hankyoreh

senior staff writer

When former Washington Post reporter Myra MacPherson wrote her biography of legendary 20th century American independent journalist I. F. Stone, she titled it “All Governments Lie.” No title could have better expressed Stone’s lifelong campaign against deception by the state. Stone was so committed to his investigation of government misinformation that the FBI kept a close watch on him, with a file more than 1,600 pages long.

The best-known government lie that Stone turned up was the Gulf of Tonkin incident. When the Pentagon announced that an American warship had been attacked and destroyed by Vietnamese torpedo boats, the entire media parroted the Pentagon’s announcement, stirring up a warlike atmosphere. But Stone questioned every aspect of the incident and raised the possibility that it had been fabricated. Stone’s questions were confirmed to be accurate when secret Pentagon documents were made public seven years later.

All governments lie - and armies are especially bad about this. During the Battle of Balaclava (in the mid-19th-century Crimean War), a brigade of British light cavalry, under orders from its commanding officer, charged a Russian position, losing 345 men (half of the brigade) in just ten minutes. But the British army proclaimed that its string of military victories was continuing. During World War II, the imperial Japanese army claimed to be winning the war even while the Japanese homeland was being razed to the ground.

The South Korean military has a more peculiar tradition. At the beginning of the Korean War, President Rhee Syngman (in office 1948-60) declared that he would defend Seoul to the last man - and then promptly decamped. While the military brass claimed to be crushing the forces of the North Korean puppet regime on the front lines, they were blowing up bridges on the Han River, blocking residents from escaping. Despite all that, they never said a single word of apology. The lies that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the head of a parliamentary audit of the government in regard to the case of a North Korean soldier who crossed the DMZ undetected and knocked on a barrack door to defect in 2012 may seem trivial in comparison, but they’re also part of this tradition.

In 2004, there was an uproar over the military’s cover-up and lies about Operation Plan (OPLAN) 5029 and about a skirmish near the Northern Limit Line in the West (Yellow) Sea. This went beyond covering up the skirmish and omitting information from briefings - the military’s top intelligence officer used the media to manipulate public opinion, sowing discord and mistrust between the people and the government. The push for Operation Plan 5029 was even more serious, provoking doubts about what country the South Korean military was really fighting for.

Since 1993, the US has wanted to establish an operation plan under the authority of the Combined Forces Command for a potential crisis in North Korea. The South Korean military took advantage of the chaotic change of governments in Dec. 1997 to furtively accept the American request. This put the incoming Kim Dae-jung administration (1998-2003) in an awkward position. It could not unilaterally cancel the plan, but neither could it countenance an operation plan for a crisis inside North Korea. Such a plan was likely to lead to an infringement on sovereignty or interference in domestic affairs by American forces even when the peninsula was not at war.

The compromise that was grudgingly reached in 1999 was Concept Plan (CONPLAN) 5029. A concept plan is just a program that is in progress. In 2004, the military was working on converting this concept plan into an operation plan, but the president eventually found this out and stopped them. The US was severely displeased, and it made its feelings clear: there was even talk about dissolving the South Korea-US alliance. In response, the Roh Moo-hyun administration (2003-08) showed its good intentions by revising the concept plan.

The situation was even worse with THAAD. The US seems to have been trying to rush through its desired THAAD deployment during the confusing period between one administration and the next. But in order to do this, it disregarded domestic laws, including the environmental impact assessment. Furthermore, the additional delivery of four launchers was deliberately omitted from a briefing because of an agreement with the US to not go public with that information. The only thing that mattered to the South Korean military was the wishes of the US - it didn’t care about Koreans, the commander-in-chief they had elected or the law.

By Kwak Byoung-chan

The Republic of Korea’s army is a national army, and it came into being at the same time as this state. During the feudal period, kings, feudal lords and clans had their own armies. One thing that enabled the army of Napoleon to conquer Europe was that his soldiers were proud to be in the national army, an army that was fighting for their families and for their homeland. This change was the consequence of the revolution that replaced the monarchy with the republic. While the armies of the monarchy were marching 8 km a day, the national army covered 40 km, enabling them to seize the high ground and to overpower their enemies.

That’s the reason for these lamentations. Who is the South Korean army fighting for? To whom does it belong? Is it really the army of the Korean people? Considering that the army has rejected the people’s choice in not one but two military coups, it may have a hard time submitting to the command of the state or the president. But in that case, why is it so blindly loyal to the US?

By Kwak Byoung-chan, senior staff writer

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