ABSTRACT
In 2003, when South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun decided to send troops to Iraq in a show of support for U.S. policy in the Middle East, seventeen members of the National Assembly publicly declared that they would vote against the deployment of Korean military troops. Interestingly, these assemblymen were members of both the ruling and opposition parties, evidently marking the Iraq War a bipartisan issue. In the declaration, these members of parliament accused the U.S. of provoking an unjust and overly aggressive war in the sovereign state of Iraq. Expectedly, this event attracted much media attention, in part because the opinion of these assemblymen went against their parties’ official stance: both the ruling party and the opposition party officially supported the decision to send Korean troops to Iraq.
