Bruce Cummings is an expert on the Korean War and has a powerful sense, largely long forgotten here, of the staggering level of destruction American air power brought to the Korean peninsula in those years (1950-1953). He's always worth reading. Here's his latest at the Guardian. -- TomDispatch
Here are Cummings’ opening paragraphs:
As they always do on the anniversary of the armistice, North Koreans celebrated their ‘victory’ in the Korean War on 27 July. A few days later, President Donald J Trump remarked that if the North Koreans made any more threats, they “will be met with fire and fury, and frankly, power the likes of which the world has never seen”.
"No American president has uttered words like this since Harry Truman warned the Japanese, between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, either to surrender or face “a rain of ruin from the air, the likes of which has never been seen on this earth”. Trump’s nuclear bluster, made off-the-cuff between golf rounds, was widely condemned, but a few days later he doubled down on it.
"As a White House staffer told the New York Times, the president “believes he has a better feel for Mr. Kim [Jong-un] than his advisers do. He thinks of Mr. Kim as someone pushing people around, and Mr. Trump thinks he needs to show that he cannot be pushed.”
"Trump is surrounded by people who echo his fantasies of ultimate power. Sebastian Gorka, a strange figure advising Trump (said to be a Trump “favorite” and a dead ringer for a Bela Lugosi flunky in a Dracula movie), told Fox News that Trump’s “fire and fury” line meant “don’t test America and don’t test Donald J Trump”.
"We are not just a superpower, Gorka went on, “we are now a hyper-power. Nobody in the world, especially not North Korea, comes close to challenging our military capabilities.” This has been a truism since the Soviet Union collapsed, but it doesn’t explain how the US has failed to win four of the five major wars it has fought since 1945. One of those wars was Korea, where rough peasant armies, North Korean and Chinese, fought the US to a standstill.
"It was 64 years ago that North Koreans emerged from this war into a living nightmare, after three years of “rain and ruin” by the US air force. Pyongyang had been razed to the ground, with the Air Force stating in official documents that the North’s cities suffered greater damage than German and Japanese cities firebombed during World War II."
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| Napalm bombing of village near Hanchon, North Korea, 10 May 1951. |
By Bruce Cumings
