Korean war anniversary marks new future for divided Korea

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): No two countries in the world knew less about each other before 1950 than Korea and the United States. No two countries have been more closely intertwined since. But all that is probably nearing to an end.

In the United States, the intelligence community has obediently swung round to the Pentagon's view that the country needs a "National Missile Defense" against attacks by "rogue states".

Over the next 15 years, it said last year, the U.S. "most likely will face ICBM threats from Russia, China and North Korea, probably from Iran and possibly from Iraq."

In the old days, this fantasy would have been loyally backed by the South Korean regime, but listen to them now. "The threat hasn't gone away, but it's most unlikely," said a South Korean diplomat just before President Kim Dae-jung's historic visit to North Korea on June 13-15.

"What everyone is looking at now, at some point down the line, is the reunification of North and South."

You couldn't prove that by the sparse results of the southern leader's first meeting with North Korea's "Dear Leader" Kim Jong- il -- the reopening of cross-border railroads, some meetings between members of the million families that were permanently divided by the Cold War division of Korea -- but it probably is true.

As Kim Dae-jung said on returning to Seoul: "There is no longer going to be any war. The North will no longer attempt unification by force, and ...we will not do any harm to the North."

All Koreans, South and North, want to believe that this is true, and it certainly comes at a propitious moment, for this week (June 25) marks the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the war that tore the country apart.

It lasted three years, it killed about 10 percent of the country's population at the time, and it left a legacy of bitterness and extremism on both sides that has lasted down to the present.

Korea, formerly a Japanese colony, was divided after 1945 because the Soviets were grooming an obscure Communist guerrilla leader called Kim Il-sung to take power.

They set him up with his own government in Pyongyang, the biggest city in their zone of occupation -- and the U.S. responded by backing Syngman Rhee, an elderly and autocratic Korean patriot who first went to jail for nationalist agitation in 1897, as the elected president in Seoul.

The same thing happened in Europe after 1945 with the division of both Austria and Germany, but both those countries were eventually reunited peacefully. What made the difference in Korea was the war - and we know now that that was entirely the fault of Stalin, Mao and Kim Il-sung.

It is rare to get a clear and definitive account of how a war started, but for the Korean War, one exists. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and in 1994 Russia's then-President Boris Yeltsin gave South Korea 548 pages of secret Soviet documents about the origins of the war.

The documents begin in January, 1949, with reports from the Soviet Embassy in Pyongyang of clashes between troops of the capitalist South and the Communist North.

In March, North Korean leader Kim Il-sung traveled to Moscow and suggested armed aggression against the South, but Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin counseled caution. In August, however, Kim again insisted that he must attack the South to achieve national unification.

By March of 1950, Kim had persuaded Moscow to sell him 120 million rubles worth of arms, and in April he met Stalin again. This time, Stalin said that "outside conditions" (probably, the successful testing of the first Soviet nuclear weapon) were turning in favor of an invasion of South Korea, and agreed that Kim should launch his attack -- provided that Mao Tse-tong's new Communist regime in China also agreed to back it.

In May, Kim met Mao, who approved the attack plan, and promised to send Chinese troops if the United States sent forces to defend South Korea. Kim then informed Moscow that the plan of attack had been finalized with the aid of a Soviet general called Vasiliyev -- and on June 25, 1950, he invaded South Korea and launched a war that killed three million Koreans.

He nearly won in the first couple of months, sweeping the South Korean forces aside, capturing Seoul, and bottling up the U.S. troops who were hastily dispatched with United Nations backing at Pusan in the country's south-eastern corner.

But then the U.S. and its allies turned the tables with a surprise amphibious landing at Inchon, near Seoul, and drove the North Koreans all the way north to the Chinese border.

It was at this point in late 1950, when it seemed that Korea would be reunited by American arms and under United Nations auspices, that Rhee's paramilitary thugs rounded up 150,000 suspected Communist sympathizers and executed them without trial. But then in November Chinese troops came to Kim Il-sung's aid as Mao had promised, and the UN forces were driven back south of Seoul in a chaotic retreat that American troops called "the big bug-out".

The U.S. commander-in-chief who was responsible for this disaster, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, tried to blame it on overwhelming Chinese numbers, but he wasn't so much outnumbered as out-generalled by the Chinese commander, Lin Piao. (Cynical American soldiers described the order of battle of a Chinese regiment as three hordes to a human wave, and three human waves to a human sea.)

This was the same Douglas MacArthur who had lost the Philippines to inferior numbers of Japanese troops at the outbreak of World War II, and he was simply (in Gen. George Marshall's words) "never any damn good."

MacArthur's plan for reconquering North Korea involved dropping 50 atomic bombs on neighboring areas of China, landing half a million Nationalist Chinese troops from Taiwan to seal the Korean peninsula off from China -- and then spreading massive amounts of radioactive cobalt dust along the Korean-Chinese border (right on top of the troops from Taiwan) to prevent all movement through the area for years.

At this point, mercifully, President Harry Truman fired MacArthur, and the remaining two years of the war saw slow, grinding battles of attrition as UN troops fought their way back north to approximately the original line of division.

As many American troops died as in Vietnam, together with a million Korean soldiers, an unknown number of Chinese, and around two million Korean civilians.

By the time an armistice ended the shooting war in 1953, the two Koreas were rigidly separated societies driven half-mad by hatred and loss. They remained frozen in those postures for two generations, while South Korea rapidly industrialized and slowly democratized, and North Korea sank ever deeper into Communist cant, personality cult, and poverty.

But now a Northern regime made desperate by poverty and famine is dealing directly with a Southern leader who has impeccable democratic and nationalist credentials. Unification is on the table, probably by gradual compromise and negotiation (and not, as we once thought, by mere absorption of the North by the bigger and richer South.)

That will be good news for all Koreans if it happens, but it is a more complex issue for Korea's neighbors and allies. Japan will have to rethink its attitudes if it finds itself living next door to a unified and self-confident nation of 70 million Koreans, many of whom still harbor deep feelings of resentment about Japanese imperial rule.

China's Communist rulers would not be pleased to see the first Asian Communist regime go the way of the European Communist states -- and only 300 miles (500 kilometers) from Beijing at that.

Above all, Korean unity would remove the main public justification for the United States to keep 70,000 troops and a carrier fleet in eastern Asia (they are really there mainly as a counter-weight to Chinese power), and it would eliminate the most plausible "rogue state" from the litany of the Pentagon planners. In other words, it would make everybody rethink their strategies, which would be an excellent thing.