[Peace-discuss] Korean/Vietnam/AfPak wars

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Recently on "AWARE on the Air" we discussed why the Obama administration is 
inhibited in its desire to use its air power to control AfPak even more brutally 
than it does now. This book gives some of the background. --CGE]

	NY Times July 21, 2010
	Carpet-Bombing Falsehoods About a War That’s Little Understood
	By DWIGHT GARNER

	THE KOREAN WAR
	By Bruce Cumings
	Illustrated. 288 pages. Modern Library. $24.

North Korea, like Cuba, is a country suspended in time, one that
exists off modernity’s grid. It’s a place where the cold war never
ended, where the heirloom paranoia is taken down and polished daily.

Korea’s cold war chill is heating up. Four months ago a South
Korean warship was sunk, and a South Korean-led international
investigative team concluded that North Korea was responsible.
Next week the United States and South Korea will begin large-scale
naval exercises off the coasts of the Korean Peninsula and Japan
in a show of force.

The world will be watching, and here’s a book that American
policymakers may hope it won’t be reading: Bruce Cumings’s “Korean
War,” a powerful revisionist history of America’s intervention in
Korea. Beneath its bland title, Mr. Cumings’s book is a
squirm-inducing assault on America’s moral behavior during the
Korean War, a conflict that he says is misremembered when it is
remembered at all. It’s a book that puts the reflexive
anti-Americanism of North Korea’s leaders into sympathetic
historical context.

Mr. Cumings is chairman of the history department at the
University of Chicago and the author of “The Origins of the Korean
War,” a respected two-volume survey. He mows down a host of myths
about the war in his short new book, which is a distillation of
his own scholarship and that of many other historians. But he
begins by mowing down David Halberstam.

Mr. Cumings, who admires Mr. Halberstam’s writing about Vietnam,
plucks the wings from “The Coldest Winter,” Mr. Halberstam’s 2007
book about the Korean War. The book, he argues, makes all the
classic mistakes popular American historians tend to make about
this little understood war.

Mr. Halberstam’s book is among those that “evince almost no
knowledge of Korea or its history” and “barely get past two or
three Korean names,” Mr. Cumings writes. “Halberstam mentions the
U.S. Military Government from 1945 to 1948, which deeply shaped
postwar Korean history — in one sentence,” he adds. “There is
absolutely nothing on the atrocious massacres of this war, or the
American incendiary bombing campaigns.” Ouch.

Americans need to get past the idea, Mr. Cumings says, that the
Korean War was a “discrete, encapsulated” story that began in
1950, when the United States intervened to help push the Communist
north out of the south of Korea, and ended in 1953, after the war
bogged down in a stalemate. The United States succeeded in
containment, establishing the 2.5-mile-wide demilitarized zone
that still runs through Korea’s middle, but failed miserably at
the war for the north, an attempt at Communist rollback.

Mr. Cumings argues that the Korean War was a civil war with long,
tangled historical roots, one in which America had little business
meddling. He notes how “appallingly dirty” the war was. In terms
of civilian slaughter, he declares, “our ostensibly democratic
ally was the worst offender, contrary to the American image of the
North Koreans as fiendish terrorists.”

Mr. Cumings likens the indiscriminate American bombing of North
Korea to genocide. He writes that American soldiers took part in,
or observed, civilian atrocities not dissimilar to those at My
Lai. An official inquiry is needed into some of these events, he
writes, for any kind of healing to begin. (He also writes that
this war, during which nearly 37,000 American soldiers died,
deserves a memorial as potent and serious as Maya Lin’s Vietnam
memorial.)

Among the most important things to understand about North Korean
behavior then and now, Mr. Cumings writes, is the longtime enmity
between Korea and Japan. Japan took Korea as a colony in 1910,
with America’s blessing, and replaced the Korean language with
Japanese. Japan humiliated and brutalized Korea in other ways.
(During World War II the Japanese Army forcibly turned tens of
thousands of Korean women into sex slaves known as “comfort
women.”) About this history Mr. Cumings writes, “Neither Korea nor
Japan has ever gotten over it.”

North Korea, which is virulently anti-Japan, remains bitter and
fearful of that country and of the United States. It will do
whatever it can to stay out of the hands of South Korea, where
leaders have long-standing historical ties to Japan.

Mr. Cumings, in “The Korean War,” details the north’s own
atrocities, and acknowledges that current “North Korean political
practice is reprehensible.” But he says that we view that country
through “Orientalist bigotry,” seeing only its morbid qualities.
We wrongly label the country Stalinist, he argues. “There is no
evidence in the North Korean experience of the mass violence
against whole classes of people or the wholesale ‘purge’ that so
clearly characterized Stalinism,” he writes.

The most eye-opening sections of “The Korean War” detail America’s
saturation bombing of Korea’s north. “What hardly any Americans
know or remember,” Mr. Cumings writes, “is that we carpet-bombed
the north for three years with next to no concern for civilian
casualties.” The United States dropped more bombs in Korea
(635,000 tons, as well as 32,557 tons of napalm) than in the
entire Pacific theater during World War II. Our logic seemed to
be, he says, that “they are savages, so that gives us the right to
shower napalm on innocents.”

“The Korean War” has its share of awkward sentences, and Mr.
Cumings makes at least one mistake of his own, referring to
Michael Herr’s 1970 nonfiction book “Dispatches,” about the
Vietnam War, as a novel.

But this lean book may put some readers in mind of “Wartime,” Paul
Fussell’s acidic attack on some of the comforting myths about
World War II. Mr. Cumings’s prose, at its best, is reminiscent of
Mr. Fussell’s stylized, literate high dudgeon.

Witness the carnage in this passage from early in “The Korean
War”: “Here was the Vietnam War we came to know before Vietnam —
gooks, napalm, rapes, whores, an unreliable ally, a cunning enemy,
fundamentally untrained G.I.’s fighting a war their top generals
barely understood, fragging of officers, contempt for the
know-nothing civilians back home, devilish battles indescribable
even to loved ones, press handouts from Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s
headquarters apparently scripted by comedians or lunatics, an
ostensible vision of bringing freedom and liberty to a sordid
dictatorship run by servants of Japanese imperialism.”

This year is the 60th anniversary of the Korean War’s conventional
start. Even from this distant vantage point, Mr. Cumings writes,
there are still multiple unpleasant facts Americans have not
learned about this war, “truths that most Americans do not know
and perhaps don’t want to know, truths sometimes as shocking as
they are unpalatable to American self-esteem.” His book is a
bitter pill, a sobering corrective.



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