By Edwin Cooney
I was pretty young back in the summer of 1953 when President
Eisenhower’s United Nations Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge brought news of the
Korean War armistice to U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold. Ever since Sunday, June 25th,
1950 when President Harry Truman learned of North Korea’s invasion of South
Korea while spending his thirty-first wedding anniversary at home with his
bride Bess, Americans had been at war under the flag of the newly created
United Nations.
For the first time in American history, except for the Civil
War, the United States was fighting an undeclared war. Approximately 36,000 Americans had been
killed and considerably more than 100,000 were recovering in Veteran’s
Administration hospitals from Maine to California. Many Americans firmly believed back then that the war had
started due to the incompetence of three men, Harry Truman, the failed
haberdasher and machine politician, Dean Acheson, the haughty Secretary of
State, and George C. Marshall, the Secretary of Defense whom many Republicans
considered to be both naive and treacherous.
It was Sunday night, July 26th , 1953, at home
while in Panmunjom, Korea it was already Monday, July 27th: the
armistice was engineered by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of
State John Foster Dulles, two men who had been in office less than six months,
but who were regarded by most as far more experienced, realistic and
worldly-wise (almost more patriotic) than Harry Truman.
Of course, no one,
except men such as Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H. W.
Bush, claimed that the Korean War was really over. Everyone, especially those who have been sent to serve along
the demilitarized zone near the 38th parallel during the nearly 60 years since that midsummer
night, has fully come to realize that no armistice constitutes a peace.
Still, for millions of Americans, this undeclared Korean
“police action” had accomplished one vitally important thing. It had blocked the advancement of world
communism. For decades to come
we’d hear stories that Ike had privately made it clear to the North Koreans and
the Chinese Communists that they’d either bring the war to a successful
conclusion or America’s most powerful weapon might, just might, become a
factor. Thus, we had
"brinkmanship," and "peace through strength" in a nice tidy
bundle. Not until May1954, when
the French lost to the North Vietnamese Communists under Ho Chi Minh, would
world communism again appear to be advancing.
Yet suddenly after 60 years, the North Koreans are now
warning the United States and the whole world that they, a reconstituted
Democratic Republic and nuclearized power, may be ready to re-issue what they
regard as their legitimate claim to rule the whole of the Korean
peninsula.
It’s hard to read about North Korea and even begin to take
it seriously. It’s a nation of
only approximately twenty-four million people. Almost half its people live near the poverty line. The Kim family, which has ruled the
country since August 1945, has a political and almost cultural stranglehold on
domestic authority. It appears to
have little to offer the world in either ideas or resources. Even its stated objective of
vanquishing the South Korean government appears to be totally unrealistic. If it were to use its tiny but lethal
nuclear power it could only bring about its own destruction. So the question is: what’s up? What’s in it for the North Koreans?
I tossed that very question to a couple of friends of mine
in the past few days and one of them may have at least part of the answer. My friend, let’s simply call him
"Unk," suggests that someone, perhaps the Iranians, are paying the
North Koreans to distract “satanic America” in the midst of its successful
attempts to disrupt the nuclear and economic advancement of Iran. Another
friend, we’ll call him "Intrepid" (he loves to prowl the desert land
of Death Valley, California) reminded me that the Clinton administration had
successfully negotiated with North Korea in 1994 at least temporarily easing
that nation’s suspicious outlook toward the United States. Since then, however, American officials
have cast North Korea as part of “an axis of evil.” So, there you have it. North Korea suddenly finds more
international leverage in evil than it does in international cooperation. Hence another question: is there
anything new about that?
A number of years ago, the late CBS commentator Eric
Severeid suggested that there is a certain degree of power in “shamelessness.” Nuclear “stick ‘em up" certainly
gets everyone’s attention, but it should never be confused with genuine human
power. Genuine power builds,
advances and nurtures. North
Korean audacity may buy the Kim family more worldwide notice than it had since
it signed the armistice at Panmunjom, but in the end North Korea can only look
silly.
As for those of us in the land of the free and the home of
the brave, as long as we believe we can stop another nation’s ambitions by
merely labeling or scaring them, we’re bound to be surprised by how resilient
they turn out to be!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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