Korean War

[CAPAIRMAN 0]

I am doing a paper on the korean war and i would like feedback. It is my opinion that the US/UN forces won the war, but I would like to see how people view the outcome of the korean war.

[theavonlady 2]

There should have been a 4th choice: NO ONE.

Actuallly, I'd vote somewhere between NO ONE and US/UN. Half a century's gone by and for the most part S. Korea is free, independent, economically strong and almost war-free, barring the North's provocations.

[CAPAIRMAN 0]

There should have been a 4th choice: NO ONE.

Actuallly, I'd vote somewhere between NO ONE and US/UN. Half a century's gone by and for the most part S. Korea is free, independent, economically strong and almost war-free, barring the North's provocations.

South Korea has a strong economy, but has had the most political scandals i have ever heard of, and has undergone decades of "democracy" where protestors are surpressed, and political rivals to the president are "persuaded" not to run for offices.

[Akira 0]

I voted the communists won in the sense that after China entered the war and started pushing the allies back, it forced peace talks thereby assuring the presence of a communist N. Korea.

Had the US/UN stopped short of the Yalu and fortified and strengthened their positions, its is concievable that there would be no N. Korea today, and a united and free Korea. Of course there was also the possibility of using Da Bomb on China...as they had absolutely no way to strike back.

So my answer is somewhere between Draw, and Communists.

[CAPAIRMAN 0]

The only reason i thought the US/UN won is that they acommplished what they initially set out to do.

[theavonlady 2]

I voted the communists won in the sense that after China entered the war and started pushing the allies back, it forced peace talks thereby assuring the presence of a communist N. Korea.

So what's the prize for winning? Mass starvation, rabid communism, extreme poverty, prison camps with Nazi extermination methods?

Blessed are the losers.

[hellfish6 7]

I voted the communists won in the sense that after China entered the war and started pushing the allies back, it forced peace talks thereby assuring the presence of a communist N. Korea.

Had the US/UN stopped short of the Yalu and fortified and strengthened their positions, its is concievable that there would be no N. Korea today, and a united and free Korea. Of course there was also the possibility of using Da Bomb on China...as they had absolutely no way to strike back.

So my answer is somewhere between Draw, and Communists.

I think the fact that the peninsula is still divided is proof that the US/UN won - it was our foremost goal to protect South Korea. We only crossed the 38th Parallel because it looked like we might be able to free the North too.

We accomplished our main goal. The North Koreans didn't.

[Akira 0]

I would have to disagree on both accounts.

The US/UN failed to rid the penisula of communism, a far more pressing concern for the US I assure you. The US/UN would have won had they not been pushed right back to the original starting line, something that says to me that at that point the US/UN was losing. The goals for the coalition obviously changed when they reached the 38th parallel because they continued. Obviously just freeing the South was not the main goal, but freeing the North as well, something they obviously failed at.

[Winters 1]

Since the N. Koreans attacked first with the goal of wiping out the south and they failed to do that i would say the US/UN "won" but its more of a won/stalemate that was acheived. Since the N. Koreans failed 100% to meet thier goals and the US was unable to free the north.

[EiZei 0]

There are only losers in wars.

[Ares1978 0]

I sort of agree with theavonlady, nobody won, if you define winning as achieving your goals and preventing the enemy from achieving his.

There are only losers in wars.

I absolutely love that saying, it's so adorably pacifistic (naive).

[Nemesis6 0]

I agree with Hellfish on this one. If the U.S. had "lost", There would be no such thing as South Korea. Just the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea". And we all know there's nothing democratic about that.

[Akira 0]

If the US/UN had "won" there would be no North Korea, as they intended, so from that view they lost, and what followed was some 20+ years of trying to fight "The Domino Effect" in the Asian region...unsuccesfully.

In my view, the North won by virtue of not having been wiped out. Also, due to the US ignoring China, the North also recieved a close ally. China also recieved much propoganda from having pushed the US away from its borders.

But if it was a victory it was a narrow one as I said, and closer to a draw. The North started out strong and kicked ass, then the US/UN came back and kicked the North's ass, and then China came in and kicked the US/UN clear back to where it started.

So maybe China should be thought of as the winner. Lots of prestige, emergence as a power in the region, and international respect. So the communists still won.

[Monkey Lib Front 10]

The only winner in this was China with the North Korean forces being defeated by US/UN forces. The US saw an opportunity for reunification of the Korean peninsula after the speed in which they steamrolled past the N. Korean forces and the entrapment by landing at Inchon which resulted in a policy switch of containment too rollback of the Korean forces.

When the US pushed through the 38th parallel (without a UN resolution, the initial goal was to push back to the 38th and no further) they where warned many times by the Chinese not to, McArthur and the Truman administration always felt that the Chinese where bluffing and that they could not mount such an attack (remember the Chinese Civil war had only finished a year before 1949).

The US/UN where pushed back by the Chinese when they got to the Yalu river by what could only be called as a human wave, the US did inflict heavy casualties as they retreated on the Chinese forces but this made no difference to the direction in which the US/UN forces where heading. The Chinese pushed the US/UN forces all the way back down to the 38th and held them at the 38th as the Chinese had no desire to push the US out of the Korean peninsula and have the threat of the use of nuclear weapons which where considered when the Chinese entered the conflict.

This really led to 2 years of stalemate where each side blasted the shit out of each other.

China was defiantly the winner (if one can be declared) as they where able to strike a blow against the US in that they defeated and pushed the US/UN forces out of north Korea, it also gave them global recognition and a slight amount of political leverage, but it did rally western feeling against communist china and led to increased funding to the Taiwanese exiles which increased tensions, some could say that it rallied anti communist feeling back home especially in the time of the red scare and entrenched an even more hard-line policy and may have led to decisions in later incursions.

[kavoven 4]

I sort of agree with theavonlady, nobody won, if you define winning as achieving your goals and preventing the enemy from achieving his.

There are only losers in wars.

I absolutely love that saying, it's so adorably pacifistic (naive).

Well, then tell me who wins in a war? People win some sadness, people win fear, people win death...

I don't see any real advantages

[Winters 1]

I sort of agree with theavonlady, nobody won, if you define winning as achieving your goals and preventing the enemy from achieving his.

There are only losers in wars.

I absolutely love that saying, it's so adorably pacifistic (naive).

Well, then tell me who wins in a war? People win some sadness, people win fear, people win death...

I don't see any real advantages

The only winners in a war are the companies that manufacture the weapons used.

I still say it was more of a stalemate (although slightly tilted to the US/UN winning) than anything else, as neither side accomplished the goals they were trying to achieve.

N. Korea wanted to destroy the south which they failed at. The US/UN wanted to save the south which they acheived but then tried to unify the entire country which they failed at.

[dmakatra 1]

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

Voted for "Not Sure", but I'd rather vote "No-one did".

[CAPAIRMAN 0]

Something i neglected to mention is that the aggreement signed to end fighting was just a cease-fire accord, and was unsigned by an ROK delegate, so technically, the war is still on.

[Akira 0]

Indeed. Puts the parties in somewhat of a bind I would say. N. Korea could attack at anytime it wanted to, and technically it would be legal. hehehe.....oh the irony.

[kerosene 0]

Stalemate, the U.N should have listened to the Chinese when it was still friendly advice. I can see why they wanted to push all the way to the border though, they probably thought they'd be preventing a lesser version of what actually happened, except presumably North Korea would have been a Chinese puppet state.

MacArthur's plan wasn't just to bomb China, he wanted to bomb part of the Soviet Union too, I think that got him the sack.

Winning in North Korea wouldn't nescessarily have stopped the Domino effect, Vietnam still would have been a french colony and the Vietnamese would still not have been allowed to try and run their own country.

[shinRaiden 0]

Correct. All the DPRK and the ROK have atm is just a Cease-fire, no armistice/surrender/declaration 'closing' the war. The US and China have their armistice's, but they also have their security agreements as well.

Did the UN/US fulfill their initial objective? Almost, there's just a small bit of DPRK land near Seoul that's still south of the 38th. If you've ever looked at the geography you'll see why the UN's been embroiled in one disaster after another of it's own making, as the paperpushers think the world is flat and that you can draw straight lines anywhere.

What the US/UN fell prey to in Korea with the Chinese intervention, and still does not have a good grasp of is how literally eastern strategy follows nhilistic chess. The pawns, rooks, knights, bishops, even the queen are all expendable. Saddam and Osama played this, Adid got a great ROI when he set the rules in Mogadishu, and it worked for Mao and Ho Chi Minh. The basic premise is so long as the king still stands, you can lose, waste, or use everything else, but still win.

On that premise strategicly China was the clear winner. The DPRK never has had any pieces to play until the recent nuke developments. Militarily they could afford to adopt horde-wave tactics that similarly 'worked' in Russia at stopping the much more advanced Blitzkreig. Secondly they could point to the politicing in Washington and ridicule the 'fallacies' of the capitalist imperialists as not being dedicated to the cause of whatever they were doing.

The Korean war was further compounded by coming so close on the heels of WW2. You had a lot of organization and equipment that was bored, including a large portion that came in right at the end of the war. This was added onto by many more who thought they would have missed all the fun and excitement that got called up themselves. Take MacArthur for example. Did a lot of generalling in WW2, followed by occupational rule in Japan. Couldn't stand retirement, so he had to come back for another fight. There were many more like that as well, I think a lot of the problems Truman had to deal with was the ranks of old brass who couldn't just hang up the sword and go play golf.

There's also the much-debated topic of "changes-in-plans", ie switching from the 38th to push to the Yalu. Israel's faced the same situation from day one, as have many of the other UN polygonal states. True, the UN is not entirely to blame as an institution, as the polygoning goes back to the League of Nations political puck-pushing.

The twist this time around is that China's tried to take a very low-key role in the DPRK, not nearly so overt as they were even in Vietnam, and definately not as much as they are against Taiwan. Of course they are there, but they don't like to publically associate themselves with His Glorious Emminence and People's Thought Leader of the Pure way of Juche Kim Bong Ill. Conversely, it's the Japanese, who were pretty much under lockdown themselves at the time of the Korean war, and bitterly detested for the Manchurian occupation, that are now pushing to get the DPRK to come to the table and be their kind of reasonable. China's grumbled about Japan's 'meddling' in the roundtable, and I wonder if the recent staged and coordinated riots have any connection to the calendared roundtable talks.

[kerosene 0]

Quote[/b] ]What the US/UN fell prey to in Korea with the Chinese intervention, and still does not have a good grasp of is how literally eastern strategy follows nhilistic chess. The pawns, rooks, knights, bishops, even the queen are all expendable. Saddam and Osama played this, Adid got a great ROI when he set the rules in Mogadishu, and it worked for Mao and Ho Chi Minh. The basic premise is so long as the king still stands, you can lose, waste, or use everything else, but still win.

Between available technology and manpower, this was the only strategy China had, and against the U.S probably the only strategy they'd have available now. China had a lot more pawns than the U.N and was also a lot freer to sacrifice them. It was manpower vs. skill. I don't think it was choosen because of cultural factors, it was simply the most expedient way of getting

what they wanted and the one most likley to be sucessful.

I don't think Saddam Husseins tactics were comprable (although the analogy is more appropriate), he had no alternative other than to step down, which he had no intention of doing, he also had a lot less pawns.

[ozanzac 0]

Voted not sure, but, I'm of the opinion that nobody won.

[ebns72 0]

I voted the US/UN won because they achieved what they set out to accomplish-prevent North Korea from invading South Korea. Mission accomplished, they won.

EDIT: since this is for a paper, why not include both perspectives and opinions displayed here? Just on this subject it is possible to have an entire paragraph describing the different points of view.

[Colossus 2]

The campaign failed, so in a way S. Korea and it's allies won.

(Soviet was a member of the UN so it would be right if I said that the UN won)

But then again, the conflict isn't over.