What… the hell are you doing? This should all have been handled nicely behind closed doors. The military just needed to explain things to the president:
You’re thinking about declaring Martial Law. We have known that for a few days. If you do declare Martial Law we in the military will do two things:
- Pretend like this is news to us and we had absolutely no idea you were going to declare Martial Law.
- Act as if though we had no reason to doubt the president’s word about there being a clear military threat.
Then after a few hours we would say “Hey, enough time has passed for us to stop pretending like the declaration of Martial Law was legitimate”. At that point we will tell you – in private – to rescind your declaration. If you don’t, we will make a public statement that the military considers the declaration of Martial Law to be invalid. The only reason we won’t do this immediately is because the military must be seen to respond resolutely to the declaration of Martial Law. We have to spend a few hours before we can pull the plug on Martial Law and say “There’s no change to the military threats against our nation, this is just some politician who doesn’t like losing his majority in the legislative assembly”.
A sensible politician would then draw the conclusion that he can’t solve the problem of “no longer having popular support” with “Martial Law”, something which he really should have been able to figure out on his own but at the very least the military should have explained it to him.
South Korea is making things worse all the time with the PPP saying that they won’t support impeachment of the president because “he apologized” before deciding that the did support impeachment. Not sure why an apology is a non-zero issue to be honest, normally an attempted coup d’état is dealt with more forcefully. Not staffing the Supreme Court so that they won’t have the necessary quorum to deliver a finding in the impeachment… At some point, will you stop shooting yourself in the foot? Is that even a remote possibility?
The military seems to be unsure of which side to take in this conflict. I would argue that the Constitution is a good bet here. Not because it’s the unalterable word of God, but at least it’s more sensible than many other characters involved in this drama. I don’t quite understand why civil servants are prosecuted alongside the president. How is playing along with the declaration of Martial Law(until the president “somehow” rescinded it) not entirely in line with their obligations?
Since sensible politicians seem to have gone missing in South Korea of late, let me explain things: South Korea is very dependent on the rest of the western world. It exports stuff to the rest of the world, the West in particular. It also needs to buy a lot from other countries. It stands to benefit by seeming stable and orderly. Now it’s unclear who is in charge, if the constitution is upheld, who is on the Supreme Court, if the military and the police pursue the same goals and so on. You see how that isn’t conducive to being seen as a reliable business-partner to whom you may lend money?