S Korea Election A Major Defeat For Bush

by Jim Lobe

It also marks the third election around the world in as many months in which U.S. foreign and military policies were a major campaign issue and where the candidates most closely identified with them lost.

South Korea now joins Germany and Pakistan as countries expected to be key players in Washington's fight against the "axis of evil" whose voters instead elected candidates who were most critical of the administration's "war on terrorism."

The results echo a recent 44-nation poll by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press that found a sharp drop in positive attitudes toward the United States in most foreign countries, particularly its close allies, especially South Korea, Pakistan and Turkey.

"We are seeing precisely the phenomenon you would expect," said Chalmers Johnson, an East Asia expert at the University of California. "When you come out as such a bold and thoughtless imperialist as the current administration, this is what you get: 'Anti-Americans of the world, unite -- you have nothing to lose but your hegemon.'"

Roh, a human-rights lawyer who staunchly defended the "sunshine" policy toward North Korea for which outgoing President Kim Dae Jung won the Nobel Peace Prize, defeated the candidate of the Grand National Party (GNP), Lee Hoi-chang.

Analysts said voters split along mainly generational lines, with younger voters preferring Roh to Lee, a former supreme court judge and one of the few GNP heavyweights untainted by corruption charges during a long career.

Bush administration policies were a central issue in the campaign.

While Roh strongly defended Kim's diplomacy toward the North, even after Washington disclosed that Pyongyang was working on a secret nuclear weapons program, Lee argued that Kim's policies had failed and that a harder line more closely attuned to Washington was needed.

Bush had humiliated Kim when they met at the White House in March 2001, when he publicly denounced North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as untrustworthy and announced that his administration would not continue high-level negotiations with Pyongyang launched by President Bill Clinton. When a senior U.S. State Department official finally visited Pyongyang last October, he used the occasion to confront the North with evidence of the secret program whose existence Pyongyang confirmed.

Since then, the administration has demanded that the North dismantle the project as a precondition for a resumption of talks, cancelled scheduled shipments to the North next year of heavy oil pursuant to the 1994 Agreed Framework under which Pyongyang froze a different nuclear program, and pressed Japan and South Korea to cut off all but humanitarian aid to Pyongyang until Washington's demand was met.

During the campaign, Roh denounced Washington's positions as "hard-line" and insisted that, as president, he would maintain and intensify engagement with North Korea. "I don't have any anti-American sentiment, but I won't kowtow to the Americans, either," he declared at one point.

Resentment about the administration's approach boiled over after last month's acquittal by a U.S. military court of two U.S. sergeants whose armored vehicle ran over and crushed two 14-year-old schoolgirls during military exercises in a village north of Seoul.

Anti-American sentiment rose steeply, with angry student demonstrations, hunger strikes, and other protests that called for an apology from Bush, the immediate revision of the Status of Forces Agreement (SoFA) that gives the United States jurisdiction for crimes committed by U.S. soldiers, and even the withdrawal of all 37,000 U.S. troops based in Korea. Some U.S. soldiers were verbally and even physically assaulted by Korean crowds.

Focused on Iraq and North Korea, Washington was slow to react.

The administration indicated a willingness to review the SoFA only last week, while apologies on Bush's behalf by the U.S. ambassador and visiting Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, appeared only to heighten the anger.

"They wanted to see a picture of the president apologizing," said Don Oberdorfer, a Korea specialist at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), who traveled to Seoul and Pyongyang last month.

Despite potentially disastrous last-minute setbacks -- including a move by Pyongyang to restart the nuclear program frozen by the 1994 accord and the desertion of a key political ally 24 hours before the vote -- Roh pulled out the victory.

The result is another defeat for the Bush administration's hawks, who had hoped that a Lee presidency would have been more sympathetic, not only to U.S. policy toward the North but also vis-a-vis U.S. plans to build up its military power throughout the western Pacific, a policy that Johnson calls a "Cold War anachronism".

"There's no question they would've been much more comfortable with Lee," said Oberdorfer.

They same could be said about the administration's disappointment over the victory in September of German Socialist Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder over the more-conservative Edmund Stoiber in elections that ultimately were decided by Schroeder's categorical refusal to back a U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Bush was so infuriated by what he perceived as Schroeder's anti-Americanism that he not only refused to congratulate him on the victory, he also imposed a month-long freeze on cabinet-level contacts.

In both South Korea and Germany, according to Charles Kupchan, a foreign-policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, "you have an undercurrent of growing resentment toward the U.S., and politicians are tapping into it to campaign for office. It's a powerful statement of how much American power is beginning to cause fear and resentment in many countries, including those that have been our close allies."

That is especially true in countries, like Germany and South Korea, with strong democratic cultures, according to both Oberdorfer and Johnson. "People in democratic societies don't like big brothers coming over and telling them what to do," said Oberdorfer.

While Pakistan political culture may not be as democratic, the October elections there, in which a coalition of pro-Taliban parties swept two key provincial legislatures and quadrupled their previous showing, also marked a strong rebuff to the administration's "war against terrorism."

"If there continue to be elections with anti-American candidates winning, we're just going to take our marbles and go home," added Kupchan, whose recent book, The End of the American Era, predicts that the unilateralist and global ambitions of administration hawks cannot be sustained for very long.