Seoul Searching: Pointing the Finger

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Friday, September 21, 2001

South Korean President Kim Dae Jung quickly expressed his country's full support to the United States in the wake of last week's devastating terrorist attack. That was expected. The U.S. and South Korea are close allies and Seoul depends on the 37,000 American troops stationed in the peninsula for its security. But the grassroots reaction here has been a little surprising -- and raises questions about how much military support Kim could really muster if the U.S. calls on Korea for help.

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There has been little expression of popular sympathy here, not many spontaneous gestures, and few wreaths laid at the U.S. embassy in Seoul. Maybe those aren't typical Korean gestures; Koreans are sympathetic of course, and nobody is suggesting the attack on America was justified. But comments in everyday conversation, on the Internet and in newspaper editorials, come uncomfortably close to suggesting the U.S. brought this on itself. Just two days after the attacks, the left-wing Hankyoreh newpaper condemned the terrorists. But, the newspaper argued the terrorists' actions were the product of deep-rooted religious and racial tensions the U.S. played a big part in creating. "The U.S. should look back and reflect on what it's done," the newspaper editorialized.

That "but" rubs me the wrong way. It does, however, capture a widespread feeling here -- how widespread is hard to gauge but it is not confined to the left-wing -- that the U.S. is arrogant and it did some bad things around the world, so it somehow provoked the terrorists into killing more than 5,000 innocent people. Arrogant? Sure, it is a superpower. I'm Canadian, so I know Americans can be arrogant but also America-centric, self-righteous and pushy to boot. Has the U.S. done bad things? Of course, as many Americans would readily admit. But what is the argument here? Osama Bin Laden, from what little we know about the No. 1 suspect in the attacks, is angry at the U.S. because it sullied Saudi Arabia -- home to Islam's holiest sites -- by stationing troops in the country during the Gulf War. So the U.S. should have allowed Iraq to swallow Kuwait? Bin Laden doesn't like America's support of Israel. So the U.S. shouldn't be supporting Israel? It would have been pushed into the sea by its Arab neighbors long ago without American backing. Sure, the Israelis have committed human rights abuses and humiliated Palestinians. But it's my guess Bin Laden would hate the U.S. and Israel even if the Palestinians had their own state.

Whatever the U.S. did or did not do has to be separated from these attacks, which took the lives of thousands of innocent people going about their own business. Suggesting the U.S. should take its share of the blame is akin to telling a rape victim she had it coming to her because she was wearing a provocative skirt. I remember right after the attacks a group of Palestinians laid a wreath outside the U.S. embassy in Israel. Two days earlier they had been demonstrating against U.S. policy outside the same embassy. The gesture shows they understood the difference between politics and mass murder. At the risk of sounding arrogant, maybe some Koreans don't see the big picture here -- we are all Americans, and we could all be victims.