By Donald Kirk
Just about everyone remembers where they were 10 years ago, on September 11, 2001, when they heard two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.
I was on a bus in central Seoul and got the news in a call from a radio station. What did I think about it? I knew nothing, had no idea what to think. Half an hour, maybe an hour later, I saw, live on television, the first of the buildings at the World Trade Center collapsing in slow motion.
Then the other WTC tower and the building beside it slowly crumbled too. ``9/11,” as the attacks that day are universally known, became all the more real to me the next time I was in New Jersey, my home state, driving toward New York on the Jersey Turnpike. The sight of the twin towers of the World Trade Center had been a beacon beckoning people into the city. Now there was emptiness.
The decade since has been filled with violence, uncertainty, tremors of worries. Could this thing get bigger? Is this just the beginning? Having also hit the Pentagon but failed to get a fourth plane to the White House, did the terrorists have other targets?
A lot of people were asking questions like that. If there is any such thing as a ``war to end wars,” as they used to say about World War I, was this finally it? Might the ``war on terror,” as President Bush called it, spread up and down the east coast, maybe the west coast, too? Were we ready?
As if to answer these questions, Bush sent American troops to Iraq and Afghanistan to stamp out al-Qaida, the sponsor of 9/11, and the Taliban too. Al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan weren’t the same, but try and tell that to an American. They’re all Islamic, and ordinary people to whom I talk on visits to the U.S. aren’t going to split hairs trying to distinguish between the two.
Disheartening though Bush’s ``war on terror” has been, it’s been quite different from Vietnam in one fundamental aspect, not counting ideology or geography or allies or sources of arms or anything like that. The difference for Americans is that all the U.S. troops are volunteers, and nobody’s throwing eggs at them or staging demonstrations when they come home.
At a baseball game that I attended in July in D.C., the crowd got up and cheered as the announcer introduced a group of wounded veterans in the stands. The Irving Berlin song, ``God Bless America,” is often sung at games along with the ``Star-Spangled Banner.” The ``war on terror” has plenty of critics but almost none of the virulent protest that swept American campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The U.S. did away with the draft in 1973, the year Henry Kissinger and ``North” Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho signed the ``Paris peace,” and the last U.S. forces withdrew from Vietnam and the Saigon regime was left to collapse and die two years later. With the end of the draft, young people lost interest in protest. It was as if the air had suddenly whooshed out of a balloon. No one’s talking now about reinstating the draft. Everyone knows protest would burst out of nowhere and everywhere if that were to happen.
Still, the draft might become necessary if the ``war on terror” were to spread beyond the Middle East. Nobody thinks of the past decade in Korean history in terms of ``post-9/11,” but it’s been a worrisome time here too. Think of the revelation in October 2002 that North Korea had a totally secret program to enrich uranium for nuclear warheads in violation of the 1994 Geneva framework agreement. Think of the breakdown of that doomed-to-fail deal under which the North was to get twin nuclear energy reactors in return for shutting down the well publicized five-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon.
And think of the failure of six-party talks after the U.S. cut a new deal in 2005 for the North to give up its nukes in return for still greater incentives. Think of North Korea conducting its first underground nuclear test in October 2006, then returning to the table and going along with two more agreements in 2007 stating the steps by which the North would live up to its promises.
Think of North Korea in May 2009 staging its second nuclear test, this one far bigger than the one in 2006. Think of all those missiles the North has tested, short-range, medium-range, good for export, plus a long-range model capable of ``delivering” warheads thousands of miles away. And think of the sanctions imposed after that second nuclear test – sanctions only vaguely obeyed. China, by far the North’s leading source of all the food and fuel needed to prop up the regime.
It’s probably a waste of time to link North Korea’s fanatic drive to ``nuclear power” as fallout from 9/11. There is, however, a connection. The ``war on terror” has diverted funds and energy from defending this corner of the world. A decade later, peace endures on the Korean peninsula in a precarious balance of terror marred only by occasional ``incidents.”
Everyone seems to know the ``the war on terror” in the Middle East would look like a minor scuffle compared to the holocaust in Northeast Asia.
Columnist Donald Kirk, in ``Korea Betrayed: Kim Dae Jung and Sunshine,” links North Korea’s nuclear program to funds pumped into the North by the South. He can be reached at kirkdon@yahoo.com.