Korean War "Practice"?

[Doug Macdonald <Dmacdonald@mail.colgate.edu>]

	I agree with Ed Evanhoe that Korea was pretty much what it looked
like: a concerted communist bloc attempt to take over the south.   The new
documents that have come out of the former Soviet Union so far clearly
suggest that this was the case.  We even have publicly available a
transcript of the discussion between Stalin and Kim Il-sung in April, 1950
when the Russian dictator gave the go ahead.  He gave several reasons for
changing his mind on the invasion.   Stalin had been blocking it since the
previous spring (1949) when American troops started their last withdrawal
and Kim began pushing for a southern invasion.  The Chinese returned tens of
thousands of ethnic Korean troops with their weapons  in spring, 1950 that
had fought with Mao in the Chinese civil war in preparation.  Stalin told
Kim that he was in favor of an invasion then  because: 1) the USSR now had
nuclear weapons and that fact, added to the Sino-Soviet Defense Pact signed
in February,  1950 would deter the US; 2) the Chinese Communist victory
acted as a model for the entire region, and a Korean victory for communism
would further the revolutionary process regionally; 3) the lack of a US
response to the Chinese Communist victory showed that the "final crisis" of
capitalism" had begun and the US was too weak to intervene; and, 4)
conditions in South Korea seemed ripe for a revolution.  Mao was apparently
more cautious, wanting to take back Taiwan first, but he went along.  The
truth was that they were going to keep going until they were stopped.  In
Korea, they were stopped.  Those allied lives were not lost in vain, in my
view.   I am a Vietnam Veteran; I have no illusions about us always being
right or victorious.   The jury is still out on Vietnam, in my view.  But it
is in on Korea: Truman did the right thing.

	At the risk of seeming to be self-promoting, an article I wrote on
the origins of the Cold War in Asia that gives some background to the
outbreak of the war from a traditional Cold War perspective is online;
anyone interested can go to: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/macdon.htm



Doug Macdonald
Colgate University