Left Flank

Commemoration of Korean War events has begun afresh as June 25 reset the calendar for another year. GI Korea offers a heartfelt, if revisionist account of Task Force Smith (my comment recounts why I believe the banner of United Nations intervention is no cynical machination.).

I would emphasize the issue of presidential authority.

One of Truman's important but little noted first moves in the fateful last weeks of June had been to recall Averell Harriman from Europe, where he had been a kind of roving ambassador, and make him a special assistant to help with war emergency problems; and one of Harriman's first movies in his new role was to press upon the President the need for congressional support for what he was doing in Korea. He urged Truman to call for a war resolution from Congress as soon as possible, while the country was still behind him. Dean Acheson, however, disagreed, insisting that such a resolution was unnecessary and unwise. The President, said Acheson, should rest on his constitutional authority as Commander in Chief. It was true that congressional approval would do no harm, but the process of obtaining it, Acheson thought, might do great harm. In the mounting anxiety over how things were going in Korea, the timing was wrong.

Truman sided with Acheson, telling Harriman further that to appeal to Congress would make it more difficult for future presidents to deal with emergencies.

Later when Robert Taft and others began criticizing the President [Harriman would recall] I was convinced the President had made a mistake. This decision, however, was characteristic of President Truman. He always kept in mind how his actions would affect future presidential authority.

(Truman [E-Book], David McCullough, 1992, pp. 4926-4930)

My grandmother's second husband fought in Korea (my grandfather was a sailor during WW2 in the Mediterranean fleet). I won't distract readers here with his bitter accounts of fighting, the Korea terrain, and the locals. Suffice it to say, he would not approve of me living in ROK. But, despite his rancor, I believe he did good. The Korean War offered the hope that war would not become general and global, like World Wars One and Two. But, it also perverted American political institutions. It is a Faustian bargain, but a sacrifice history will cherish.

Juan Cole cites the recently intensifying anti-Lee-cum beef protests (and open season for any progressive grievance in ROK) to protest Senator John McCain's notoriously long-term strategy for Iraq.

Do you notice how Iraq and South Korea are not actually very much alike? Do you really think they will become alike in the next 4 years? Could Republicans please stop using John Gaddis's brain-dead "analogy", which never made any sense to begin with?

On one hand, let's validate that theory about anti-Americanism as a cause for the protests. But, on the other, rightly, Seoul's past is sui generis, and not even a good example for its own future. Beijing's and Tokyo's competition for regional hegemony, even as two Korean states vie for diplomatic influence, is unprecedented. This works, too:

The analogy would make slightly more sense if Seoul were in NORTH Korea. Otherwise, you should compare having troops in South Korea to having troops on the Kuwait/Iraq border.

Only the US Army, and this is the salient constituency he needs to impress, would appreciate McCain's thin grasp of trivia.

Mind you, here's a slightly more polite version of the story about which my wife lectured me this morning:

In a joint press conference after the summit at the Great Hall of the People on Tuesday afternoon, Hu said the two countries «agreed to make a joint four-point effort to develop a partnership of strategic cooperation."

The four points are strengthening bilateral communication and build a dialogue channel for foreign strategies; strengthening reciprocal cooperation on telecommunications and nuclear power generation and conduct active research on a Korea-Chinese free trade agreement; expanding personnel, cultural and youth exchanges; and promoting close cooperation on international issues, including peace and stability in Northeast Asia, climate change and reform of the UN.

(…)

«An old saying in Korea says, 'If a rooster crows in Qingdao early in the morning, you can hear the cackling in Incheon.'

Obviously, my wife didn't vote for Lee Myung-bak. Then again, she didn't vote for Roh Moo-hyun, either. I'm not certain how she ever votes, every single election, including parliamentary by-elections, but it might be for me. I'm fairly certain she spoils ballots, and I only hope she doesn't use profanity.

Outside the expat echo chamber and the netizen asylum, there lies the majority of really pissed-off, responsible South Koreans, like my in-laws. The historical subtleties of international politics seems like nothing more than a ever-recurring cyclical anal penetration. My parents vote GNP faithfully, and I know this because I once went to a GNP auxiliary rally where my wife and I were the only lucid persons younger than 40. But, my wife and her friends, and my siblings are in a quandary. Let me put it bluntly as I here it. The conservative GNP is "shit", old crooks who love Japan and China. The progressive UNDP (or whatever they want to call themselves now) are "morons", made up of people whose only virtue is their inability to steal. They also love the North. There's no one to vote for! We're screwed! The world sucks!

Beijing needs shepherding into its leadership position in East Asia, and democratic Japan and South Korea are the best bets for the job. But, I don't know how long my wife and friends' patience will last.

In what promises to be a thought-provoking essay on the North Korean nuclear program, Eli Lewine posts the first part of «A Short History of the North Korean Nuclear Program». If I'm reading correctly, here's the three most suspicious culprits so far:

• An NSC decision in 1953 to leak the intended use of nuclear weapons, if DPRK-US negotiations at Panmunjom did not move forward
• Both the Soviet Union and President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program for allowing the DPRK to research nuclear energy
• The first Bush administration's failure to follow up the Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in 1991 with further negotiations

So, Pyongyang was not as irrational as some would believe. One aspect of this «History» that I do find compelling is the role the negotiations at Panmunjom played in setting the parameters of the relationship between Pyongyang and the US, and really the world. Instead of being a two-year sideshow to the tactical military main show outside, Panmunjom offers in vitro the way Pyongyang learned how to deal with its adversaries.

The purpose of retrospective film festivals is to relive old debates from a new perspective. However, when the 50 years old conflict, the Korean War is still simmering and distorting ideologies, it's hard to take a new look at a film like Mt. Sahwa. But then, there's just the long shots of what appeared to be central Busan, the harbor and beaches, and the Young-do bridge.

In an American context, where irony and parody are all but necessary even on TV sitcoms, 1969's Mt. Sahwa could actually hold its own. It's one of those movies that plays with a viewer's mind trying to figure out who the bad guy is. Unfortunately, it's soaked in ideological symbolism, but really, unless one is pacifist or communist, it's harmless now (although the Park dictatorship at the time was certainly not). I was pleasantly surprised by this film. A recent Korean movie, Brotherhood of War (Taegukgi Huinallmeo) will play a recurring role in this and the next movie review. The American films, The Guns of Navarone and The Dirty Dozen, also came to mind, because of how seven men come together with an unconventional mission.

There's some confusion in the website blurb: Kim Seung-ho's character was a father, but no father figure. When first we encounter him, his character is a drunk and a brawler, and he is recruited in spite of his almost constant intoxication. Later, we find out he killed his wife's brother during the war for bringing Kim Il-sung's brother to his house for hiding. In a manner, he is the cause of the events in the entire film, and it's unclear if he or his wife can redeem what they did after that day.  The wife, also the mother of their boy, has spent her years as a KPA officer struggling to fulfill her brother's dying wish to protect Kim Il-sung's brother and keep contact with her son whom the Communists have abducted and placed in a Busan orphanage for extortion. Even with her guilt and the extortion, she had more real power over a unit of guerrillas on Mt. Sahwa than any South Korean woman of the time. Other characters cloak themselves as criminals and lowlife, and everyone is carrying around a secret.

Mt. Sahwa is obviously pro-ROK (at one point, a son buries his father in the Taegukgi), but the South Koreans are on the side of motherhood and putting divided families separated by Communist perfidy back together. Those modern Commies just don't know what good in this world: a village in the hills with your family, and all that's traditional, like pure love between young people. Unlike Brotherhood of War, choosing the right side is important, if one wants to be Korean. And, even if you've spent years stewing on the docks in Busan or in exile in Japan, one can still earn a reunion with one's family with the help of those nice ROK soldiers (commanded by the guy in the crew disguised as a knife-fighting con man).

One could also spin an anti-war perspective, where excessive ideology and human evil trample over family life. But, Mt. Sahwa, unlike Brotherhood of War, at least does not argue that the sordid details of an unfortunate life aren't compensable, but require the dross to make the gold appear in its real form. Mt. Sahwa is a more provocative and edifying film for all its propaganda quirks.

The Korean War in Color,, a 90-minute documentary featuring color footage, is available on YouTube, in nine segments, and at ROK Drop.

I'm watching the second segment now, but the first segment glanced over some key political aspects of the start of the war that today have become political footballs. The first months of the war until MacArthur's removal were in many ways the least durable legacy of the war. The debate over who invaded first, how the Korean People's Army captured Seoul, Task Force Smith, and the incident at Nogun-ri, as well as the two years of negotiations between the DPRK and US loom larger than the tactical aspects of the war.

Caveat: This is not a book review; I have not read this book. I was interested in the opinions expressed in these two book reviews. But, for a complete account of the war, I recommend William Stueck's The Korean War and Rethinking the Korean War.

David Halberstam's last book, The Coldest Winter, about the Korean War, is receiving attention more for its author's career than the subject.

Two reviews, by Stephen Sestanovich and Erik Spanberg, caught my attention for what each said, not for the book each agreed was important, but if only for its author. Sestanovich concludes:

The Korean War that David Halberstam describes offers echo after echo of our contemporary predicament, or at least of one reading of it. His story is all about the hijacking of American policy, the fomenting of national hysteria, and the disaster that follows. But he would have written a truer?and, for that matter, a more useful?book if he had admitted how many people in high positions thought the policy was both necessary and right. For an understanding of the insidious workings of consensus, rather than of conspiracy, The Best and the Brightest would have been an excellent place to start.

Spanberg concludes:

No one won much of anything, but the ripples and lessons of political and military hubris echo to the present. «The Coldest Winter» is a fitting, warm tribute to the art of reporting, the most appropriate epitaph imaginable for David Halberstam.

What about the Koreas today? What about the Six-Party talks at least? Has the Iraq War and partisan politics in America warped perception so completely, that all of history is a lesson about the Bush administration? Both reviewers agree on Halberstam's main thesis: General MacArthur was the problem. But, there were over two years left to a sausage-grinder of a war, in which battles often occurred for no reason but diplomatic leverage. Spanberg punctuates what for me is one of the enduring legacies of the war.

Late in the book, Halberstam skips over large portions of the war's final two years, exhausted, no doubt, by the endless skirmishes over anonymous hills and villages for little to no gain on both sides.

That is a minor quibble in a book filled with insight and marvelous detail. Some of Halberstam's work in recent years smacked of a reporting treadmill, churned out too quickly. With «The Coldest Winter,» it is clear that Halberstam invested all of his considerable talents - and energy - without being rushed to meet a publishing deadline.

Within the tedious diplomatic exchanges at Panmumjon lies the record of the infuriating tactics Pyongyang has honed to a science in the last 50 years. The casualties and deaths compiled on those Korean hills while diplomats talked is a harbinger of decades of murderous economic development and political infighting in both Koreas, and, possibly, of a future war. America could not end the war then in victory, and America has not found a way to end a war still stuck in armistice. The denizens of the DPRK's gulags are a testament to that inhumanly brutal and frustrating legacy.