The last time there was a war in Korea, an estimated 2,730,000 civilians died, most of them killed by a U.S. bombing campaign that targeted cities, towns and villages, as well as battlefields.
Gen. Curtis LeMay, who wanted to drop nuclear bombs on Korea and China but was refused permission by President Truman, boasted after the war that his planes had wiped out 20 percent of Korea’s population, North and South.
Most Americans, including the present occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, seem to have forgotten that little piece of history, as well as Iraq, Vietnam and all the ugly little wars we waged in Haiti, the Philippines, Mexico and Central America, a hundred years or more ago.
We’ve developed a habit of turning small, distant nations on the other side of the world into mortal enemies in our imagination, and using that as an excuse to virtually destroy the place and then walk away as if we’d done nothing wrong. Pretty awful habit, I’d say.
At least there were actual reasons for us to initially intervene in Korea, in the ’50s in Vietnam and in Afghanistan today. But even then, we end up fighting the war the wrong way, slaughtering allies, innocents and enemies alike. It’s kind of like that dreadful old pop song, “Oops! ... I did it again.”
In Vietnam, we went in to defend an ally, with visions of helping the country prosper and to ensure that Communism didn’t spread across all of Asia. We ended up with over 50,000 dead American soldiers, 1.5 million Vietnamese civilians killed, an entire country poisoned with Agent Orange and, in the end, no “Domino Theory,” no Communist Asia ruled by Beijing.
In Korea, we were fighting the prequel to stop a takeover of South by North Korea, a righteous cause, but then we “destroyed the country to save it,” as the saying goes. Our behavior has become far worse and more egregious in this new era of “pre-emptive/preventive wars” and “regime change,” wherein we claim the right to annihilate a nation simply because it frightens us or to toss out another country’s leaders because we don’t like their politics. Some say that regime change is as badly needed in Washington, D.C., as it is in Pyongyang, Tehran or Caracas.
The Iraq war was a perfect case. Remember all the uproar comparing Saddam Hussein to Hitler and claims he was building an arsenal of nukes? “He has to be destroyed before there’s a mushroom cloud over Manhattan,” people ranted, people who should have known better. “And he has to pay for planning the 9/11 attacks, and we’ll free the long-suffering Iraqis in the process.”
Everyone knows the results – thousands of American soldiers were killed in action, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and the country completely disintegrated and spawned global terror, as it continues to do today. But no proof existed of a nuclear weapons program and zero proof that Saddam was behind Sept. 11 (in fact, he hated groups like al-Qaida almost as much as he hated us). Now, we seem to be careening toward another politically disastrous, morally catastrophic conflict in Korea.
Our president tosses around words like “totally destroy” and “fire and fury like the world has never seen “(actually, Korea already has, thanks to us). He utters ominous threats – this is “the calm before the storm,” because “we will no longer allow this (a nuclear-armed North Korea) to happen,” and “we can’t let a madman with nuclear weapons let (sic) on the loose like that.”
But what exactly has North Korea done to push us to the brink of World War III? They have tested a few missiles and warheads, and insulted and mocked our country and its president. They threaten to attack Guam (!), an American possession 90 percent of Americans have never even heard of.
Their legitimate economy is smaller than that of Alabama. Among their chief exports are amphetamines, counterfeit currency and prostitutes, sent to work abroad and send their earnings back to Pyongyang. Those hardly amount to a bunch of casus belli.
Every thinking person knows that North Korea will never attack the United States. If they lobbed a nuclear-armed missile in our direction, we would shoot the missile down and then fire a hundred missiles back at them. End of story.
Kim Jong-un knows that, and he is not crazy – or rather, he’s as crazy as a fox. He calls us names, and we horrify our allies in Japan and South Korea, who would suffer horribly if we carried through on our threats of starting a war. It’s a long-term scheme of slowly prying Japan and South Korea away from us, using our own words and deeds against us.
No, Kim is not the crazy one here. A truly great nation isn’t just a military, political and economic power. It has to be a moral power, too. Our most important resource – honor – is rapidly being eroded; fewer and fewer nations trust us or look to us for leadership, let alone admire us.
One more needless bloody war and we’ll be just another failed nation, a superpower that simply stopped being super.
Rob Schultheis has covered Afghanistan and the Middle East for Time, CBS, NPR and The New York Times. He also writes about climbing, the arts and environment from his home in Telluride. Reach him at robschultheis1@gmail.com.
