The
Black Hole of the Korean War in American History
Are you a war
buff? Or do you know several? People who can walk the
battlefields of the Civil War declaiming on the tactics and errors of the
generals on both sides. Are the bookshelves,
attics and basements of friends and family filled with tomes on World War II or
Vietnam? Probably.
But how many
people know anything about the Korean War?
The Korean War, The Forgotten War
according to Clay Blair, is the black hole in American history. Oh, Korea, the retreat from the Frozen Chosin (ironically, Chosin in the
Japanese name for the location) is probably the limit of people’s knowledge of
that war. It was not a war, it was a
“police action”, remember?
Now, a new book, The
Korean War: A History by Bruce Cumings, the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service
Professor and chair of the Department of History at the University of Chicago,
comes along to put the Korean War in its proper place as an important event in
American history and, most surprisingly, the real starting point of the
military aspects of the Cold War.
In war, traditionally, the capital is the last place to
fall. The outlying defensive armies,
protecting the leadership, need to be defeated before the war is won. The north needed to conquer Richmond in the
American Civil War. The Germans were
stopped at the gates of Paris in World War I.
The American and Soviet armies raced for Berlin in the European theater
in World War II.
But in the Pacific theater, the war was ended suddenly
with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan was defeated, but its army, its empire,
was largely intact. Both the Korean and
Vietnam wars were a result of the operational decisions stemming from the need
to disarm the intact Japanese armies in Vietnam and Korea. The sixteenth parallel in Vietnam was the
dividing line: to the north, the Chinese replaced the Japanese; to the south,
the British replaced the Japanese. [The
fact that the Chinese and Russians forced the Vietnamese to accept the
seventeenth parallel as the dividing line between north and south at the Geneva
Conference in 1954, and to give up land they had won militarily above the
sixteenth parallel, was a major cause of Vietnamese distrust of the Chinese and
Russians as intermediaries for negotiating an end to the war and why Quang Tri province turned out to be such a killing ground
for US troops during the war.] In the end, the French relieved them both. And Ho Chi Minh actually preferred the return
of the French to the continuation of Chinese presence. This fact should have been a red flag for
American decision-makers about the relationship between the Vietnamese and
Chinese.
In
Korea, the Soviets disarmed the Japanese north of the 38th parallel
and the Americans disarmed the Japanese to the south. In essence, when the United States defeated
the Japan, it inherited its empire. In
the interests of stability and anti-communism, it basically
rehabilitated the colonizers in the Far East and made them American clients. Hence, the United States inherited the aura
of the French colonialists in Vietnam and the Japanese occupiers in Korea. Neither the 16th parallel nor the
38th parallel were originally intended as international
boundaries. The United States decided to
make them boundaries by force of arms, in the name of anti-communism.
Cumings’ book makes post World War II American foreign policy
comprehensible. Like most historians who
want to keep their jobs and get their books published, he assiduously avoids
the third rail of American foreign policy: Israel. David Ben Gurion,
Israel’s first Prime Minister, wanted to send Israeli soldiers to fight in the
United Nations coalition in Korea. This
was a mere two years after the creation of Israel with the new country
allegedly threatened with extinction by its more
numerous neighbors.
When Israel was
created, it proclaimed a policy of neutrality between east and west. It was the Korean War that got Israel to side
irrevocably with the west. Ben Gurion failed to get Israel to send troops, partially
because a significant section of his Mapai Party
wanted to support the north, not the south.
As a compromise, Israel sent humanitarian aid to the south. And six years later, in collusion with the
French and British, Israel conquered Egypt’s Sinai Pennisula
in six days. And eleven years after
that, nineteen years after its creation, Israel invaded and seized the West
Bank, which it still holds today in violation of international law. Does this sound like the record of a small,
weak country surrounded by numerically superior neighbors threatened with
extinction? American foreign policy in
the post-war world has been foremost about protecting the religious state of
Israel while opposing religious states in the Muslim world.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union more than twenty years
ago, and China’s emergence as a global military and economic power, archives of
both nations have been opened to researchers.
There is a flood of excellent scholarship on the Cold War, now based on
hard data, rather than speculation, and two generations of graduate students to
mine this rich seam. For example, Mao:
The Unknown History by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday,
Lorenz Luthi’s The
Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the
communist world, Mercy A. Kuo’s Contending with Contradictions: China’s
Policy toward Soviet Eastern Europe and the Origins of the Sino-Sovet Split, 1953-1960; and Nicholas Khoo’s Collateral
Damage: Sino-Soviet Rivalry and the Termination of the Sino-Vietnamese Alliance, all deal with one of the major events
of Cold War that affected every other, the Sino-Soviet Split. Part of the
reason for the global economic crisis is the unaffordable military spending
predicated on outdated ideas of national defense.
And the Sino-Soviet split was the elephant in the china
shop during the Cold War. Not a single
issue can be understood without looking at it in the context of the
Soviet-China rivalry for leadership in the Communist world. It is as important as the Korean War, the
1956 Suez War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the construction of the Berlin Wall,
the Arab -Israeli wars and the Vietnam War.
And now the archives are open and we can learn who did what and why.
The problem is that the United States is becoming more
and more ignorant about anything other than sports and entertainment. It turns out that in the run up to the 2000
election, when Bush was being briefed by his foreign policy advisors, he did
not know if Germany was part of NATO. Is
it any surprise he stumbled into two wars, especially since he lost the
election? Far from being a free, democratic country, Americans are kept in a
state of vincible ignorance, all the easier to play
them like a piano for political purposes.
At the moment, the international news is all: Syria, Syria, Syria, Iran;
Syria, Syria, Syria, Iran; like one note Johnny, the voters are being
manipulated and played for fools.
And
the ultimate outrage has come in the Jerry Sandusky child molestation
trial. The surprise witness permitted by
the judge was heresay by two janitors of a third
janitor who now has dementia and can not testify for himself. His colleagues claim that he said he saw
Jerry in the shower with a ten year old boy.
Further, they testify that he said it was worse than anything he had
seen in Korea. Really? Worse than Korea? A war that took over 54,000 American lives
(20,600 were “accidental”), at least 132,000 Chinese lives (probably 400,000)
and about 3 million Korean lives, half of them civilians. Really, a child molester is worse than
American soldiers being ordered to shoot women and children? And the jury and public will believe this,
because they know nothing about the Korean war and the
vast majority of public officials and voters have never served in the military
and have a Disneyland idea of warfare and combat.
Post-war
American foreign policy was predicated on an opposition to a monolithic
communism that, if it ever existed at all, ended after the Korean War.