twenty years

incalculable damage to institutions

Twenty years. I flew on an almost empty 747 from Dulles to Seoul on 19 March 2003 to fulfill an National Defense University President’s commitment to the Korean National Defense University to strengthen our institutional ties by proving a week of lectures on various topics. Few other passengers boarded not only because everyone was certain a war was about to unfold against Saddam Hussein but also because SARS, a precursor to our recent pandemic, gripped much of East Asia with Korea and Japan surprisingly excluded.

Memories of the war flooded my mind approaching this anniversary. I see the newspapers are covering it with the same questions I still ask myself regularly: are we better off after the millions of lives upended and billions of dollars spent? Is our world safer today than it was in 2003? Why did our leadership pursue a course so fraught for our nation?

I spent the week in a Korea in a cold apartment on the periphery of Seoul, the capital with ten million residents. Located desperately close to the Demilitarized Zone separating the Republic of Korea from the Kim-run poverty-striken, isolated society in North Korea, only five months before I arrived the fear of a nuclear weapons program in the North hit the news again. One of my friends told me she could not believe I was going because it is ‘dangerous over there and you have kids’ but I sadly