Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (26 page)

THE KOREAN WAR

T
he first shooting war of the Cold War was the Korean War. It began when Soviet-trained and -supplied North Korean forces invaded the South in June 1950. While this act of unprovoked aggression may have been partly induced by U.S. statements and actions indicating that Korea was outside the U.S. defense perimeter, Truman rightly announced that it could not go unchallenged, particularly in the context of Soviet threats elsewhere at the time. U.S. troops were committed and fought desperately to stem the North Korean tide. This they did quickly and then brilliantly counterattacked with the famous Inchon landing behind North Korean lines. By September, U.S. forces had secured all of South Korea and occupied much of the North, including the capital city of Pyongyang. What remained of North Korean forces were broken and scattered. At this point U.S. casualties were 3,614 dead, 4,260 missing, and 16,289 wounded.
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As the defeat of the North Koreans became clear, China warned against an American advance to its border with North Korea on the Yalu River. Such an advance was unnecessary: The communists had been contained, and the allies were in effective control of Korea. But General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the allied forces, believed in total victory and also in the need to replace the communist regime in China with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese government, which had recently fled to Taiwan. As he had ordered U.S. troops to Korea, Truman had also directed the U.S. Seventh Fleet to position itself in the Taiwan Straits between mainland China and Taiwan, thus intervening in the Chinese civil war on the side of the corrupt Chiang Kai-shek regime. Without any decision having been made regarding war with China, MacArthur visited Taiwan to coordinate his war effort with Chiang’s continuing attempts to regain a foothold on the mainland. MacArthur also directed the U.S.-led forces to drive to the Yalu. As they said they would, the Chinese attacked. Three years later, with the death toll at 54,246, the wounded at 103,284,
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and the U.S.-led forces no longer in control of North Korea, a fragile armistice was concluded and a Demilitarized Zone established that is still policed by U.S. troops and their South Korean allies. Thus, our ignorance about our foe and our paranoia about Chinese communism combined with our readiness to resort to arms to lengthen the war, adding to the casualty lists while actually weakening the U.S. position. And there was other fallout, whose effects we are still feeling.

The Chinese communists were not predestined to become a major enemy of the United States. During the war against Japan, they had made friendly overtures to U.S. officials and had actually fought harder against the Japanese than Chiang’s forces. They naturally resented U.S. support of Chiang in the civil war that ensued after Japan’s defeat and were angry that the United States continued to recognize the remnants of Chiang’s forces in Taiwan as the government of China (I discuss Taiwan further in Chapter 8), even while Britain and most of the rest of the world recognized the communist regime in Beijing. But China was not looking for a fight with the United States. There were major differences between the Chinese communists and the Soviet communists. Some U.S. Foreign Service officers, such as John Service and John Patton Davies, tried to make this clear to Washington and the U.S. press at the time, but in the hysteria about communism that gripped the country then, they were ignored. Their careers were soon ruined by the advent of McCarthyism. The march to the Yalu had locked the United States into more or less permanent intervention in China’s civil war and into an attitude of unrelenting suspicion and hostility. Not until the 1970
s
was it possible for then President Richard Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to take advantage of the differences between China and the Soviets to make their opening to China. Despite the modus vivendi that has governed U.S.-China relations since then, there remain deep wells of suspicion on both sides that periodically threaten a return to the old hostile relations. It didn’t have to be that way.

The armistice that stopped the fighting cemented in power the dictatorship of Synghman Rhee, whom the United States had intervened in South Korea to back. Ironically, the regime was heavily staffed by former collaborators with the Japanese. Although it had saved the South Koreans from an oppressive communist future, the United States quickly demonstrated a preference, which it would display time and again during the Cold War, for reliable dictators to messy democracies. In 1960, Rhee was overthrown by Koreans attempting to establish a democracy, but the attempt failed when the United States supported a takeover by General Park Chung-hee. Then in 1979, the United States not only encouraged a coup d’etat by General Chun Doo-hwan but actually gave Chun permission to use the 20
th
division of the Korean Army (formally under U.S. command) to put down a 1980 student uprising in Kwangju. Before it was over, hundreds of South Korean democracy advocates had been killed in what became known as the ‘Kwangju Massacre,’ an event that Koreans will always associate with the United States. Among other things, Chun arrested long-time democracy advocate Kim Dae-jung and sentenced him to death on charges of collaborating with North Korea. The Reagan administration persuaded Chun to commute the sentence. The United States did promote the economic development of South Korea both by welcoming thousands of Korean students and by opening its markets and technology to Korea. Eventually in the late 1980
s
Korean democracy advocates managed to achieve a change to democratic government and Kim Dae-jung ultimately returned from U.S. exile to become president. It was he who initiated the ‘Sunshine Policy’ aimed at gradual warming of relations with North Korea and consummation of economic ties as a way of loosening the iron grip of Pyongyang’s rulers.

Americans who feel the South Koreans are ungrateful for all we did for them should keep in mind the above events. They should also consider what began in 1994 when the Clinton administration headed off a North Korean threat to build nuclear weapons by concluding an ‘Agreed Framework.’ Under the deal, the United States was to replace North Korea’s plu-tonium-producing reactors with two light-water reactors (which could not produce weapons-grade plutonium) that would give North Korea the same amount of electricity. The United States was also to provide a certain amount of fuel oil, pledge not to use nuclear weapons in Korea, and open trade and some form of diplomatic relations. In addition to closing its old reactors, North Korea pledged to remain party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and to allow IAEA inspections. The United States had difficulties on all points. It delivered the oil, but not on schedule, and did not open diplomatic or economic relations, although it did provide enough food to keep North Koreans from starving. The promised light-water reactors fell far behind schedule. Aware of these problems and frightened that North Korea might collapse and inundate South Korea with starving refugees – or worse launch a desperation attack – Kim began providing economic assistance to the North. With the advent of the Bush administration in 2001, the U.S. policy changed from vacillating rapprochement to seeking the collapse of the Northern regime. It quickly became clear that the North Koreans had also reneged on the deal and were continuing their nuclear weapons development, that news justified the administration’s position in some eyes. But military retaliation was out of the question because Seoul would likely be destroyed in any conflagration. The United States was forced to revert to a version of the Clinton-Kim policies, but with the added handicap that by now such a strong anti-American sentiment had developed in South Korea that its new president was elected on a platform to revise the SOFA.

In response, some Americans, believing that our troops in Korea are primarily there to defend the South against the North, called for a U.S. withdrawal. They should be aware of Secretary of Defense William Cohen’s statement in April 1997 that the United States intends to keep its forces in Korea even if the two Koreas unite.
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U.S. troops are in Korea as much for Americas purposes as for protection of Korea. The Koreans know this even if most Americans don’t.

U.S. INTERVENTION: FROM INDONESIA TO IRAQ

A
fter the Korean War, there followed a long series of American interventions to change democratically elected regimes in favor of authoritarian governments more compliant with U.S. wishes. In 1953, the CIA played a key role in the ouster of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and the restoration of the Shah. In 1954, the government of Jacobo Arbenz, elected to replace thirty years of bloody right-wing dictators in Guatemala was overthrown with U.S. assistance after complaints by the Chiquita Banana Company that the new government was dangerously left wing. The result has been another fifty years of bloody right-wing dictators. In 1955, the United States encouraged the South Vietnamese ruler Ngo Dinh them to ignore the agreement that settled the French Indo-China war and that called for elections to unite North and South Vietnam. Since everyone knew that them would have lost to the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, America favored no elections. The domino theory – that if South Vietnam went communist, all Southeast Asia would automatically follow – was then holy writ in Washington. Exactly why the theory would hold was never well explained, but it guided U.S. policy toward war with North Vietnam. In fact, we were so determined to ‘bear any burden and pay any price’ that we manufactured a justification for going to war. We now know that the North Vietnamese ‘attack’ on the destroyer
Maddox
that served as the pretext for a congressional resolution authorizing the use of force caused little damage and occurred only after the
Maddox
fired first. The rest is, of course, a sad history.

On September 11, 1973 (this is the 9-11 remembered in Chile), the U.S. helped spark the overthrow of the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende and put in place a military dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet. Thousands of persons simply disappeared under the regime, in circumstances that the world later learned were shockingly barbaric. Zaire, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Greece, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, and Afghanistan round out the list of countries where the United States either installed dictators or lent them vital support. This is not the place to review all of these in detail, but four countries in particular have come back to haunt us: Indonesia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Indonesia

Indonesia, the world’s fourth-largest country and largest Muslim country, is much in the news today as a result of the War on Terror and the terror attacks in Bali. It was also in the news in the late 1950
s
and early 1960
s
as a result of U.S. fear that it might go communist and that it needed protection against China. Given that Chinese Indonesians are a small, discrimi-nated-against minority and that China at that time could barely feed itself, it seems amazing that anyone feared the Chinese in Indonesia. But the American government did because Sukarno, the leader who had gained independence in a bitter war with the Dutch, saw capitalism as a system in which the Dutch owned everything and the Indonesians nothing in their own country and adopted socialism, along with non-alignment in the Manichaen U.S.-Soviet contest. This development created quivers of fear along the Potomac, and in 1958 the CIA trained Indonesian dissidents and mercenaries at bases in the Philippines and infiltrated them into Indonesia where they briefly established a rebel government in conjunction with some dissident local army commanders.
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This gambit eventually failed; Sukarno strengthened his position and made himself President for Life. He also nationalized some U.S. property, took Indonesia out of the UN, and didn’t seem upset when mobs attacked the U.S. AID mission.

Then, in September 1965, a still murky incident changed the whole game. A squad drawn from the Indonesian Air Force and suspected of communist ties raided the homes of the army’s high command, killed six generals, seized the radio station and announced they were saving the country from a CIA takeover. Somehow, General Suharto, commander of the Army’s strategic reserve, survived and led a counterattack that crushed the takeover attempt. The U.S. ambassador at the time, Marshall Green, noted that ‘the Indonesian Army had many people in it who were our friends.’
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These included Suharto, whom embassy personnel supplied with lists of names that helped the army’s retribution to be thorough.
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The ensuing blood bath resulted in 200,000-500,000 deaths. In quick succession U.S. property was returned, the Bank of America was invited in, and the United States urged the IMF to make a $200 million line of credit available to Indonesia.
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For the next thirty-two years Suharto destroyed every potential opponent as he maintained strict military rule leavened with nepotism. As generations of Indonesian army officers learned how to keep dissidents under control at American military schools, Suharto’s wife, sons, and daughters became fabulously rich acquiring huge industries and swathes of prime real estate. The Dutch had left Indonesia with no institutions, and Suharto introduced none except the army. The United States trained Indonesia’s soldiers but did little to promote concepts like rule of law and democracy. In 1975, during a visit to Indonesia, President Gerald Ford and Kissinger let Suharto know that an invasion of East Timor, recently granted independence by Portugal, would not be opposed by the United States. Unsurprisingly, Suhartos troops moved the following week. The only institution in which it was possible to voice dissent at this time was the mosque. Islam, increasingly funded by Arab oil dollars and increasingly fundamentalist, began to spread.