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  Monday  November 17  2003    01: 48 AM

the joys of going it alone

A number of folks have raised a ruckus over a point I made Thursday night about the strained relations between the United States and South Korea (ROK).

Their beef is with this passage …

the deep strains in US-ROK relations … have deep roots. Much of it stems from difficulties adjusting to the end of the Cold War and Korean democracy itself, which is fairly new. But in no small measure the stance of the current South Korean government is the result of the Bush administration’s aggressive and unilateral policies toward the Korean Peninsula.

How can I call White House policy unilateral, these folks ask, when the US has been trying to get six-party negotiations underway for months?

How? Easy.
[...]

There is of course a telling and unfortunate parallel with the current situation in Iraq. Now that things are going south we're looking for help from anyone and everyone there too. But, again, that's desperation, not multilateralism. Does trying to get the South Koreans to send us a few troops change the fundamental character of our policy? Of course not. Everybody goes begging for help when they run out of options. That's human nature. The key is to avoid pursuing a policy based on recklessness and swagger that gets you into such a position in the first place.

In Iraq that is certainly where we are right now.

The president loaded us all into the family van, revved the thing up to 70 MPH, and slammed us into a brick wall called Reality.
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