Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war: McCarthyism, Korea, and other nightmares

Monthly Review, April, 1997 by Doug Dowd

2. Our first serious commitment in Vietnam took place during (and partially as a response to) the Korean war, as increasingly from 1950 on we undertook to finance the hopeless effort of the French to hold on there and in the rest of Indochina. By 1952 we were paying four-fifths of the French bill; and when they were defeated in 1954 we began our long military involvement, succeeding in keeping it covert and camouflaged in one way or another for another ten years. And then ten years of war.

3. The weaponry provided to North Korea by the Soviet Union (which clearly stood aloof from the war) was paltry, apart from materiel left over from World War II. It was the Chinese entry that altered the balance between North Korea and the United States; but that entry would not have occurred had Truman not sent MacArthur "across the 38th parallel" in September, despite an explicit warning from Premier Chou En-lai that China would enter the war if that happened. Acheson worked on the assumption that China was controlled by the Soviet Union and that Stalin's withdrawal from involvement meant China was bluffing. See Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1990 (New York: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 114 ff. Among the many differences and similarities between the wars in Korea and Vietnam: 1) in neither case was what had been a colonialized society allowed to find its way toward independence; 2) attempts to achieve the latter were accompanied in both countries by considerable internal conflict - between bottom and top, those who had resisted and those who had worked with the former colonial power, between what were or became left and right forces; 3) both were victimized as pawns in the cold war; 4) both societies, if at different times and in different ways, found themselves arbitrarily divided in two (at the 38th parallel in Korea, at the 17th in Vietnam); 5) for both the war was a tragedy of limitless dimensions. Korea is still divided; and South Korea still has over 40,000 U.S. troops in place, equipped with nuclear weapons (as this is being written).

4. Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), pp. 200-201. This recent book is a shortened and non-academic version of the same authors' The Fire in Korea (also Pantheon Books) and of Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), which provide full documentation and references. The present book has many illuminating and wrenching photographs. For purposes of comparison: just under 60,000 U.S. troops died in Indochina and over 3 million Vietnamese died. The numbers for Laos are impossible to pin down. As is well-known, however, at least one million died in Cambodia in the 1970s, killed by the Khmer Rouge - which, it is vital to note, the United States (along with China !) supported (and supports still?), as a means of continuing to oppose Vietnam (which opposes the Khmer Rouge): a more horrendous combination of national madnesses and mass murder would be hard to find. The people of the United States are almost entirely ignorant of the heavy responsibility we bear for the tragedy in Cambodia, despite available essays and books that tell the story. See, for example, William Shawcross, SIDE-SHOW: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (New York: Pocket Books, 1979).