Korea's blessing

[Brad De Long]

>In the event, the allied preparations for the surprise attack were
>extensive. Republican spokesman John Foster Dulles had visited Seoul to
>pledge support for the south, 500 US military intelligence officers were
>posted on the border and British Field Marshall Slim was in conference
>with Australian defence chiefs in the weeks before the war.

One might imagine from this paragraph that John Foster Dulles was 
part of the U.S. government in 1950...


>
>
>The point of MacArthur's retreat was to keep the case for the
>implementation of NSC 68, with its extensive commitment to militarising
>the Pacific alive. Red scares galvanised the US establishment. US
>General Van Fleet said in 1952 'Korea has been a blessing. There had to
>be a Korea either here, or some place in the world.' (UP, 19 January
>1952)

I understand Heartfield's motivation. Stalin's arming of Kim Il Sung, 
Kim Il Sung's strike across the 38th parallel that nearly conquered 
the entire peninsula, and then Mao's intervention all seem as if 
calculated to rally U.S. Congressional support for the U.S. national 
security state. It is surely the case that the defense program of NSC 
68 had no chance of enactment before Kim Il Sung struck in Korea, and 
every chance of enactment once U.S. forces were in retreat from the 
Chosin Reservoir.

So there is this deep suspicion that somehow Truman and Acheson 
*tricked* Kim Il Sung, Stalin, and Mao into providing this excuse for 
NATO and for a U.S. defense budget of 10% of GDP.

But it is hard for who has actually worked for a government to 
believe that such a cross-continental black deception operation could 
have actually been carried out...

Brad DeLong