So your argument is that he voluntarily backed down from a coup that otherwise would have continued and worked even after the military knew the rest of the government, including those in his own party, rejected his claim? Like he had some earnest change of heart rather than knew it was failing?
Coups aren’t resolved by rules and regulations on who gets to command the military, they’re about whose message gets out as “official” and who the security forces follow, and he was obviously not winning that struggle. There were soldiers on the street apologizing and that the members of parliament even got into the building indicates the security forces weren’t fully on board. The very publicized opposition leader bypassed the restrictions by jumping a waist high fence.
And none of this subjective determination of which individual entity held the most sway in ending the coup matters to anything else in the piece. It’s not even a terribly important question.
No, actually. I made no assertions about whether or not the coup would’ve succeeded. Only that it doesn’t make sense to pat parliament on the back for doing the absolute minimum of saying “we don’t like this.” The whole situation is a mess, but it’s important to be realistic about what happened. The fact that South Korea still has conscription probably had more to do with the failure than anything else.
So your argument is that he voluntarily backed down from a coup that otherwise would have continued and worked even after the military knew the rest of the government, including those in his own party, rejected his claim? Like he had some earnest change of heart rather than knew it was failing?
Coups aren’t resolved by rules and regulations on who gets to command the military, they’re about whose message gets out as “official” and who the security forces follow, and he was obviously not winning that struggle. There were soldiers on the street apologizing and that the members of parliament even got into the building indicates the security forces weren’t fully on board. The very publicized opposition leader bypassed the restrictions by jumping a waist high fence.
And none of this subjective determination of which individual entity held the most sway in ending the coup matters to anything else in the piece. It’s not even a terribly important question.
No, actually. I made no assertions about whether or not the coup would’ve succeeded. Only that it doesn’t make sense to pat parliament on the back for doing the absolute minimum of saying “we don’t like this.” The whole situation is a mess, but it’s important to be realistic about what happened. The fact that South Korea still has conscription probably had more to do with the failure than anything else.