Anti-U.S. demonstrators see Bush's visit as a great chance to rev up the protests, just as they appeared to have tapered off since outbursts of violence in June and July.
The protests show the depth of anti-U.S. pressure as exerted by radicals who can't seem to digest the conservative victory in last December's presidential election. Bush, making life easier for Lee, has had to tread carefully around the beef issue, assuring him in a telephone chat that U.S. exporters won't ship beef from cattle more than 30 months old.
The protesters, moreover, have another issue to rally around - fresh revelations by South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the killing of hundreds if not thousands of South Korean civilians by U.S. air strikes, mainly on targets thought to be under North Korean control during the Korean War in the early 1950s. Survivors of the victims, with the backing of the commission, are demanding compensation.
Bush and Lee may put off questions on this topic by referring them to investigators, but the timing of the commission's reports is sure to add fuel to the beef protests.
Lee, however, is far more concerned about rising confrontation between North and South Korea while the U.S. focuses on getting the North to move on to the next phase of abandonment of its nuclear weapons program. North Korea is hurling nasty rhetoric at Lee in the aftermath of the shooting by North Korean soldiers of a South Korean woman who had strayed off the beaten track in the Mount Kumkang tourist zone.
In response to South Korea's suspension of the Kumkang tours and demands for a joint investigation, North Korea says it will expel South Korean workers from the zone. One North Korean commentary last weekend accused Lee of "driving the frozen inter-Korean relations to a catastrophic phase".
North Korea, refusing to resume North-South dialogue, demands that Lee endorse all the agreements reached in the two inter-Korean summits hosted by Dear Leader Kim Jong-il for Lee's two left-leaning presidential predecessors, Kim Dae-jung, who initiated the "Sunshine" policy of reconciliation with the North, and his successor, Roh Moo-hyun. The conservative Lee has not repudiated the agreements of June 2000 or October 2007, but clearly sees them as concessionary and wants to set an independent policy.
The great paradox in U.S. relations with Korea is that Lee has set a relatively tough policy while Bush, after appearing hardline during his first term, has sought to appease North Korea by promising to remove the North from a list of terrorist countries.
The issue now is the degree to which Bush will ease Lee's worries about the wavering U.S. position in light of the Kumkang incident and the impasse in North-South dialogue. It may be due to such concerns that the White House now says removal of North Korea from the terrorist list will have to wait until North Korea agrees to verify whatever it does to get rid of its nuclear arsenal.
South Korean officials, hoping for firm U.S. support in the wake of both the beef demonstrations and the killing of the housewife, want to see a shift in U.S. policy that includes a promise not to scale down U.S. forces below the current level of 28,000 troops, as well as postponement of plans to pull all combat troops to a new base about 60 kilometers south of the capital Seoul.
They would also like to put off the U.S. scheme for transferring troop leadership to South Korea in the event of war, and they want the U.S. to forget about North Korea's repeated calls for a peace treaty to replace the armistice that ended the Korean War in July 1953. That idea is seen in Seoul as critical to a North Korean effort to isolate South Korea, since the South was not a signatory to the truce.
Bush, however, has his own special agenda to pursue - his desire for South Korea to respond by strengthening its vastly diminished commitment to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That's a treacherous topic that South Korean politicians, even conservatives, prefer to play down, if not avoid. About 500 South Korean troops remain in Iraq, down from 3,000 at their peak in 2004. South Korea withdrew the 200 troops from Afghanistan after one death in a suicide bomb attack and the abduction of 23 South Korean church workers, two of whom were killed.
The Korean troops in Iraq are involved in engineering projects. The force in Afghanistan was on a medical mission. Bush believes South Korea should renew - and increase - its commitment to both countries in exchange for renewed guarantees of unwavering American military support.
The U.S., well before Bush got to Korea, turned aside what promised to be another terribly difficult problem, namely that of the U.S. position on the Dokdo islets, the rocky outcroppings in waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan. The Bush administration was basically blind-sided when the little-known U.S. Board on Geographic Names decreed that sovereignty of the islets was "undesignated" and wanted to call them the Liancourt Rocks after the name of a French whaling ship that ventured on them in the 19th century.
The suspicion is that Japanese diplomats and scholars had subtly gotten through to members of the U.S. geographic board, unbeknown to the U.S. State Department or the White House. If the islets could not go by the Japanese name of Takeshima, as Japan identifies them, then the Japanese at least wanted recognition that their status was "unsettled" and the name Dokdo represented only the Korean side of the argument..
The Korean Embassy in Washington was caught by surprise. With the ruckus over Dokdo likely to ruin Bush's visit to Korea, the White House had the sense to reverse the geographic board's decision and have the islets listed as firmly under South Korean control.
Dokdo, for all the headlines, was easy. The White House will have more trouble with beef.
It's not at all clear if the U.S. Congress will ratify the free trade agreement, even if Lee pushes it through South Korea's National Assembly. Influential American conservatives as well as liberals, including the presumptive Democratic Party presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, oppose it. The best shot is for Congress to vote on it in the window between the U.S. presidential election in November and the end of Bush's term.
While Bush promises to press for ratification, he can make no promises - any more than he can guarantee the continuity of U.S. policy after his successor takes over in January.
