hankyoreh

Some 700 conservative intellectuals, including current and retired scholars and professors, have issued a joint statement calling for the government to stop pursuing the return of wartime command authority to Korea’s military. Intellectuals should be encouraged to openly express their opinions in a democratic society. But there is one premise: they must have a legitimate motive and awareness of the questions at hand, and express themselves in an honest manner and on firm grounds. That is not what is happening, however, which is unfortunate.

To begin with, the statement itself is full of the inaccurate and misled arguments being spread primarily by the conservative media. This can best be seen when it reads that the government is "trying to exercise wartime command on its own, by disguising its anti-American and anti-alliance stance with a cover it calls ’independence.’ "

The claim is that getting back wartime command would be negating the U.S.-Korea alliance. This is black-and-white thinking that makes it hard to believe that those behind the statement are intellectuals. Following their logic, is it that the U.S. accepts the Korean government’s "anti-American, anti-alliance stance" that Washington has agreed to hand over wartime command? When you create an imaginary enemy and go on the attack, you are performing nothing but a witch hunt.

Discussion of the transfer of wartime command has gone on between the U.S. and Korea for years, but these conservatives are calling it "a move that is being made hastily and for primarily political reasons." Neither do they hesitate to distort the truth, when they say that the W621 trillion (US$626 billion) the government wants to see spent on national defense by 2020 is all earmarked for Korea’s shift to independent wartime command. Getting back wartime command would advance Korea’s military sovereignty, so you just have to laugh when you come to the part of the statement that says the change "could result in Korea becoming militarily dependent on the U.S. and Japan."

The statement was drafted by the "People’s Congress for an Advanced Nation" (Seonjinhwa Gungmin Hoeui) which is a semi-political organization begun last Spring so that "advanced (conservative) forces" can win power back from "leftist forces." Reportedly, the group sent e-mails to 7,000 professors and full-time lecturers at universities across the country. It looks like practice for next year’s presidential election campaign. The motive is thus impure and the behavior is not wholesome. It is they who are politicizing the issue.

The issue is, as they say, an important one that relates to national security and the U.S.-Korea alliance. They need to discard their outdated modes of thought and see reality for what it is. They need to agonize over how the alliance needs to be rearranged and how build a future for a unified Korea. The U.S. is already drawing up a security strategy for the "post-post-Cold War" world, and we need to get rid of the illusion that our future will be guaranteed if we leave it to America. At the very least, one hopes for an end to the political witch hunt.