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Pro- and Anti-Bush Rallies Mark President's Visit to S. Korea
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"We are hopeful that we will be able to reach an understanding with the North Koreans, but we're not at that juncture yet," Wilder said.
At a joint news conference after their meeting, both presidents vowed to press Pyongyang for a concrete mechanism to verify its recent declaration of a nuclear weapons program. Bush said North Korea would not come off the terrorism list if it did not comply.
"They have got a lot to do. They have got to show us a verification agreement that we can trust," he added.
It has been a rocky first year for Lee, a onetime corporate executive who was more pro-business, skeptical of North Korea and pro-American than his two predecessors. That seemed to augur well for U.S. relations with South Korea, one of Washington's most important allies in Asia. About 30,000 U.S. troops are stationed here.
But Lee's approval ratings have plummeted over perceptions that he is too high-handed and that he moved too quickly in opening up South Korea's beef market to U.S. imports. Washington and Seoul renegotiated the beef deal to address these concerns.
Demonstrations for and against Bush's visit started in the scorching afternoon Tuesday, and they picked up as evening set in.
"The U.S. is our ally forged through shedding blood. We must remember that the Americans helped us to chase away the North Korean communists" in the 1950-1953 war, said Oh Seung-ah, 48, a homemaker attending a pro-Bush prayer service in front of Seoul's city hall..
Elsewhere, anti-government protesters rallied. Organizers put their numbers at 10,000; police called it a small fraction of that.
"It is not that I don't like America," said Hwang Jung-sun, 34, a computer specialist. "It is the way Bush throws around his weight. He is not treating South Korea as an ally but as a vassal state. I don't want to accept everything just because the Americans are making demands, like asking to dispatch South Korean soldiers to wars he created and eat the beef when safety is in question."
