Time to End the Korean War
by Dave Chaddock
Wars generally end with peace treaties. But the Korean War, which began 56 years
ago, was suspended three years later only on the basis of a truce, or a
temporary cessation of hostilities. A formal end to this war, the longest
continual conflict in US history, is way overdue. In the words of an old
Korean proverb, it is time to "throw away the sword and hold up the rice
cake." But not the Condoleezza Rice cake. It's no use to look for
peace in that direction. "Truly evil regimes" like North Korea,
as she said in a Voice of America broadcast a few years back, "must be
confronted, not coddled." Looking for the Bush regime to resolve an
international dispute, as Maureen Dowd recently put it, is even less productive
than watching paint dry.
At least in that case something is happening,
albeit rather slowly. But with Bush there's "almost nothing to see...It's
like watching dry paint." How did Bush observe the 56th anniversary
of this war, which cries out in anguish for a resolution? He
"celebrated" by initiating massive military exercises near the Korean
peninsula with 19,000 US troops. Is it any wonder that North Korea fired off a
few compensatory fireworks of its own with its rocket launch on the Fourth of
July?
Actually the so-called "crisis" with North Korea could be
resolved very simply. What North Korea wants is an assurance that it will
not be attacked by the US. It has been branded by Bush as one third of the
"Axis of Evil." Another third (Iraq) has been subjected to US
invasion and occupation, and the remaining third (Iran) is being threatened. For
three decades the US deployed tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea, and at
present it has nine ballistic missile subs on patrol at any given time, each of
which threatens to launch the destructive power of 1,536 Hiroshima’s.
Not so long ago Madeleine Albright had
no problem going to North Korea for talks, and Clinton, on the next-to-last day
of his administration, confessed to her that he wished he had accepted Kim
Jong-Il invitation to visit. The opportunity awaited. But Bush
declared that he would never allow himself to "get caught in the trap of
sitting at the table alone with the North Koreans." And even his
six-party talks have not convened for over a year because he outraged Pyongyang
by imposing financial sanctions, accusing the North of drug smuggling and
counterfeiting. These charges were based on the unreliable testimony of
defectors.
As I write this article, incidentally, Israel is bombing Lebanon to
smithereens, and Bush is rush-delivering 5,000 pound bunker-busting bombs to
facilitate the process. Rice calls it "the birth pangs of a new
Middle East." But we need look no further than the Korean War itself
to see the unsound nature of this policy. Orders were given in 1950 for
every factory, city and village in North Korea to be
destroyed.
Not a structure was left above ground. Anything that moved was a
target. 866,914 tons of napalm was dropped. However, in the end, the
US could not conquer North Korea, but only increased its anger and its capacity
to fight. It also caused a neighboring country (China) to come to Korea's
aid.
Over the intervening years, there have been numerous trumped-up charges against North
Korea, but the greatest one of all, I believe, and the one that has helped make
all the succeeding ones more plausible, is the accusation that North Korea
started the war.
In the portion of Korea where the US took over after the Japanese surrender, it created a military government
using the same officials who had been brutally controlling Korea under Japanese
domination. Reporter Mark Gayn found in 1948 "with shame and anguish,
that under our flag, there had come into being a police state so savage...that
it was difficult to find a parallel." ( Japan Diary, 429 )
It
was an aggressive state. In the summer of 1949 a young officer admitted to
the 3rd secretary of the US Embassy: "One usually hears that the Army never
attacks North Korea and is always getting attacked. This is not true. Mostly
our army is doing the attacking first, and we attack harder." On June
14, just eleven days before the start of the war, Syngman Rhee, the South Korean
leader, wrote to a friend: "Now is the best time to take on the
offensive...We will drive Kim Il-Sung and his bandits to remote mountains."
For US officials, the war was just what the doctor ordered. As they
saw it, China had fallen to the Communists, and a red tide was advancing on
Vietnam and the Philippines.
An impetus was required to enable an
intervention, which would save Taiwan. The US needed to build up its
military forces. It desperately needed a jolt, a "Remember the
Maine!" incident, a Tonkin Gulf attack, something to rouse the American
populace. Senator Smith was ecstatic: "It was all very wonderful and an
answer to prayer." Three days after the war began, the US moved the
7th Fleet into the Taiwan Strait.
Was it Divine Intervention? Or did it have something to do with the visit of
John Foster Dulles, who arrived in Seoul on June
17, eight days before the war began? We have two accounts, one from a
South Korean source, and one from North Korea, which detail a key instruction of
Dulles.
The two accounts are in agreement. Channing Liem, a former
ambassador to the UN from South Korea, testifies that he was told by a close
confidant of Rhee that Dulles had stated that if the South was ready to attack,
"the US would lend help" but that there was a "need to persuade
the world that the ROK was attacked first." The other source was
Rhee's former minister Kim Hyo Suk, who went over to the North's side when Seoul
fell, and who quoted Dulles as saying: "The time is ripe. Attack North
Korea along with the counter-propaganda that North Korea invaded South Korea
first."
The rapid advance of the North helped create an impression that Rhee was
an innocent victim. Actually the North knew it was about to be attacked,
and it had had many discussions with its allies about how far it should go in
response.
For many years after the war South Korea continued to be a threatening
military dictatorship. When I visited Seoul in 1980, over 2,000 persons had just
been killed in cold blood at Kwangju. The universities were closed and
patrolled by armed soldiers. The legislature had been sent packing, and
when I rode a bicycle too close to these empty chambers, a tank lowered its gun
in my direction.
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