KIM JONG IL LOOKING STRONGER... IS ROH HAPPY OR SAD?

From my friend, Mingi, at Time Magazine who contributed to this article:

Below is the cover story from this week's TIME Asia on the faltering US-South Korea alliance and the reason behind the downfall: Kim Jong Il's propaganda war. Read the entire story, because the end is too well-put, too sad and unfortunately, too true.

Kim's Great Game
The U.S. can't seem to stop him. Asia doesn't know if it loves or hates him. So the position of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il looks stronger than ever

TIME MAGAZINE
BY ANTHONY SPAETH
June 14, 2004

Lee Myong Sok grew up in the town of Dongducheon, just 20 km south of Korea's Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the grotesquely fortified no-man's-land rimmed with razor wire, heavy military hardware and tens of thousands of soldiers. When he was a boy, Lee lived on "army-base stew": leftover meals from U.S. military canteens, which he would throw into a pot with cabbage and water after discarding the stray cigarette butts. Today, as an operator of a bar in which Russian girls serve the drinks, Lee is still living off the American troops who serve as a "trip wire": if North Korea attacks, these soldiers will come under attack, guaranteeing U.S. involvement in the conflict. But now Lee is deeply upset at the news that Washington wants to pull out 12,500 soldiers, or one-third of the American armed presence in Korea, after 50 years of peacekeeping. The plan is to remove all the troops now stationed on the front line. "This is devastating," says Lee. Fifteen of Dongducheon's leaders shaved their heads last week and went to Seoul to hoist a protest banner outside the National Assembly building. The banner was written in their own blood.

For the elders of Dongducheon, the departure of American soldiers is a pocketbook issue: the town survives by providing Yankee grunts with Pringles, Budweiser and raunchy nighttime entertainment. For the rest of the region, it's something far more significant: another indication that the status quo on the Korean peninsula for more than half a century, written in the blood of the Korean War's more than 2.5 million victims, is rapidly evolving. North Korea is no longer the region's pariah, a hermetically sealed place with whose leaders no others wanted to deal. On the contrary, South Korea is now dominated by a leftist-nationalist President and a political party whose members often see the North as a potential friend or partner, and only sometimes as an enemy that vows to invade and conquer them in a "sea of fire." (The two countries are still technically at war.) Last week, Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi gave an astonishingly positive account of his recent meeting with North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, saying that "I personally felt that North Korea was interested in moving forward in a positive way." (See following story) Beijing said last week that it did not share Washington's assessment of the north's nuclear programs. These changes in attitude toward Pyongyang are being played out against the backdrop of a revised American military posture on the peninsula and strains in the U.S.-South Korea alliance. Echoing the famous complaint about Washington's China policy in the late 1940s, South Korean conservatives are already starting to ask: "Who lost the U.S.?" (full article)