Die for a Tie: How the Korean War Began

[davidswanson]

An excerpt from the just published book "War Is A Lie" http://warisalie.org

After two world wars with a depression in between, none of which Americans had submitted to voluntarily, President Harry S Truman had some bad news. If we didn't set off immediately to fight communists in Korea, they would shortly invade the United States. That this was recognized as patent nonsense is perhaps suggested by the fact that, once again, Americans had to be drafted if they were going to go off and fight. The Korean War was waged in supposed defense of the way of life in the United States and in supposed defense of South Korea against aggression by North Korea. Of course it had been the arrogant genius of the Allies to slice the Korean nation in half at the end of World War II.

On June 25, 1950, the north and the south each claimed the other side had invaded. The first reports from U.S. military intelligence were that the south had invaded the north. Both sides agreed that the fighting began near the west coast at the Ongjin peninsula, meaning that Pyongyang was a logical target for an invasion by the south, but an invasion by the north there made little sense as it led to a small peninsula and not to Seoul. Also on June 25th, both sides announced the capture by the south of the northern city of Haeju, and the U.S. military confirmed that. On June 26th, the U.S. ambassador sent a cable confirming a southern advance: "Northern armor and artillery are withdrawing all along the line."

South Korean President Syngman Rhee had been conducting raids of the north for a year and had announced in the spring his intention to invade the north, moving most of his troops to the 38th parallel, the imaginary line along which the north and south had been divided. In the north only a third of available troops were positioned near the border. Nonetheless, Americans were told that North Korea had attacked South Korea, and had done so at the behest of the Soviet Union as part of a plot to take over the world for communism.

Arguably, whichever side attacked, this was a civil war. The Soviet Union was not involved, and the United States ought not to have been. South Korea was not the United States, and was not in fact anywhere near the United States. Nonetheless, we entered another "defensive" war. We persuaded the United Nations that the north had invaded the south, something the Soviet Union might have been expected to veto had it been behind the war, but the Soviet Union was boycotting the United Nations and took no interest. We won some countries' votes at the United Nations by lying to them that the south had captured tanks manned by Russians. U.S. officials publicly declared Soviet involvement but privately doubted it.

The Soviet Union, in fact, did not want a war and on July 6th its deputy foreign minister told the British ambassador in Moscow that it wanted a peaceful settlement. The U.S. ambassador in Moscow thought this was genuine. Washington didn't care. The North, our government said, had violated the 38th parallel, that sacred line of national sovereignty. But as soon as U.S. General Douglas MacArthur got the chance, he proceeded, with President Truman's approval, right across that line, into the north, and up to the border of China. MacArthur had been drooling for a war with China and threatening it, and asked for permission to attack, which the Joint Chiefs of Staff refused. Eventually, Truman fired MacArthur. Attacking a power plant in North Korea that supplied China, and bombing a border city, was the closest MacArthur got to what he wanted.

But the U.S. threat to China brought the Chinese and Russians into the war, a war that cost Korea two million civilian lives and the United States 37,000 soldiers, while turning Seoul and Pyongyang both into piles of rubble. Many of the dead had been killed at close range, slaughtered unarmed and in cold-blood by both sides. And the border was right back where it had been, but the hatred directed across that border greatly increased. When the war ended, having accomplished no good for anyone but weapons makers, "people emerged from a mole-like existence in caves and tunnels to find a nightmare in the bright of day."

David Swanson is the author of "War Is A Lie" http://warisalie.org

[Obamanaut]

1. Interestingly (to me, anyway) that very same president sent the first

advisors to VietNam.

[WinkyDink]

2. Because, as I posted elsewhere, the U.S. was and is an ally of France.

Hindsight is amazing, no?

[Obamanaut]

3. And as in this particular OP, VietNam was/is not even close to the

US.

And, the French had their own nearly 20 year agenda with VietNam (aka Indochina), which had nothing to do with the US.

And, the US was contributing/paying a large percentage of the French war bill in VietNam for the last couple of years of the French involvement there.

And, the French got out of VietNam in large part due to the outcry of French citizens. Fast forward 20 years in the US, similar outcry.

And, being an "ally" doesn't make it right to jump in on a fight when it isn't your fight.

And, it cost 50 something thousand dead Americans, many thousands of maimed ones, and who knows how many maimed and dead civilians.

How easy would it have been for the US administration to say something like "I'm sorry France, but it ain't my problem."

If the US was not the "Policemen to the world", we might not even be in all the '-stan' countries today.

[somone]

10. French involvement was much longer

France started its Vietnam war in 1858, and stayed there for nearly 100 years.

[Obamanaut]

15. Thanks. That's worse than the 20 I gave them. Much. nt

[Javaman]

13. Why we were in Viet Nam...

Two reasons,

1) De Gaulle used the US to get more funds to fight in Vietnam under the pretense, that if we didn't, he would allow the French Communist party a say in the French Government.
The US cought between a rock and mccarthyism couldn't back down. The French played us like a harp. And we began our long slow spiral of stupidity by supporting foriegn colonialism.

2) The rubber plantations were huge business for the likes of firestone and goodyear. When the US appeared to balk at first regarding the French demands, the tire corporations used their huge influence to sway various congress peoples opinions. Couple this with their funding of various anti-communist propaganda programs. This was done all so they could get their hands on those rubber planations.

The route that brought the US in to Viet Nam is far from a direct one, but its basis is mostly in money and resources. aka so what else is new?

The concept of defeating communism as the heart of the US plan to invade and occupy Viet Nam played well to the mouth breathing majority of the US population when we first went in. The public, to a large extent, was still very innocent and more or less still trusted the government to do the right thing.

Just like all wars, they are all fought for resources. But todays wars, trying to fight one with corporate interests as the focal point, will never ever get you a "win", it will just get you more war. Because as Gen. Smedly Butler once said and wrote about, "war is a racket". And the last thing a corporation wants is an end to the gravy train, especially when it brings in the bucks to the US.

[JVS]

32. Are you sure about the tire companies caring about the rubber plantations.

My understanding of the history of the plastics industry is that while natural rubber was an important strategic concern in the early part of WWII (hence rationing of gas to save tires), that faced with the loss of rubber growing areas, the US was forced to develop synthetic rubber based on oil and that they eventually developed it into something better than the real thing.

[former9thward]

22. Truman sent advisors to Vietnam?

[Obamanaut]

27. Advisors were sent during the Truman administration, and recall "The

buck stops here."

[proteus_lives]

4. "But the U.S. threat to China brought the Chinese and Russians into the war"

Horse-shit.

That war was the child of Stalin and Mao.

[davidswanson]

7. how so?

thanks for explaining

[tuckessee]

14. No, it's true.

Anyone who has read Edwin Hoyt's basic trilogy on the Korean knows this statement about Chinese military involvement is true.

China was hestitant to enter a major war so shortly after their own civil war. They begged the Americans to stop their advance and were even willing to write off communist North Korea. But MacArthur didn't stop, the Chinese feared American incursions into Manchuria (a region, we should add, that has been on imperial want lists for a long time. Just ask the Japanese) so relucatnatly they rolled in with their antiquated and unreliable army.

Sometimes history is a tough pill to swallow.

[pnorman]

16. Much of about China '"getting sucked into the war", is well covered in that I. F. Stone book

It was very difficult to get at the truth, half a century ago. You practically had to be an expert, with plenty of access to a few major libraries, But now? Much is publicly available some where, and JUDICIOUS use of the internet will get at something close to the truth.

[pnorman]

17. Bruce Cumings

"The Korean War did not begin on June 25, 1950, much special pleading and argument to the contrary. If it did not begin then, Kim II Sung could not have "started" it then, either, but only at some earlier point. As we search backward for that point, we slowly grope toward the truth that civil wars do not start: they come. They originate in multiple causes, with blame enough to go around for everyone- and blame enough to include Americans who thoughtlessly divided Korea and then reestablished the colonial government machinery and the Koreans who served it. How many Koreans might still be alive had not that happened? Blame enough to include a Soviet Union likewise unconcerned with Korea's ancient integrity and determined to "build socialism" whether Koreans wanted their kind of system or not. How many Koreans might still be alive had that not happened? And then, as we peer inside Korea to inquire about Korean actions that might have avoided national division and fratricidal conflict, we get a long list indeed.<4>"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Cumings

I have his trilogy on the origins of the Korean War somewhere, and I'll try to search them out. Also, I'll check out that Hoyt trilogy. Thanks for what might be an important source.

On edit: Google returns a confusing collection of hits on Edwin Hoyt. Could you provide the titles in that trilogy?

[pnorman]

18. "THE COLD WAR AND ITS ORIGINS 1917-1960" by D. F. Fleming

That's a 2 volume work by a well respected historian, that goes into the Korean War in some detail. I had come on it in a library about 30 years ago, and checked it out twice. In my opinion, the author seemed to be more sympathetic to the Soviet Union than was common then, but not to a damaging extent.

I'm a Questia.com subscriber, and I see that those 2 volumes are carried there. I'll go through them later.

[pnorman]

28. "That war was the child of Stalin and Mao."

.
.
.
The actual invasion of the South by the North took place on June 25th 1950. The Security Council of the United Nations met the same day. The Russian delegation to the Security Council did not attend the meeting as they were boycotting the United Nations for recognising Chiang Kai-shek’s government in Taiwan as the official government for China whilst ignoring Mao’s communist regime in Beijing. Therefore, the obvious use of the veto (which it is assumed the USSR would have used in this case) did not occur.

At the meeting, America claimed that North Korea had broken world peace by attacking South Korea. America called on North Korea to withdraw to the 38th Parallel. Nine out of the eleven countries in the Security Council supported this view. Russia was absent and one abstained.

On June 27th 1950, America called on the United Nations to use force to get the North Koreans out as they had ignored the Security Council’s resolution of June 25th. This was also voted for and once again the Russians could not use their veto as they were still boycotting the United Nations.
.
.
.

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/united_nations_korean_war.htm

It should be obvious to most here, that this was a civil war between the clients of the two remaining Super Powers. And as is frequently the case, clients get unruly and forced the hands of their sponsors. Russia would have been in a position to give her client VITAL support in that Security Council, but did NOT because she was absent for that crucial time frame.

China? Only AFTER she was directly threatened by MacArthur's Eighth Army at the Yalu, did she move in.

[TheWraith]

5. This narrative in no way conforms to actual history. nt

[leveymg]

6. Izzy Stone's "Hidden History of the Korean War" is a must-read.

The Hidden History was suppressed at the time, but was perhaps, the greatest muckraking journalism since Joseph Pulitzer's critical coverage of financial scandals and gunboat diplomacy surrounding the Panama Canal led Teddy Roosevelt and JP Morgan to chase him out of the country. Pulitzer was forced to live offshore on his boat for years.

Izzy Stone also came in for more than a little harassment by the State Department and other agencies during the McCarthy era.

[pnorman]

9. Here's the webpage of I. F. Stone:

http://www.ifstone.org/hidden_history.php

I was startled to find that book in the Fort Ord post library in 1952, and probably did my "record" little good by checking it out a couple of times. I discovered the probable reason: Gen. McClure had been treated very shabbily by Gen. McArthur in Korea, and was abruptly sent out of the country despite his excellent military achievements there. That was briefly mentioned in that book. McClure ended up as post commander of Fort Ord, and he must have seen ton it that it was in the library.

Stone did some excellent investigative journalism, and the book is well worth reading. Although the publisher was the (left wing) Monthly Review, Stone made almost all of his citations from the MSM. But very significantly, it was from the European editions of the NYT & Herald Tribune, rather than the NY editions.

[leveymg]

11. Looking back at that book, we see a blueprint for the US wars that followed, including the present

GWOT and the escalation of tensions with Iran. Here's a particularly telling extract of a review of the book: http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/feature.doc

How and why did U.S. President Truman so quickly decide by June 27 to commit the U.S. military to battle in South Korea? Stone makes a strong case that there were those in the U.S. government and military who saw a war in Korea and the resulting instability in East Asia as in the U.S. national interest. Stone presents the ideas and actions of them, including John Foster Dulles, General Douglas MacArthur, President Syngman Rhee and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, which appear to amount to a willingness to see the June 25 military action by North Korea as another Pearl Harbor in order to "commit the United States more strongly against Communism in the Far East." (p. 21). Their reasoning may have been, Stone thought, the sooner a war with China and/or Russia the better before both become stronger. President Truman removed Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, according to Stone's account, because Johnson had been selling this doctrine of preventive war. (p. 93)

Stone shows that Truman committed the U. S. military to the war in Korea, then went to the U.N. for sanctions against North Korea. "It was neither honorable nor wise," Stone argues, "for the U.N. under pressure from an interested great power to condemn a country for aggression without investigation and without hearings its side of the case." (p. 50) But that is what the U. S. insisted should happen using, Stone argues, distorted reports to rush its case.

Then when the war came to a stalemate at the 38th Parallel, Stone makes a strong case that U.S. Army headquarters provoked or created incidents to derail the ceasefire negotiations. When the North Koreans and Chinese had ceded on Nov. 4, 1952 to the three demands of the U.N. side, the U. S. military spread a story that "The Communists had brutally murdered 5,500 American prisoners." The talks were being dragged out, the U.S. military argued, because "The communists don't want to have to answer questions about what happened to their prisoners" and they are lower than "barbarians." (pp. 324-25) At no time after these reports were these "atrocities" reported again or documented. But hope of a ceasefire subsided.

Stone takes the story in time only a little beyond the dismissal of MacArthur on April 11, 1951. He quotes press reports as late as January 1952 that "there still could be American bombing and naval blockade of Red China if Korean talks fail."(1)

The evidence which Stone presents is solid but circumstantial. What else could it be, with the official documents still unavailable? In the 1960s, the Rand Corporation, a major think tank originally funded by the U.S. Air Force, conducted studies with additional information and according to one reviewer came to "almost identical conclusions" as Stone.(2)

Stone's telling of the history of the Korean War, emphasizing the opportunistic response by the forces in the U.S. advocating rollback and also downplaying the role of the Soviet Union challenged the dominant assumption that this was Stalin's war. "Until the release of Western documents in the 1970s, prompted a new wave of literature on the war, his remained a minority view."(3)

[davidswanson]

12. thanks

for posting this

[pnorman]

24. It was the first MAJOR war that was accomplished by Executive Action.

Its predecessor, WW2, may be the last one in our life time to have been declared by Congress,as per the US Constitution!

In another recent DU thread, I may have treated Truman pretty harshly. but in this instance, he tried to keep that action from getting WILDLY out of control. Sacking Gen. McArthur was political suicide, and he well knew it, But he did it anyhow!

[DonCoquixote]

8. so the author

Would rather have Seoul look like Pyongyang?

[HEyHEY]

21. And ignores the fact that now even China says the North Started it

[pnorman]

25. Both sides had been engaging in provocative and BLOODY incursions,

for many months before the formal outbreak of the war.Never mind what China says NOW, which side "started it" isn't all that clear-cut. In any event, it was a civil war between clients of two super powers.

[ProudDad]

19. The "Permanent War Economy(tm)"

propping up capitalism since 1944...

It's time IT died!!!

[HEyHEY]

20. That is the biggest piece of shit I've ever read.

[hayu_lol]

23. Another effort by Swanson to rewrite history...

actually, it was MacArthur who said "Never fight a war on the Asian mainland." The US Army was totally unprepared to defend themselves, much less protect the south Koreans. Were it not for the prompt arrival of US Marines, used to supplement the Army forces in Korea, South Korea would have been taken by the North. Our forces were, in the early days of the 'police action', in danger of being driven into the ocean at the southern end of the Korean peninsula.

Arrival of US troops was measured in weeks instead of days.

Ah well, what do I know? (Korean Vet).

[pnorman]

26. Yes, MacArthur said that, but it was WELL AFTER the Korean War

But when he was in command, he REPEATEDLY went well beyond his UN mandate, while thumbing his nose at Truman. Shortly after the Inchon landing, a Peace Treaty (rather than an "armistice") was a distinct possibility, and at very favorable terms to the UN participants. But, without authority, MacArthur charged northward, until he openly threatened China (and Russia). The rest is history.

By that time, he was coked to the gills on "Christian :evangelical fervor", and hoped to put an end to all those godless atheists NOW! Does that ring a bell?

[tuckessee]

30. Did you know Dugout Doug also called for an invasion of China.....

....and the reinstallation of Chiang Kai-Shek in Peking? He did so up until the day he was sacked.

[bobthedrummer]

29. kick-off for the 2nd half is coming up in a few hours n/t

[Catherina]

31. Too late to recommend. Thank you n/t