War Tensions Mount in the Koreas

SEOUL — Koreans are watching the war taking place half a hemisphere away with an eye to what could happen next much closer to home.

On both sides of the DMZ, people believe that a rapid and relatively bloodless toppling of Saddam Hussein will embolden hard-liners in the Bush administration to go after North Korea, which has been openly flaunting its nuclear weapons program.

Maurice Strong, a United Nations envoy who visited the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, last week, told reporters Saturday in Beijing that the North Koreans are watching the war unfolding in the Middle East "very carefully and with deep concern, and questioning what this means in terms of the U.S.' ultimate intentions toward them."

For South Koreans too, the conflict in Iraq is not merely a war in a faraway place being played out on TV.

Many in Seoul believe that the war will exacerbate tensions between North Korea and the United States and ultimately tensions on the Korean peninsula. The fear is that if the U.S. is known to be considering military action against North Korea, the North Koreans might strike at the 38,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea and at the South itself.

"They are fighting in Iraq now, but it clearly means that the next target is North Korea," said Yoon Jung Chun, 32, who works for an Internet shopping company in Seoul and who was participating in an antiwar demonstration Saturday in Seoul.

"The Iraqi war rings an inauspicious alarm bell for Koreans," said an editorial in the English-language Korea Herald on Friday. "The United States has been annoyingly ambiguous in its rhetoric against North Korea

The war has already put a strain on relations between the Koreas. North Korea on Saturday canceled a series of long-scheduled bilateral meetings on economic exchanges and maritime affairs, citing a state of alert imposed last week in South Korea to guard against terrorism during the Iraq war.

"The behavior of the South Korean authorities is a rude perfidy to the dialogue partner and a reckless act of laying an artificial obstacle in the way of contacts and dialogue between both sides," North Korea said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.