The Korean War: A History (32 page)

The longevity and insolubility of the Korean conflict make it the best example in the world of how easy it is to get into a war, and how hard it is to get out. American troops arrived in southern Korea in September 1945, and thirty thousand of them are still there today, long after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed. More daunting, war could come again, and very quickly—indeed a new, perhaps more catastrophic Korean War almost did come again in June 1994, as the result of American worry about North Korea’s nuclear facilities. In the immediate aftermath of the apparent victory in the Iraq War, in the late spring of 2003, high American officials again spoke openly of trying to topple the North Korean regime violently. In other words, our war with North Korea continues apace: after 9/11 Donald Rumsfeld suggested preemptive nuclear strikes on rogue states,
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and when it appeared that the
invasion of Iraq would move quickly to victory, he demanded revisions in the basic war plan for Korea (called Operations Plan 5030) and also sought money from Congress for new bunker-busting nukes. The strategy, according to insiders who have read the plan, was “to topple Kim’s regime by destabilizing its military forces,” so they would overthrow him and thus accomplish “regime change.” The plan was pushed “by many of the same administration hard-liners who advocated regime change in Iraq.” Unnamed senior Bush administration officials considered elements of this new plan “so aggressive that they could provoke a war.”
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In the new century Americans have once again replicated their Korean experience—this time in Iraq. Without forethought, due consideration, or self-knowledge, the United States barged into a political, social, and cultural thicket without knowing what it was doing, and now it finds that it cannot get out. A great civilization arose and flourished at the intersection of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, but American leaders know almost nothing about it. Somehow they thought that they could invade a sovereign country, crush Saddam Hussein’s army, and find the road to Baghdad strewn with flowers. Shortly after the occupation began in 2003, a
New York Times
reporter asked a professor at Baghdad University how he thought things were going: the scholar’s first comment was “You Americans know nothing about my country.”

The same might be said of the Americans who first occupied Korea in September 1945. After the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (and with that, the effective death of his trusteeship plans for a unified Korea), the State Department pushed ahead with a full military occupation of Korea, or a part of it—no matter what happened, they wanted a “preponderant role” on the peninsula because they feared thousands of guerrillas in Manchuria who might combine with Soviet forces, should the Red Army fight the Japanese in Korea. Why were they concerned about Korea in the first place, a country that had never attracted serious American attentions before? Korea was thought to be important to the postwar security of Japan
(the enemy that the United States was still fighting). So Kim Il Sung and his allies were the problem then, and they remain the problem today—with no solution to the problem in sight.

In the trite phrases of Washington policymakers, this would be called “lacking an exit strategy.” In fact the United States has had no exit strategy anywhere since 1945, except in places where we were kicked out (Vietnam) or asked to leave (the Philippines): American troops still occupy Japan, Korea, and Germany, in the seventh decade after the end of World War II. Policymakers—almost always civilians with little or no military experience (Acheson is the archetype)—get Americans into wars but cannot get them out, and soon the Pentagon takes over, establishes bases, and the entire enterprise becomes a perpetual-motion machine fueled by a defense budget that dwarfs all others in the world.

If our contemporary occupation of Iraq follows suit, the country will be divided, civil war will erupt (beyond what has transpired already), and millions will die but nothing will be solved; and in the 2060s, thirty thousand American troops will still be there, holding the line against the evil enemy (whoever he might be), with a new war possible at any moment. We have been locked in a dangerous, unending, but ultimately futile and failed embrace with North Korea since Dean Rusk consulted a map around midnight on the day after we obliterated Nagasaki with an atomic bomb, and etched a border no one had ever noticed before, at the 38th parallel. When will we ever learn?

To take everything with a sunny, fact-based equability (were the
ianfu
forced or not?), to get angry at nothing (was Curtis LeMay a pyromaniac or not?), to indulge the empirical at the expense of judgment (did we really burn down
every
North Korean town?), to offer silly equivalencies (North Korea and the Nazis), and to confuse
objectivity with justice, a spurious on-the-one-hand and then on-the-other, negating the human necessity to make choices and render judgments: Is this right? Judgments might be “points of view.” Or they might be called wisdom. Objectivity might really mean empathy, and ultimately magnanimity—especially toward those who have suffered most at history’s hands.

Similar ideas inhabit Nietzsche’s essay “The Uses and Disadvantages of History,” where, as we saw, he begins with cattle munching grass in a field. We envy them because they appear to be happy, cavorting in the grass, sleeping and eating and making little cows just as they please. “Why not tell us about your happiness?” a passerby asks. The beast wants to answer but can’t—“‘I always forget what I was going to say’—but then he forgot this answer, too, and stayed silent: so that the human being was left wondering.” The cattle experience only the moment, without melancholy or boredom. A child playing in the same field is, likewise, blissfully blind to past and future. But the passerby wonders why a chain linking past and present always clings to him, no matter how much he tries to avoid it. A moment returns as a ghost, and we experience what the cows cannot: the “it was,” the past, which beats incessantly upon our minds and gives pain, conflict, suffering—and meaning. Our powers of thought and evaluation give us our human difference: the individual as “a thing that lives by negating, consuming and contradicting itself” (like, say, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo).

Memory has its opposite: forgetting, which Nietzsche thought “essential to action of any kind.” The unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure to human health, because forgetting is a gatekeeper of conscience—how immoral the world would look without forgetting, he wrote in
Beyond Good and Evil
. To act in the present is to live unhistorically, and it is also to
repress
. In a passage that Freud learned much from, Nietzsche wrote of the plastic power of people to suppress truth, to heal wounds, to go on, to transform, to re-create broken molds. The former sex slaves who have insisted on Japanese accountability and contrition are exactly
broken human vessels, re-created into strong mettle through painful struggle. To find ways to acknowledge past crimes, to grasp how they happened, and to reconcile with the victims is another path toward self-respect and strength.

These are the qualities and attributes of human thought, anxiety, memory, amnesia, strength. They do not express Korean or Japanese or American difference. In fact, South Korean leaders have come very far toward a useful understanding of history’s value. Korea surely suffered one of the worst twentieth-century histories of any nation, and remains divided in the new century. Yet when Kim Dae Jung was elected in 1997, a charismatic politician rather than a historian or scholar, he inaugurated a sweeping effort at reconciliation with the North
and
with the rebellious southwest of his native land, which had lived very uncomfortably from the 1890s into the 1990s with the Japanese, the Americans, and successive Korean military dictators. At his inauguration he pardoned two previous militarists, Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, who had been sentenced to death or life imprisonment in 1996. As scholars such as Na Kan-chae of Chonnam University have argued, the trials of Chun and Roh and Kim’s election in 1997 represented a distinct victory for the people of Kwangju and South Cholla, even if they came many years later and after great suffering.

One of Kim’s projects was “A History That Opens the Future,” dedicated to fresh and honest examination of any number of difficult issues in modern Korean history, and between Korea and its neighbors. After his term in office and his successor’s, it is fair to say that South Korea is finally one unified nation, all orthodox and heterodox “points of view” are aired, and enormous progress was made in reconciling with Pyongyang. Most people have transformed their image of the North, from evil Communist devils to brothers and cousins led by nutty uncles. In an important speech in April 2007, Kim’s successor, Roh Moo Hyun, criticized Japanese leaders for seeking to justify the actions of their forebears in the 1930s and
’40s, instead of finding common understanding with their neighbors: “true reconciliation, whether domestic or international, is possible only on a foundation of historical truth.”
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When the Korean War began, about three hundred people died in the town of Kurim, near the southwestern coast. Kurim is a village of ancient familial continuity, whose history traces back a millennium, with four clans; today it has about six hundred households. In the conflicts after liberation, villagers attacked each other with pitchforks and hoes (“hoe squads”), a common occurrence throughout the region. Some villagers supported guerrillas in the hills, who also foraged indiscriminately for what they needed. When the war broke out some villagers killed some policemen and right wingers. When South Korean forces recaptured Kurim in October, the police killed ninety alleged Communist sympathizers. Guerrilla war continued in the region throughout 1950, but after the war stabilized in 1951 a local ROKA sergeant executed thirteen more villagers in a nearby valley. Choi Jae-sang was twelve when the police told his older sister to take her clothes off; when she refused they shot her in the head in front of her parents. This village civil war left just about every family with a grievance and desire for revenge; for decades opposing families did not speak to each other. But it became a symbol of reconciliation throughout South Korea when, in 2006, village elders published a 530-page history of Kurim, listing the war dead without naming the killers, and sponsored joint memorial services. It turned out the elders had collectively decided, after the war ended, not to reveal who killed whom, or to pursue revenge.
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The purpose of the various South Korean inquiries has not been to sow blame or refight Cold War battles, but to seek reconciliation between North and South and to establish an understanding and an orientation that produces
verstehen
of one’s former enemy—not sympathy, perhaps not even empathy, but an understanding of the principles that guide one’s adversary, even if one finds those principles abhorrent or deeply wounding to one’s own knowledge of
what happened historically with this same enemy. After all, to blame one side (as most Americans do) for all the blood and agony of the past century since Japan seized Korea is to fit an extraordinarily complex, merciless, and implacably brutal history through the eye of an ideological needle. But through techniques of requiem under a fair system of justice—investigation, trial, testimony, adjudication, apology, purge, reparations—people can finally reconcile, propitiate, and put their ghosts to rest. Once the enemy’s core principles are understood without blinking, once we view our history with this adversary from all sides, appeals can be made to the adversary’s worldview. And, of course, full recognition of what one side (the South) did might lead to a better understanding of all the grievances husbanded by the other side. But perhaps the greatest gain is self-knowledge, for if you do not know yourself and what others think of you, rightly or wrongly, it is difficult to navigate a complicated world.

So we come again, finally, to the human being as opposed to the cow: modern individuals must “squander an incredible amount of energy … merely to fight their way through the perversity in themselves,” Nietzsche wrote. Cows don’t have to worry about that, but we do—and so do leaders such as Abe Shinzo and a succession of American presidents. Our only recourse is “the scalpel of truth” and to use it ruthlessly “to regulate and punish” in the ultimate interest of justice, magnanimity, and reconciliation. South Korea is the only East Asian nation to have done this—to examine its own history and its conflicts with other countries fully, carefully, and without blinkers.

Imagine now what the enemy thinks. Their leaders fought Japanese militarists long and hard in the wilds of frozen Manchuria for a decade, a pitiless and unforgiving struggle indeed, but one that set them apart from all but a handful of other Koreans in 1945 and, in their eyes, bequeathed their right to rule. The sole reigning sign of truth and justice was that those who sacrificed everything against the Japanese imperialists would inherit the motherland—and those who stood with that Japanese enemy would get what they deserved. The north wind was stronger after five years had passed, with blooded soldiers, and so they did what the weaker side also wanted to do, which was to use the new, massed army that Koreans lacked during decades of colonial oblivion to attack and obliterate the other side. It would have happened, and almost did happen, in a matter of weeks. But lo, the invasion unwittingly played into the hands of the United States, which for its own very different reasons joined the battle—and snatched Korean defeat from the jaws of victory.