South Koreans who protest against U.S. forget history

We understand that there are countries and ethnic groups and various cultures and subcultures that don't like the United States. Some, as President Bush has often pointed out and events have demonstrated, hate America.
The Palestinians have long thought that the United States pursues a policy that favors Israel over them. Iranian students attacked our embassy and held Americans hostage for 15 months 25 years ago because the United States had propped up a dictatorial regime. The old Soviet Union saw America as a threat to worldwide Communism for decades.
Even in our own hemisphere, we've been at odds with Cuba for almost half a century. Mexico and Venezuela have each called up their ambassadors after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called Mexican President Vicente Fox "a puppy of the (U.S.) empire."
Those tensions, historical and present, can be understood on one level or another.
Some greeting
What we don't understand are the violent anti-American demonstrations that greeted President Bush when he arrived in South Korea last week.
Certainly there have been differences of opinion between U.S. and South Korean leaders regarding the best policy to be pursued in containing Kim Il Jung, North Korea's maniacal dictator. And there have been tensions over the behavior of the 37,000 U.S. soldiers stationed in South Korea -- the recent focus being on a U.S. military court's acquittal of two soldiers involved in a traffic accident in which two Korean school girls were killed.
But the ferocity of the demonstrations that greeted the president were far out of proportion to any grievances the South Korean population might have with the United States.
It was galling to see France, especially, turn its back on the United States in the Iraq War, given that the United States helped liberate France from the Nazis.
Just as dramatically, the United States, as part of a United Nations force, preserved South Korea from a Communist takeover. And for half a century, it was because American forces were stationed in South Korea that the North did not dare to launch an invasion.
If South Koreans want to know what their life would be like without the United States, they only have to look across the border.
Just last week, the European Union sponsored a United Nations resolution expressing serious concern about the "continuing reports of systemic, widespread and grave violations of human rights" in North Korea, including torture, public executions, imposing the death penalty for political reasons and extensive use of forced labor.
Compare and contrast
Famine and death stalk North Korea, while Kim lives, literally and figuratively, like a king.
South Korea, meanwhile is a thriving capitalistic, democratic state, thanks in no small part to the aid it has received from the United States and the billions of dollars it receives for goods sold in this country.
If that isn't enough to make South Koreans feel grateful to the United States and just a but guilty about the reception some of its citizens gave President Bush, here are some numbers to consider.
More than 5.7 million U.S. soldiers served in the Korean conflict. Of those, 54,246 died there. Another 103,284 were wounded. Thousands of those veterans carry their wounds with them today.
The irony, of course, is that had it not been for those sacrifices, the demonstrators would likely be living under the same repressive conditions described in the U.N. resolution. They wouldn't be able to protest the arrival of a foreign dignitary. Or the Third World conditions they would be living under. Or the squandering of the nation's scant resources on the development of nuclear weapons. They wouldn't be free to protest anything if it were not for another United States president, Harry Truman, who effectively sacrificed his political career to save their nation.