The Koreas’ and America’s Unfinished or All-Out of War

"We lost thirty thousand dead in Korea to save face for the United States and the Untied Nations, not to save South Korea for the South Koreans, and it was undoubtedly worth it. Soviet expectations about the behavior of the United States are one of the most valuable assets we possess in world affairs." -Thomas Schelling (RAND) in Arms and Influence

Unlike most Western Powers, the United States is unfortunately still seduced by the idea that it can fix something after the fact. This might be a comforting and visceral concept, especially when a nation is confronted with nearly insurmountable odds, or with something that is insolvable, like an ongoing conflict. But those out-of-sight and out-of-mind problems have a way of sometimes returning in more ghastly and terrible forms.

The current shelling and threats for an all-out war between North and South Korea is applicable and relevant to the fix-it-later and out-of-sight/out-of-mind syndrome. In some ways, the Korean War merely passed the responsibilities of a major crisis and the conclusions to a perpetually horrible conflict onto future generations. At the time, and specifically for the United States, it might have seemed like an intelligent and strategic solution, but it was not. It was actually an abnegation in behaviorism.

Thomas Schelling and other elite economists, politicists, militarists and nuclear physicists, engineers, and scientists, who advised the Truman Administration and worked for the RAND Corporation, never quite understood this. Since their main task was to create new weapons systems that were faster and cheaper, and since they were only obsessed with how new methods, techniques and strategies of warfare could be used to benefit the Pentagon and American Empire, they were always mystified about human behavior.

The problem with Thomas Schelling and the RAND Corporation was that there were no moralists, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and definitely no theologians. They were (and still are) true believers in military strength and power. Their chief executive officer, after hearing about the questionable legitimacy of the Allied Dresden bombing, that killed over 200,000 Germans, said: "We must not get soft. War must be destructive and to a certain extent inhuman and ruthless."(1) This is way of thinking would guide the American Empire during the Cold War years (and after).

After thirty-five years of Japanese occupation and right after World War II, in 1950 Kim Il Sung, a socialist dictator, ordered North Korean troops over the 38th parallel into South Korea. South Korean forces were quickly routed and in a state of confusion. As millions of civilians and wounded soldiers flooded into Seoul, North Korean loyalists in the South quickly switched sides, as did a number of public figures who no longer believed in the South and its right-wing dictatorship.

Truman's advisors (RAND) initiated a total war. However, the American public was taught to refer to it as a war of "containment," or a "limited war." Hundreds of thousands of American and U.N. forces drove the North Koreans back to the Yalu River. Kim Il Sung was finally rescued, though, when U.S. military generals tried to usurp the authority of the presidency by threatening to attack China. The Chinese intervened on behalf of North Korea. In the midst of a stalemate and armistice that was eventually signed, a demilitarized zone was established. Tens of thousands of troops now faced each other.

Meanwhile, Korea was blanketed by U.S. strategic bombing campaigns and with napalm. Villages and cities were either turned to ash or reduced to rubble. Dams and crops were ruined, as were irrigation canals, roads, and other life-saving infrastructures. While the living starved, two million Koreans lay dead. Hundreds of thousands of women and orphans too were without food, clothing, water, and shelter.

A BBC Journalist wrote, "In front of us a curious figure was standing, a little crouched, legs straddled, arms held out from his sides. He had no eyes, and the whole of his body, nearly all of which was visible through taters of burnt rags, was covered with a hard black crust speckled with yellow pus…He had to stand because he was no longer covered with skin, but with a crust-like crackling which broke easily…I thought of the hundreds of villages reduced to ash which I personally had seen and realized the sort of casualty list mounting up along the Korean front."(1)

Schelling and the RAND Corporation never wanted to admit to these truths and realities. Neither did they want to acknowledge that Korea was still plagued by rival dictatorships and U.S. occupation forces. In the North, Sung promoted an all-pervasive cult of personality centered around his own supposedly god-like qualities. He also announced his intention of creating a dynasty of rulers, namely, his son, Kim Jong Il. Military spending, poverty, unemployment, and food shortages leading to famine have devastated North Korea. It is alone and isolated from much of the world.

The South was backed by an imperial cult bent on world domination. Some in this god-like empire, or so they thought of it as such (and still think today), believed the Soviets and China were threats to national security and self-interests, as was Vietnam. Therefore, right-wing dynastic generations continued to fund an ever bloated military empire and, of course, the RAND Corporation. In this empire, poverty and unemployment have also risen, as has political and economic isolation from other nations of the world. For both sides, the hidden costs and sacrifices of the unfinished Korean War have been exponential.

But in reality, the Soviets are no threat. Neither is China or even Vietnam. Japan too will help contain the volatility that currently exists between the Koreas. At the same time, hereditary dictators and archaic, dying empires are seldom wooed by the carrot at-the-end of-a-stick approach, especially when both are trying to hold the stick. Both these dictatorial dynasty and empire live in a different realm and a different world, one that not only disregards their own people, but in the end, brings upon themselves their own self-destruction.

Schelling and the RAND Corporation popularized the Game Theory approach to world conflict during the Cold War, applying it to Korea (and many other disastrous wars). They assumed that the one who took the biggest risk in a given situation would win. The risk, of course, always dealt with winning a conflict by having and using the most powerful weapons, even nuclear weapons. It was a policy that guided the American Empire for decades, and one that still guides many policy makers today. (This type of thinking and strategic behavior can be seen in Afghanistan and Iraq.)

But what if the greater and most productive risk, that would have brought about a more secure peace, would have dealt with peace itself, or the absence of weapons systems and military intervention and total war? This is something the Soviets displayed in 1950, when it called home its advisors and denied Pyongyang the use of its planes. In other words, what if the United States would not have strong-armed the United Nations and instead, issued an all-out of war? Would the conflict over the two Koreas and their eventual unification have been solved?

Embalmed and worshipped to this day, homicidal dictators and a right-wing militant and suicidal empire, both of which were responsible for the deaths of millions of Koreans from 1950-53, are close to an all-out war again. (A war that is not so forgotten.) In peace, nothing is lost. But in war or in an "uneasy peace," everything can be lost. Perhaps it is true that an oppressed people can only liberate themselves through a struggle, a struggle, that is, which might be much closer to their own homes than what their leaders have taught and told them to believe.

Meantime, human behavior is not a game. Neither can it be theorized. Like war, human behavior is both predictable and unpredictable. It is rational and irrational. Demilitarized zones with thousands of soldiers facing each other, expensive and massive weapons systems, ongoing military maneuvers, and nuclear weapons are merely symbols of human failure and the irrational and unpredictable. Regarding North Korea and the American Empire, unless people rise-up and declare an all-out of war, the present-day turmoil will more than likely prolong an unfinished war, a war that might not leave anyone alive to feel guilty for pulling a trigger.