Stone in his Hidden History of the Korean War. In a long chapter entitled “Who Started the Korean War?” I examined just about every thesis on how the war started including this thesis, first advanced not by me but by I.F. In his review of David Halberstam’s book on the Korean War, The Coldest Winter, Richard Bernstein mentions the thesis “advanced in particular by Bruce Cumings” that Syngman Rhee or the South Korean military might have provoked Kim Il Sung’s attack in June 1950.
Littauer Professor of Political Economy, Emeritus Richard Neustadt recalled years later-speaking of General Marshall, Dean Acheson, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Omar Bradley-“No one went to Truman because everyone thought someone else should go.” The mistake, as Bernstein points out, lay in Truman’s failure to stop MacArthur’s heedless march north.
“Containment,” not “liberation.” We succeeded, Kim Il Sung failed. Doesn’t it depend on how you define victory? The American purpose in going to war was not to conquer North Korea, but to prevent it from conquering South Korea. In the Korean War, Richard Bernstein writes, “the United States decided to fight for a draw rather than insist on victory, and, as MacArthur liked to put it, there’s no substitute for victory”.
0 kommentar(er)
