> That story was on the bottom fold of today's SF Chronicle.
> For a related story, from Dissent, not known for being tough on US
>imperialism, see the following. The full AP story from a few months ago.
>Comments by Marilyn Blatt Young and Michael Walzer.
Walzer's comments are appalling. Though two listmembers - Liza Featherstone & Kim Phillips-Fein - have fine pieces in the spring issue, and Rachel Neumann gets the best of David Glenn in a defense of window-smashing, Dissent is generally such a depressing thing to read. Joanne Barkan has a witless, tedious annotation of the Blair-Schroder 3rd Way manifesto; Gitlin has a soporofic essay on Vietnam; but Walzer really wins some kind of prize for the awfulness of this.
Doug
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Dissent - Spring 2000
RESPONSES
Michael Walzer
BACK IN THE 1960s, I criticized the Vietnam War, in part, by contrasting it with the Korean War. This was a way of distinguishing myself, and the part of the antiwar movement to which I belonged, from those leftists who insisted that no American war could possibly be just. It was also a way of arguing that Stalinist aggression sometimes required a military as well as a political response. I still believe that the massive invasion of the South by the North Korean army should have been resisted-even if, as we have now learned, the forces that led the resistance committed criminal acts. But it is important to acknowledge the crimes and examine their causes.
Some of the causes are easy, even comforting, to list, and so they were immediately evoked by people eager to defend, if not quite to justify, the killings described in the above AP dispatch. The American soldiers involved in the massacre were raw recruits, rushed into combat from Japan, and they were in headlong retreat. These are circumstances that, in many wars, have made for both rage and panic, emotions more easily directed against the civilian population than the attacking army. Frightened and inexperienced soldiers are more likely to kill both brutally and randomly; military discipline reduces civilian casualties. But this can be, at best, only a partial explanation of what happened at No Gun Ri. For the killings there were not committed "in the heat of battle." They seem to have been the direct result of orders issued from U.S. Army headquarters, and the officers giving the orders were surely not raw recruits. They were veterans of World War 11, which ended only five years before the killings at the bridge, and which was followed by a major effort, at Nuremberg and Tokyo, to teach future generations a lesson about the crimes of war. No Gun Ri is a case of refusing to remember the lesson.
The trials had barely ended in 1950, but it is now clear that American officers had not acquired that heightened awareness of noncombatant immunity that Nuremberg and Tokyo should have taught - nor had they incorporated this awareness into the training of new soldiers. It couldn't have been possible to study accounts of the Nuremberg trials and then issue the command that came from the First Cavalry Division: "No refugees to cross the front line. Fire [at] everyone trying to cross lines. Use discretion in case of women and children." It couldn't have been possible to undergo a training in military ethics and then obey commands of that kind. Discretion is just what soldiers don't have when they confront civilians.
Clearly, American officers, coached perhaps by their Korean counterparts, believed these to be hostile civilians: "all civilians seen in this area are to be considered as enemy and action taken accordingly." That same perception, spread across the whole of the civilian population, was critical in making Vietnam an unjust war. You can't fight in defense of another country if you have to fight against the ordinary citizens of that same country. There i's a deep contradiction in such a war, which appears here too in the Korean case, at least "in this area." (But in Korea we were also fighting against a large-scale conventional invasion.)
It IS IMPORTANT to notice that many soldiers on the ground did not perceive the hostility 'of the civilians huddled under the bridge at No Gun Ri, did not consider them a military threat, did not believe that they harbored enemy soldiers. Some of the perceptions of innocence reported in the AP dispatch may be retrospective, nourished by a kind of moral hindsight, but some of them sound plausible enough. The probability seems overwhelming that U.S. soldiers could have withdrawn safely without shooting at these civilian refugees-and that the officers on the spot knew, or should have known, that they could. In any case, they were bound to try; massacres are not "discretionary." I am not sure what should happen now. Let's assume (what may be doubtful) that the official investigation confirms the AP account, that the commission avoids a whitewash and produces what might be called a strong reckoning. There would then have to be some kind of compensation for the victims and perhaps some further inquiry into the behavior of the individual commanders. It probably doesn't make sense, at this distance, to bring them to trial, but their standing in the annals of the U.S. Army should certainly be called into question. And there should also be something more: some kind of public acknowledgment that putting enemy soldiers on trial for war crimes - as we did, and rightly did, after World War II - no barrier to war crimes of one's own. The only barrier is an army, and a political leadership, committed at every level to ensuring that the wars it fights are not murderous.
MICHAEL WALZER is co-editor of Dissent and author of just and Unjust Wars, among other works.