David Halberstam: The Coldest Winter

David Halberstam's big (719 pp.) book on the Korean War is something I don't have time to read any time soon, but the war itself may be more interesting now with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan bogged down. After WWII it must have been inconceivable to view Korea as anything like the defeat that Vietnam turned out to be, but it was certainly an immense frustration -- the first real taste that Americans had that post-WWII wasn't going to be like WWII. In lieu of reading the book, here's a quote from Max Frankel's New York Times review:

Ever the patriot, Halberstam bemoans not so much the fact of our intervention as the mind-set behind it, which led to "an American disaster of the first magnitude, a textbook example of what happens when a nation, filled with the arrogance of power, meets a new reality." The underrated North Koreans virtually destroyed two American regiments and cornered our retreating forces for three blood-soaked months at the edge of the Sea of Japan.

MacArthur responded with his career's most brilliant tactical stroke, which paradoxically inspired an even greater disaster. Instead of reinforcing his surrounded troops, he threw a Hail Mary pass, staging an amphibious landing at Inchon, 150 miles to the north, seizing Korea's narrow waist and decimating the suddenly encircled North Korean invaders. Feeling invincible now, MacArthur refused advice that he settle for a defensible line well south of the restive Chinese forces massing at their Korean border. And with Truman rushing across the Pacific to bask in the general's glory, no one was able to restrain him.

MacArthur ordered the swift conquest of all North Korea, confident that the Chinese would not dare challenge him. But hundreds of thousands of Chinese lay in wait to spring American history's greatest ambush. Halberstam writes: "The bet had been called, and other men would now have to pay for that terrible arrogance and vainglory."

Yet again the Americans were routed, and MacArthur's obsessive reaction was to agitate for total war against China, nuclear if necessary. He had to be fired by Truman in April 1951 so that more sober generals could settle for "a grinding, limited war" that asked men to "die for a tie," a stalemate that eventually restored the original border between the Koreas.

The Korean War was still mostly a set-piece war between regular military units, which is not to deny the violence aimed at civilians. As such, the US tended to draw on lessons from WWII, but with one major difference. From the start, the US bought into total war with Germany and Japan, demanding unconditional surrender and mobilizing the entire national economy behind the war effort. In Korea, the US had the option of choosing how much war it was willing to get into: with Korea only, or with Korea backed by China, or with China backed by Russia. MacArthur was reckless enough to bring China into the war, but Truman was prudent enough to keep Russia on the sidelines. Given limited war, there could only be limited results -- something close to the prewar status quo. But the US psyche couldn't handle anything less than total victory, and that drove a wedge between what we did and what we thought and said about it. That wedge proved to be poisonous in the long run. Indeed, it is still a big part of Bush's problems with Iraq and Afghanistan. What we see through the entire history of America's post-WWII wars is the increasing inutility of military power, and the increasing confusion and madness that is causing in people who can imagine no other way to get their way.

This inability to deal realistically with the world let the Korean War drag on stalemated two more years, and let America maintain a spiteful isolation of North Korea ever since. We treated Vietnam the same way. For that matter, every American foreign policy failure has brought out the same vindictive cold shoulder, especially countries so small and powerless we risked nothing -- Cuba, Iran, Iraq. Since the fall of the Axis Powers we are far and away the most hateful country on earth. I suspect the roots of all that are buried deep in WWII -- James Carroll argues that the fateful decisions were to build the Pentagon, fund the Manhattan Project, start area bombing of enemy cities, and demand unconditional surrender. The latter is a reflection of the unquestionable power we sought, and with victory over the Axis and the unveiling of nuclear weapons we thought we had achieved. We saw the submission of Germany and Japan as proof of our might and our righteousness, and we acknowledge that submission with some measure of grace. But one is hard pressed to find US grace in any subsequent history -- indeed, it is easier to argue that the real reason we rebuilt Germany and Japan (or more accurately, let them rebuild themselves) was to shore up our power against the Soviets. But we never lost the myth of our triumph in WWII. Indeed, when Bush's idiots flew into Baghdad in 2003 the few history books they bothered to consult were not about Iraq or the Middle East or Islam; they were about America's occupation of Germany and Japan. By then, Iraq had little or nothing in common with Germany and Japan, and we were little like the country we were then, so it's easy to dismiss such folly out of hand.

But Korea should have been different -- far closer in time and space and attitude and orientation to our WWII experience than any subsequent war, but still we see the same deep set failures. The root cause is, I believe, war itself. That we got away with it at all in WWII was an amazing stroke of luck -- in large part because the Germans and Japanese were so conscious of their own culpability for the war, and so exhausted by its consequences, that they lost the desire to plot their revenge against our own numerous atrocities (especially when we proved amenable to their reconstruction and independence). We've never encountered such luck again, not least because we've never again deserved it.

posted 2007-09-28