Barbarism and Shame: Why the US Refuses a Korea Peace Treaty
By Finian Cunningham
September 22, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - The
Korean crisis is a powerful lens on American barbarism, past and
present. Despite Washington’s self-righteousness and pretensions of
virtue, the modern history of Korea is an especially powerful lesson
that destroys the American national mythology.
Listening
to President Trump’s conceited rhetoric about wiping out North Korea
has an eerie resonance with the rhetoric of President Truman. Truman
launched into the Korean War more than six decades ago with same
arrogant, mythical presumptions of American virtue and self-ordained
right to use overwhelming military force.
For
reasons of political self-preservation, Washington must live in denial
of historical reality. US leaders out of necessity have to construct an
alternative, fictional narrative for their nation’s conduct. Because if
historical reality were acknowledged, the rulers in Washington, and the
whole edifice of presumed American greatness, would implode from the
endemic moral corruption.
The Korean War (1950-53) has been described as
the most barbaric war since the Second World War. Up to four million
people were killed in a three-year period. The US air force dropped more
tonnage of bombs on the country than was dropped during the whole of
its Pacific War against Japan.
Despite
this massive and barbaric effort in Korea, the first war of the
incipient Cold War turned out to be a source of potentially crippling
shame for the US. This risk of shame to the American mythical self-image
of virtue explains why the Korean War has become known as the
“forgotten war”. It would also explain why present and past US
governments prefer to bury their responsibility to end the conflict on
the Korean Peninsula.
Sixty-four
years after the end of the Korean War, the United States continues to
refuse to sign a peace treaty with the other main belligerent party –
North Korea. Indeed, the issue is not even publicly addressed by
Washington, which shows how far removed political awareness of American
responsibilities is.
Yet,
the signing of such a peace treaty by the US is essential to
establishing a viable framework to resolve the current and recurring
security crisis on the Korean Peninsula.
The
Korean War came to an end in July 1953 with the declaration of an
armistice, or truce. The armistice was never formalized into a legally
binding peace treaty, largely due to American intransigence not to do
so. The absence of a peace treaty is almost unique in the history of
modern warfare.
Technically,
therefore, the Korean War is not over. It is simply on pause. So, when
US military exercises are conducted with its South Korean ally – several
times every year – the war drills are plausible grounds for North Korea
to fear a resumption of large-scale hostilities.
As former US ambassador to South Korea, James Laney, has stated:
“One of the things that have bedeviled all talks until now is the
unresolved status of the Korean War. A peace treaty would provide a
baseline for relationships, eliminating the question of the other’s
legitimacy and its right to exist.”
The looming question is: why does the US government and its military leaders not sign a peace treaty with North Korea?
One
reason is that the ongoing state of war on the Korean Peninsula
provides the US with important strategic advantages – too important for
it to forfeit by concluding a peace treaty with North Korea. Lucrative
weapons sales – decade after decade – for “protecting” allies in South
Korea and Japan is a boon for the US military-industrial complex that
drives its economy.
With
the presence of 70,000 US troops in Japan and South Korea and the
regular positioning of aircraft carriers, missile destroyers and
nuclear-capable warplanes, the ongoing low-intensity conflict with North
Korea gives the US a politically acceptable cover to project military
power for economic influence in the vital, resource-rich region of
Asia-Pacific.
The
installation of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system
and the Aegis anti-missile systems in South Korea and Japan – allegedly
to “protect from North Korean aggression” – is also an important
strategic gain for Washington to exert leverage over China and Russia.
Indeed, this may be the main strategic objective.
These economic and military strategic issues have been broached elsewhere in a recent article as to why the US is more interested in maintaining conflict on the Korean Peninsula than pursuing peace.
What
is worth considering here is the legacy of the Korean War as to why the
US continues to bury that conflict as a “forgotten war”. What is it
about the Korean War which seems to make it unpalatable for Washington
to publicly acknowledge?
The
Korean War can be seen as the first major test of US moral and military
authority in the Cold War. We must remember that a mere five years
after the Second World War, the US had staked its image on presenting
itself as the “leader of the free world” against the Soviet Union and
“evil communism”. In Western political mythology, the US had gloriously
won the Second World War, defeating Nazi Germany and saving Europe from
totalitarianism. The actual much bigger achievement of the Soviet Union
in defeating European fascism was – and still is – conveniently
downplayed by Western official narratives.
Soon
the evil of Nazi Germany was recycled to be projected on to the Soviet
Union and world communism. The supposedly Christian, democracy and
freedom-loving United States was presented as the noble defender of the
“free world” against “the evil of communist expansionism”.
When
the civil war in Korea erupted in June 1950, the US-backed southern
administration led by Syngman Rhee claimed that it was communist
aggression by the north with the support of the Soviet Union and
communist China. The year before, Mao had just successfully won China’s
civil war against the US-backed Chiang Kai-Shek forces which fled to
Formosa (Taiwan).
From
the US point of view, steeped in Cold War ideology of Red Menace, the
war in Korea looked like another domino falling to world communism.
The
origins of the war are murky. American claims about North Korean
aggression are belied by the fact that the US-backed Rhee regime in
Seoul had carried out countless acts of aggression against the de facto
northern state led by Kim Il Sung (grandfather of the current North
Korean leader Kim Jong-un).
In
any case, Korea became a paramount test for presumed US global
authority. President Truman had already declared the Truman Doctrine of
“defending the world from communist aggression”.
Arguably,
the US had no justification for entering the war. It railroaded the
newly formed United Nations for a mandate to intervene “on behalf of the
UN”. The facts suggest that the conflict in Korea was one of national
self-determination between, on the one hand, competing socialist
factions popular in the north and in the south, and on the other hand,
the US-backed autocratic regime of Syngman Rhee. The latter’s hold on
power was shaky due to US imposition immediately following the Second
World War. Rhee’s dictatorship, comprising military trained under the
previous Japanese fascist colonial regime (1910-45), had carried out
mass executions of suspected “communist supporters – with American
support. It was deeply unpopular and would inevitably have been
overthrown in the ferment of anti-colonial movements that were sweeping
Korea and the world in the post-Second World War era.
In
other words, the Korean War was an unnecessary slaughter that was
fueled by US interference and ideological presumptions of leadership
against “evil communism”.
During the Korean War, the US unleashed barbarism with new technological weapons, writes American historian Jeremy Kuzmarov.
It
was the first war when napalm incendiary bombs were used in large scale
in a scorched-earth tactic of indiscriminately destroying villages and
civilians seen as “guerrilla sympathizers”. Farms, crops, cattle, dikes
and dams were also pulverized by American B-29 bombers. The entire
country was obliterated in order to “save it” from communism.
American
actions were a monumental violation of the Geneva Convention which had
only just been signed in 1949, forbidding the indiscriminate killing of
civilians. The ink was barely dry when American forces were running
rivers of blood all over Korea. The communist guerrillas also reportedly
carried out atrocities. But in no comparable way to the scale that the
US was committing.
How
was US conduct in Korea any different from the genocidal “total war”
concept of the Nazi Third Reich? Exactly, there was none, if the truth
were told.
General
Curtis Le May, the head of the US air force in Korea who earlier had
masterminded the firebombing massacre of Tokyo during the Second World
War, later candidly admitted that there was nothing left to bomb in
Korea. He reckoned that US forces killed up to 30 per cent of the North
Korean population. Even then, the US generals were actively considering dropping atomic bombs, including on China, which they considered as the real power behind the North Korean guerrilla army.
Mao’s
China and Stalin’s Soviet Union did indeed lend crucial military
support to the North Korean side. Newly innovated Soviet MiG jets reportedly had
a curtailing effect on the American B-29s. But Beijing and Moscow’s
involvement only came after the US weighed into what was a national
struggle.
In
the end, despite its declarations of moral virtue and Christian
righteousness, the US was fought to a standstill. The three-year,
backward-and-forward war finally stopped at the 38th parallel, which the
US military government had earlier demarcated in 1945. Korea was not
“liberated” from godless communism. The northern Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea stands today as a reminder of defiance to US
pretensions.
In
the course of the war, the US Commander General Douglas MacArthur, was
sacked by Truman over his failures and insubordination. It was a
shameful outcome for MacArthur who had been adorned as a “war hero” for
the Pacific victory over Japan. He had been one of the US generals
advocating the atomic bombing of China.
Almost
a decade later, the Vietnam War also became another episode of American
barbarism and use of genocidal hi-tech weaponry. But by then, as
American historian William Blum points out, there was a popular anti-war movement in the US, which exposed many of the crimes and falsehoods perpetrated by Washington.
The
Korean War was different though. It was largely supported at the time
by a US population which had bought into the official mythology of
America as “the defender of the free world”. The Korean War was supposed
to be the baptism of noble America, the alleged emerging “victor of the
Second World War”, the presumed protector against evil totalitarianism.
But
the Korean War destroyed that myth in the most searing way from the
slaughter and barbarism that the US inflicted on a peasant army seeking
national unity and independence. And for all its military might and
“divine pretensions”, the US was fought to a standstill, if not an
inglorious moral defeat.
Such
is the shameful legacy of the Korean War for American national
mythology that one suspects that this is a major reason why US
authorities, the government, the Pentagon and the dutiful
corporate-controlled news media would much rather prefer to forget the
whole despicable episode. Simply put, it has to be erased from
consciousness because it would be so otherwise jarring to American
presumptions of exceptional virtue.
That
is why the all-important issue of a peace treaty over the Korean War is
not signed by the US. It is simply too shameful a subject to even
revisit in the slightest way.
And
yet, fiendishly, making a formal declaration of peace is crucial to
resolve the ongoing conflict on the Korean Peninsula, one that could so
easily escalate into a global catastrophe involving nuclear weapons.
Tragically,
and heinously, the refusal to bear responsibility for the violence and
suffering caused in Korea is why the current Trump administration presumes the
“right” to go to war on North Korea. This American presumption is
woefully ignorant of history and infused with a disturbed messianic
zeal.
Trump
and his officials arrogantly threaten North Korea with “annihilation”
because the United States has never been held to account for its crimes
in Korea (or elsewhere for that matter).
Signing
a peace treaty would be an important step towards long-overdue American
accountability. A step that the arrogant American rulers refuse to take
– because they can’t admit the shocking reality of their enormous
crimes.
This article was first published by Strategic Culture Foundation -
Shepard Ambellas
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