| |
Korean War: The problem of
memory
By Yu Bin
When the guns
finally fell silent across the Korean Peninsula on July
27, 1953, about 2 million people were dead, many more
wounded, and countless dislocated and separated from
their families. Ironically, all this occurred in a
three-year "police action". Now, 50 years later, North
Korea and the United States are "drifting toward war,
perhaps as early as this year", as former US secretary
of defense William Perry was quoted in the Washington
Post on July 15.
Still forgotten,
Hollywood-style
The looming of another war in
Korea, however, contrasts sharply with the lack of
memory of the war for the Americans in a brave new world
of "preemption". Indeed, it is almost a cliche to say
that the war has been forgotten, deliberately or not.
A cursory survey of some prominent online
bookstores quickly turns up a dozen or so titles about
the Korean War with the term "forgotten", including
Blair Clay Jr, The Forgotten War: America in Korea
1950-53 (2003); History Book Club, Remember the
Forgotten War: Korea: 1950-1953 (2000); Philip West
et al, Remembering the Forgotten War: The Korean War
Through Literature and Art (2000); John Melady,
Korea: Canada's Forgotten War (1988). The
Military History Titles 2003 of Random House Inc lists a
mere five book titles for the Korean War, as against 113
books for the Vietnam War.
Even Hollywood is
uncharacteristically reluctant about getting movies on
the Korean War out to viewers. In the past five decades,
Richard Hooker's M*A*S*H (1968) and the more
popular bittersweet television series of the same name
(1969-83) were perhaps the only enduring, though
distorted, memories of the war to make it to the screen.
And even these Hollywood imprints were actually a
disguised protest, in the format of black humor, against
the ongoing Vietnam War.
Part of the reason for
Hollywood's neglect relates to the outcome of the Korean
War. For the United States, the war was the first in
which it did not prevail. Compared with its total
victory in World Wars I and II and clear failure in the
Vietnam War, Korea falls in more ambiguous and
inconvenient middle ground. It is something that defies
the typical "all or nothing" mentality of Jacksonianism.
Named after president Andrew Jackson (served
1829-37), Jacksonianism represents a United States of
small-town pioneers turning their back on Europe and is
the philosophical root of America's isolationism when it
was weak. In US diplomatic history, it has easily turned
to crusading interventionism when it has been strong. In
real policymaking, Jacksonianism purports that if a war
is worth fighting, it has to be won and, if it is not
won, it has to be abandoned (Henry Kissinger, Does
America Need a Foreign Policy: Toward a Diplomacy for
the 21st Century, 2003). Anything in between is
incomprehensible and therefore immoral. For Hollywood,
which thrives on dramatizing and sensationalizing real
life, ordinariness and scoreless endings seldom sell.
In real life, however, the Korean War is indeed
forgotten, except by its veterans. The Korean War
Memorial in Washington, DC, was not built until 1995, 13
years after the Vietnam War Memorial was dedicated in
1982 and 42 years after the ending of the Korean War in
1953.
This gross neglect and ignorance of the
war and its consequences can hardly be justified given
the high US death toll - 39,000 in three years, as
compared with 59,000 in the 11-year Vietnam War
(1964-75). Moreover, the Korean War was never officially
declared "over". What all the belligerents did in 1953
was to sign a truce to end fighting, but not a peace
agreement. A total of 37,000 US troops still remain in
Korea to date. Their presence, however, seems
increasingly controversial for both the locals and for
themselves.
Bush's 'hostile
neglect'
It remains to be debated to what extent
the memory eclipse of the war relates to the current US
policy on Korea, or lack of a policy according to
William Perry. The policy of President George W Bush's
team, however, seems to be best described as "hostile
neglect", deliberate or not.
One characteristic
of the Bush policy on Korea is its drifting nature.
Although both Iraq and North Korea had been defined as
members of the so-called "axis of evil", the Bush
administration chose to leave the smoldering crisis in
Korea largely unattended while preoccupying itself with
Iraq. Thus, from the engagement policy of the last
months of Bill Clinton's administration to Bush's
refusal to support former South Korean president Kim
Dae-jung's "Sunshine Policy", from listing North Korea
as part of the axis of evil to putting it again on
Pentagon's nuclear hit list, from the "Bush Doctrine" of
preemption to a demonstrative Iraq war, the current US
administration has yet to make any genuine diplomatic
effort to defuse the ongoing crisis in Korea.
Such neglect, intentional or not, may eventually
lead to an overreaction in the era of preemption.
Paradoxically, the United States also neglected Korea
before the outbreak of the Korean War by excluding Korea
from its East Asian defense parameter. This may have
given the impression of a less committed US in the Far
East, leading to the full-scale attack on the South by
the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) in June
1950. This time, however, US preemption may well be
accompanied by "nuclear first use", as the Bush
administration won in May congressional endorsement to
begin research on a new generation of small-yield
nuclear warheads (below five kilotons).
The
Pentagon's latest war plan (No 5,030) disclosed on
Monday by the US News and World Reports indicates a
series of provocative tactics to destabilize, demoralize
and disrupt North Korea's economic, political and
military infrastructure. It becomes increasingly clear -
and worrisome, according to Perry and other analysts -
that the Bush team will not accept anything short of
regime change in North Korea. In this respect, the
Korean War is not forgotten. Its outcome in 1953 has
never been accepted as final. Now it is time to score a
real military touchdown (American football phrase for
earning 6 points), plus an extra point for a
regime-change kick.
Geopolitical
realignment
Regardless of how much the conflict
is remembered, the world was never the same after the
war in Korea. The Cold War became a globalized system by
extending it from Europe to Asia. Indeed, Korea became
the "fault line" between East and West, communism and
democracies, command economies and capitalist ones, and
maritime and continental powers. For the United States,
Asian communists - be they Chinese, Vietnamese or North
Koreans - were perhaps the worst commies. They were both
"colored" ("yellow" meaning worse than their European
white comrades) and "colorless" (meaning they were not
Asians but part of the international communist
conspiracy). They needed to be contained, rolled back,
and/or divided. The legacies of divided states of the
Cold War remain in Asia today.
Despite the two
hot "limited wars" the United States fought in Asia
during the otherwise cold Cold War, it was in Asia that
the Cold War's deep freeze finally started to melt. The
two limited wars also exposed the limits of the US
power. As a result, US policymakers began exploring
strategic opportunities with persistence, subtlety, and
pragmatic diplomacy, eventually undermining Soviet
communism and extending the US free-market system to its
allies as well as to former enemies such as China and
Vietnam.
Geopolitical and geoeconomic
changes, however, are never linear. Liked or not,
wartime friends and foes during the Korean War continued
to evolve into their opposites. On both sides of the
war, alliance relations have encountered considerable
shifts and constraints. For a long time, China tasted
the limits of its friendly relationship with its Soviet
and Korean allies (see Yu Bin, China's dilemma in the current Korean
crisis
,
PacNet Newsletter, #08 February 20). Until the recent
nuclear crisis, the United States was among the biggest
donors of economic aid to North Korea, while China
absorbed the largest export volume from South Korea.
More recently, and for the first time since the end of
the Korean War, both Beijing and Washington are being
challenged by their respective Korean friends. America's
drifting ties with Seoul and Beijing's strained
relations with Pyongyang only add complexity to the
danger of a mismanaged crisis.
Despite
these geostrategic shifts in East Asia, perceptions of
the right-wingers and neo-cons in the United States are
largely frozen in the distant past. While major US media
tend to describe North Korea as "China's child" (William
Safire, "N Korea: China's child", New York Times,
December 26, 2002), some key policymakers such as
William Cohen and Arizona Republican Senator John McCain
step up their effort to urge Japan to reverse its
non-nuclear policy in order to "punish China" for not
putting enough pressure on North Korea (see Ayako Doi,
Unforeseen consequences: Japan's
emerging nuclear debate
, PacNet
Newsletter, #12 March 13).
One wonders what
would happen if the world's only constitutionally
pacifist nation jumps to nuclear weapons and is eager,
perhaps more than any other country, to taste its
newfound freedom and muscle in dealing with its
neighbors (Article 9 of the Japanese constitution reads:
"Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on
justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce
war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or
use of force as means of settling international
disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the
preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well
as other war potential, will never be maintained. The
right of belligerency of the state will not be
recognized").
Japan stirs, with a selective
memory
To be fair, the United States would have
to let Japan take the championship in the contest of
collective amnesia regarding the Korean issue. The most
recent case was the near national hysteria in Japan
regarding North Korea's "grand confession" of its
abduction of 11 Japanese citizens. Not only did Japan
fail to cash such an unusual confession into a
historical turning point for normalizing relations with
Pyongyang in the wake of Prime Minister Junichiro
Koizumi's visit to North Korea last September, but it
also chose not to relate this inhumane abduction of 11
Japanese to Japan's shameful "comfort women" policy
during World War II. The forced prostitution of hundreds
of thousands of Asian women, including many Koreans, has
not been officially acknowledged by Japan nor adequately
compensated for.
Both - the abductions and the
comfort women - were immoral. But for Japan, a nation
that chooses to remember Hiroshima but not Pearl Harbor,
let alone the Rape of Nanjing, Korea was the root of the
"Japan problem" for much of the 20th century. In the age
of imperialism, Korea, along with Taiwan, was the first
taste of blood for the Empire of the Sun before it
released its full energy on Mother Russian (the 1904-05
Russo-Japanese War) and Uncle Sam (Pearl Harbor, Hawaii,
1941). Although Western Marxism originated from Germany,
it was Japan's humiliating defeat of the two continental
powers of Russia and China that shook the foundation of
their traditional systems, thus paving the way for the
rise of radical socio-political forces such as
communism. Toward the mid-20th century, it took the
combined power of three continental states - China, the
US and Russia, plus nuclear weapons - to pacify the much
smaller island country of Japan.
Today, 100
years after Japan's annexation of Korea, the peninsula
again becomes a convenient detour for Japan to rearm and
nuclearize itself in the name of becoming a "normal
state". Since April 2002, when some Japanese hawks
started to break the sacred taboo of talking about
nuclear weapons, the nation has quietly and effectively
shaken off its constitutional constraints, thanks to the
US "war against terrorism".
Now Japan's
Self-Defense Forces are overseas. The nation is actively
acquiring power projection (midair refueling and small,
disguised aircraft carriers) and missile defense
capabilities. With the launching of its own spy
satellites, Japan made the first move toward building an
independent intelligence-gathering capability, which by
itself is crucial for an independent defense policy. At
a time when US officials still publicly commit to a
diplomatic solution of the Korean nuclear crisis,
Koizumi's hawkish Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba is
toying with the idea of preemption against North Korea
(Howard French, "Japan grapples openly on military
might", New York Times, July 22). If a nation worships
perfection of almost anything - be it Chinese
calligraphy and tea drinking, Kamikaze suicide tactics,
or home electronics - preemption may well be the next
obsession. And history is not without precedence (Pearl
Harbor).
This worst scenario may not be
impossible for a nation with highly selective memories
of what it did to its neighbors, including Korea, in the
past. It is both hypocritical and dangerous if a nation
carefully preserves the memories of every war-related
fatality of many centuries, while consistently
minimizing and whitewashing its overseas atrocities in
the past. Indeed, the unique one-party democracy in
Japan today does not seem very different from the Taisho
democracy of the 1920s before militarism crept into the
mainstream politics in the wake of the Great Depression.
At the onset of the 21st century and after 13 years of
economic stagnation, it is the defenders of the "Peace
Constitution" in Japan who are now on the defensive,
while hawks and ultra-nationalists make the loudest
noise for an audience that is largely ignorant of
Japan's past.
Back to the past, for the
future
History seldom mechanically repeats
itself. Historical analogies, therefore, should be
treated with caution. Nonetheless, history is also a
stream that carries with it all the burdens and cheers,
glory and shame, wisdom and stupidity, as well as
unavoidable consequences for one's actions into the
present and toward the future. In East Asia, Korea has
been a place where major powers reciprocate their
resolves, power, and prudence. Historical lessons serve
as a reliable guild for the present and future, however,
only for those who respect and are honest with it.
It is still possible to avert the current slide
toward another war in Korea. For this, the Bush
administration should realize that there are limits for
any balancing act in the age of weapons of mass
destruction. Being a US ally, friend, or enemies of the
enemy is not a license to obtain maximum freedom of
action. Twenty years ago, Saddam Hussein was America's
de facto ally and now has had to be toppled by the same
person (Donald Rumsfeld) who went to Baghdad in 1983 and
shook hands with the dictator. If the United States
genuinely intends to preserve Pax Americana, it
should not merely care about its own security,
credibility, and supremacy. As the world's sole
superpower with vital interests in East Asia, Washington
should exercise moral, political, and tactical
constraints over Japan, whose Shinto religion simply
does not have any moral content. It is not accidental
that Japan exports almost everything except its
religion. Ultimately, Washington has a moral
responsibility to prevent nuclear mushrooms from going
up again in the region. For this goal, a more distant
memory needs to be recovered to shed light on the
current US inability or unwillingness to move toward a
diplomatic solution of the Korean nuclear crisis.
Almost 100 years ago, US president Theodore
Roosevelt brokered a peace settlement (the Treaty of
Portsmouth) between Russia and Japan after the 1904-05
Russo-Japanese War over Korea. For this, Roosevelt won
the Nobel Peace Prize. By any contemporary standard, the
accord was imperialistic for its acquiescence of Japan's
conquest of Korea in exchange for Japan's tacit
agreement on a US takeover of the Philippines, while the
interests of the Koreans were completely ignored. It
was, nonetheless, a diplomatic solution between major
imperialist powers and an effort to avoid further
conflict and suffering. Such a precedent, no matter how
flawed, should be the minimum benchmark against which
today's statesmen and policies are judged 50 years after
the bloodiest limited war during the bloodiest century
in human history.
Yu Bin, PhD, is
associate professor of political science at Wittenberg
University and senior research associate of Shanghai
Institute of American Studies. He is a regular
contributor to Comparative Connections of the
Pacific Forum in Hawaii. His most recent books
include Power of the Moment: America and the World
After 9-11 (Beijing: New China Press, 2002) and
Mao's Generals Remember Korea (University Press of
Kansas, 2001).
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
