Chinese language ones guess that Japanese might have posted the maps with the purpose of stoking conflicts between Korea and China.

No word yet from Oh My News how the barbarian GIs in Shinchon are related to this yet but give them time.

Marmot has a whole lot more on the growing history crisis between Korea and China in regards to Chinese claims that Korean historical dramas distort Chinese history and the controversy over ownership of Mt. Paektu in North Korea.  Amazingly the Japanese get brought up those respective controversies as well.  At least everyone in northeast Asia can agree on one thing, they dislike the Japanese.

It looks like what few members left of the Korean political party, the Democratic Labor Party that are not busy being indicted as spies for North Korea are now busy cozying up to Venezuela’s newly empowered dictator, Hugo Chavez.  Antti has the scoop:

Taking a look at the Korean Democratic Labor Party’s (DLP) homepage, there’s a photo of the Venezuelan president Chavez. Not surprised about that, as there haven’t been leaders whom the far left can regard as revolutionaries for some time. It turns out that in order to initiate exchange with the Venezuelan ruling party, DLP has sent a negotiation and a study group to the country, invited and paid (except for plane tickets) by the Venezuelan government. A writer of the DLP periodical Chinbo Chôngch’i (Progressive Politics) is accompanying the visiting group, and he will write a series for the magazine with the title "Going to the land of revolution, Venezuela." Not that I have much expectations for DLP anyway any more, but this is just one step down the slope.

I’m not surprised by this because as much as leftists claim that President Bush is dictator, they find it really easy to cozy up to a real dictator like Hugo Chavez.  I wonder what Chavez is going to teach them?  How to supply anti-government guerillas with money and weapons to over throw a democratically elected government, like what Chavez is dong with the FARC in Columbia?  Or will Chavez give them some pointers on how to rule by decree?