U.S. senator complains about Korean ‘amnesia’

WASHINGTON ― At a Senate confirmation hearing for the new commander of U.S. troops in Korea, Senator Hillary Clinton raised some concerns about the U.S.-Korea military alliance.
Sentator Clinton, a New York Democrat and contender for her party’s presidential nomination in 2008, said she wondered if Koreans had forgotten the importance of the U.S. military presence In Korea and the benefits that Korea had gotten from the half-century alliance.
She said Koreans were suffering from “historical amnesia.”
General Burwell Bell, the nominee to become the next commander of U.S. Forces Korea, was being questioned by the Armed Services Committee.
Senator Clinton told him, speaking of South Koreans, that she wondered about changes in “their understanding of the importance of our position there and what we have done over so many decades to provide them the freedom that they have enjoyed to develop the economy.”
She was the second senior U.S. legislator in recent weeks to use the term “historical amnesia.” Congressman Henry Hyde, an Illinois Republican and chairman of the House International Relations Committee, used the term in complaining about efforts by some scholars and activists in Korea to remove a statue of General Douglas MacArthur from its site in Incheon, where he and UN troops invaded to break the North Korean hold on most of the peninsula in the fall of 1950.

by Kim Chong-hyuk, Ser Myo-ja