Korea Military Quotes

Joan of Arc came back as a little girl in Japan, and her father told her to stop listening to her imaginary friends. Elvis was born again in a small village in Sudan, he died hungry, age 9, never knowing what a guitar was. Michelangelo was drafted into the military at age 18 in Korea, he painted his face black with shoe polish and learned to kill. Jackson Pollock got told to stop making a mess, somewhere in Russia. Hemingway, to this day, writes DVD instruction manuals somewhere in China. He’s an old man on a factory line. You wouldn’t recognise him. Gandhi was born to a wealthy stockbroker in New York. He never forgave the world after his father threw himself from his office window, on the 21st floor. And everyone, somewhere, is someone, if we only give them a chance.

During the years of Stalin's reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women's rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that "socialism doesn't work" is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.

I felt so much pride, so much love. You get a handful of days like this in a lifetime. Take in every minute. They’ll be over soon enough, and you never know what tomorrow will bring.

There are more good people than bad people, and overall there’s more that’s good in the world than there is that’s bad. We just need to hear about it, we just need to see it.

A son for a flag is a lot of sacrifice.

I’m clinging to one last thought: pain is the harbinger of hope. You have to be alive to feel pain. If you are alive, then you have purpose. If you have purpose, then you have hope.

I have this thought, it’s horrible, and it makes me sick, but it’s true: one day these students will grow up and have their own kids, and they’re going to name them for men and women who will die in this war.

I felt like I should salute. If only I knew how.

All right. They’re on our left. They’re on our right. They’re in front of us, they’re behind us. They can’t get away this time’.

Military life is hard, even cruel—especially for the kids.

The meeting began well, meaning it had the potential for being short.

We all lose people. We all have to live in the aftermath. It’s how we move forward that counts, but sometimes we are tethered to something in our past that won’t let us move forward.

The service members who defend our way of life ask very little in return, but they deserve teachers who will be as relentless in teaching their children as the military is in protecting our interests at home and abroad.

All my life my dad felt this need to protect his kids from a war he fought, a war I believed could never reach out and touch us, could never hurt us—and yet he fed us lies with his answers, shielding us from the truth about what he did there, about what he saw, about who he was before the war, and about what he became because of it. He lied to protect us from his memories, from his nightmares. Standing with my dad at The Wall, I knew the truth—no one could know so many names engraved in granite if he 'never was in danger.

This is my worst fear. It’s not keeping my students safe from terrorists, it’s knowing what to do when the Chaplain comes to take Johnny out of class because not letting the terrorists win means sometimes the good guys are going to die. And those good guys have kids, and they’re sitting in my classroom.

Teaching isn’t rocket science. It’s about being engaged, listening, paying attention. Despite conventional wisdom, you don’t need to talk a lot to teach well. You do need to care, though. Not so much about what people think of you or whether or not they like you, but about the kids and doing what’s best for them.

This country has not seen and probably will never know the true level of sacrifice of our veterans. As a civilian I owe an unpayable debt to all our military. Going forward let’s not send our servicemen and women off to war or conflict zones unless it is overwhelmingly justifiable and on moral high ground. The men of WWII were the greatest generation, perhaps Korea the forgotten, Vietnam the trampled, Cold War unsung and Iraqi Freedom and Afghanistan vets underestimated. Every generation has proved itself to be worthy to stand up to the precedent of the greatest generation. Going back to the Revolution American soldiers have been the best in the world. Let’s all take a remembrance for all veterans who served or are serving, peace time or wartime and gone or still with us. 11/11/16 May God Bless America and All Veterans.

It’s hard to describe being an expatriate of sorts to people who’ve never lived overseas, but when you’re an American living in a geographically separated region within a country like Korea, you form bonds with people who you’d never associate with stateside.

Eventually the Korean War will be understood as one of the most destructive and one of the most important wars of the twentieth century.

For your own security it’s imperative you blend in with the native population.

The look of a smug teacher is priceless.

This is who I was, before I was dead. When I cared, when I was relentless.

If I can be perfectly blunt, his humanities teacher was an ass.

We could never go back to how things were on the day before 9/11, but maybe I could go back to who I was.

I stood with my mom in the cemetery. She felt terrible pain. My grandmother is with God. My mom has to continue living. It’s not so easy, moving forward.

In total this journey will take five flights and fifty-five hours, but in reality it began four decades and two generations ago when my uncle died in Vietnam.

When we finally let go... that's when the real fun begins." The Second Most Exotic Marigold Hotel

A military situation at its worst can inspire fighting men to perform at their best.

It’d be easy to blame everything on 9/11 or the wars that came after. It’s really about the choices we made. By necessity we adapt to the realities of the world we live in, but if we forget that how we live shapes and influences the world around us, then we’ve already lost.

Cope? Adapt? Uh, no. These are military kids. They roll with it. I once asked a new student, 'See any familiar faces?' She pointed out various kids and replied, 'Seattle, Tampa, Okinawa, New Jersey.' For military dependents school is literally a non-stop revolving door of old and new friends.

To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history. State

If automating everything makes people lazier and lazier, and laziness leads to stupidity, which it does for most people, judging by the current content circulating the social networks everywhere, except North Korea, where they don’t have any internet to speak of - at some point the Japanese robots, for which a market niche is currently being developed, with no concerns on how they should be designed to act in society or outside it - will have no choice, but to take everything over, to preserve us from ourselves…

It felt like we were reliving the first day of the school year, when students and teachers do the get-to-know-you dance—teachers tell students something about who they are, students pretend to care, and then vice-versa.

If another war follows Korea, if American policy is threatened anywhere on the globe, it will not be years and months, as in the two world wars, or days, as in Korea, but only hours until American troops are committed. In battle, Americans learn fast—those who survive. The pity is, their society seems determined to make them wait until the shooting starts. The word should go out sooner.

Honestly, I had no idea how to respond. My senior year of college I’d taken a seminar titled Public Education: Situations and Strategies. I thought about emailing my professor, maybe suggest some new topics and help him get current. Maybe he’d invite me back as a guest lecturer. He’d probably expect some strategies along with the situations though, so I guess that wouldn’t work, but whatever.

I found myself surrounded by really old veterans wearing hats that said, "Retired Marine - SEMPER FI." These hats didn't appear to fit on their heads, but instead seemed to hover over them. At one point, I mistakenly tried to take the last box of crackers that a veteran also wanted. He started yelling, "I ran away from home at seventeen, lied about my age, and joined the Corps! I fought in World War II, Korea, and NAM! I have no cartilage in my right knee! It's bone-on-bone, but every morning I run six miles! I did not sacrifice my knee for this country to come here today and have you disrespect me at the commissary. Oooh-RAH!" I dropped the crackers and walked away.

The last two days I’ve been on long bus rides, driven through the countryside on the back of a motorbike, and crossed rivers on wooden boats, traversing currents into a different century. It’s late and dark, but I’m so close now. My uncle died five kilometers from here.

More than any other nation, the United States has been almost constantly involved in armed conflict and, through military alliances, has used war as a means of resolving international and local disputes. Since the birth of the United Nations, we have seen American forces involved in combat in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Greece, Grenada, Haiti, Iraq, Korea, Kosovo, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Nicaragua, Panama, Serbia, Somalia, and Vietnam, and more recently with lethal attacks in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and other sovereign nations. There were no “boots on the ground” in some of these countries; instead we have used high-altitude bombers or remote-control drones. In these cases we rarely acknowledge the tremendous loss of life and prolonged suffering among people in the combat zones, even after our involvement in the conflict is ended.

The men and women who made up DoDDS Korea during the time I was there were an eclectic group to say the least, but as a group we were among the most talented, diverse, intelligent, fun, crazy, thoughtful, caring, and dedicated people in the world. We did important work, and we did it well. Better than that, we did it exceptionally well. We were experts in our fields, and we made each other better still because we depended on each other in ways that people who’ve never lived overseas could ever imagine.

I felt a hand on my back, movement behind me, my guys making room, someone squeezing into our circle, and then one last hand joined the pile: my Korean aide. I guess it made sense. We were her real family. The closest thing she’d ever had to a real family, at least. All year she said maybe five words a day. 'Now kick some ass,' she said.

It was too late to pray, though. The sky was clear. The helicopters were gone. Too late for so many things. My fists hit the floor. My head hit the floor. My heart broke, hardened, and I lost my faith. That’s when the killing thoughts came. When it felt right to punish everyone who let this happen. I could start with Angel’s dad—but where would it stop?

Always Sami. I was tethered to her somehow. To that scared little girl I’d found on the staircase nearly a year earlier; to the past, when teaching was simpler and I could care about everyday problems, when being relentless meant running two extra laps, not waiting for an MP to search the undercarriage of a bus for bombs before letting students approach it.

Those who suffer terrible wars have a finer sense of when they begin and when they end.

People in the countryside soon told of seeing hon bul, “ghost flames,” or “spirit fires,” flickering in the night over the killing fields.

I’m in my classroom and I’m looking at this girl, but all I can see is my dad on the ground, in front of The Wall, telling the truth, finally—his knees drawn and his chest heaving—and when people pass by they look the other way, except for this one lady who stops to give my dad a hug. She gets down on her knees to reach him, and now she’s crying with a stranger, and without asking I know it’s because she’s lost something, too, and I wonder if in comforting my dad she thinks she can find it again. Probably not. It doesn’t work that way.

During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists.

At 13:57 local time, a low yield nuclear warhead exploded in the city of Chongjin, North Korea. A long standing military target. Chongjin is home to some 532,000 men, women, and children. This city has survived a number of wars. It will not survive this. But her people will. As 13:57 and .00001 microseconds, half a million Koreans seemed to materialize on a hilltop 35 miles away from the blast. They were carried there . . . One at a time, sometimes two . . . At a hair's breadth short of the speed of light . . . By one man . . . The Flash. The Fastest Man Alive.

In Korea I’d been so afraid that Sami would lose her dad. She did, but she didn’t get a flag. He went to Doha, then to Baghdad, then to Kabul, then to someplace else, and then to a different someplace else, on and on. He’d come home, leave again, come home, leave again, until one day he came home a different person altogether. Sami lost Angel, lost her family, and then she lost herself.

THE TRUTH IS BORN IN STRANGE PLACES Joan of Arc came back as a little girl in Japan, and her father told her to stop listening to her imaginary friends. Elvis was born again in a small village in Sudan, he died hungry, age 9, never knowing what a guitar was. Michelangelo was drafted into the military at age 18 in Korea, he painted his face black with shoe polish and learned to kill. Jackson Pollock got told to stop making a mess, somewhere in Russia. Hemingway, to this day, writes DVD instruction manuals somewhere in China. He’s an old man on a factory line. You wouldn’t recognise him. Gandhi was born to a wealthy stockbroker in New York. He never forgave the world after his father threw himself from his office window, on the 21st floor. And everyone, somewhere, is someone, if we only give them a chance.

DPRK translates to Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—and if the words Democratic and Republic sound like a good thing, well, it’s oxymoronic because the Korea we’re talking about here is the communist one in the North, and when I said the pastor’s father was their guest, what I really meant is he was shot down, captured, tortured, and held prisoner by a depraved enemy in what today can only be described as a failed state.

I needed to talk to my dad. My dad who had been to war, who had seen its horrors, who suffered from its nightmares, my dad who was a good man, the best man I’d ever known, who, along with my uncle, I wanted to honor by teaching military kids—my dad, the only one who I would believe if he would just tell me I could be good, too, that I could do right by my students, because for sure they were going to suffer. It’s just cause and effect. We’re at war. The military fights wars. I teach military kids. I’d never served, but now I could make a difference. I just needed my dad to tell me what to do, to tell me I was good enough to get it done.

The only thing worse than his arrogance was his incompetence. He was a bully, behaving like an ass. I saw Angel though, not him. The memorial was right there, just outside the window. It’s in the flowers, and it makes me angry. Angel liked to sit on the couch, watch TV, eat chips. She hated outside. Maybe I should have been a bully and an ass to Angel’s parents. Maybe Angel and Grace would still be alive if I’d behaved like this piece of shit teacher.

Oddly, they were never sanguine about their own combat prowess. Most of them, officers and men, felt a deep respect for, and almost an inferiority before, the various professionals that comprised the other U.N. troops in Korea. Their praise of the allies—the French, Thais, Turks, and Abyssinians—was far removed from the grousing about allies that had marked most previous wars. Most Americans, privately, would admit the U.N. troops were better than they were.

The United Front Department (UFD) is a key section in the Workers’ Party, responsible for inter-Korean espionage, policy-making and diplomacy. Since 1953, Korea has been divided by an armistice line known as the Korean Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), held in place by military force on each side. The division of the Korean peninsula is not based on a difference in language, religion or ethnicity, but on a difference in political ideology. The North Korean version of Socialism, founded as it is on the maintenance of absolute institutional unity, regards pluralism and individual determination as its greatest enemy. The Workers’ Party has therefore been active and diligent in psychological warfare operations aimed at Koreans in both

In my life I’ve been very lucky to travel around the world and see students and teachers in nearly two dozen countries—but the most awe-inspiring experience I’ve ever had was two years after 9/11 when I had the chance to attend a conference in Manhattan and personally meet many of the heroic teachers who persevered under conditions that in our worst nightmares we could never have imagined. In my opinion there’s not been nearly enough written about those teachers, and I hope that changes soon.

I asked my dad once if his high school teachers began treating kids differently during Vietnam, when they knew some of their students would be drafted and sent to war. I was curious because for sure we’d started treating our military kids differently after 9/11. He just shrugged and changed the subject, like he always did. And that was okay with me. He’d go back and change a lot of things if he could; and like everyone else, I’d give anything to go back to the day before 9/11—but all we can do is move forward.

Ahead in the distance we could see the main gate, but there was a sea of cars, none moving, people standing, milling around, waiting nervously, perhaps fearfully, as heavily armed MPs and military working dogs searched every square inch of every vehicle, searched every bag on every person, all the while keeping a vigilant eye on the long alley we were stuck in, and on the hundreds of rooftops that overlooked that alley, wary but aware that there were people out there who would gladly hurt us again if given the chance.

When foreign military spending [bombing Korea and Vietnam] forced the U.S. balance of payments into deficit and drove the United States off gold in 1971, central banks were left without the traditional asset used to settle payments imbalances. The alternative by default was to invest their subsequent payments inflows in U.S. Treasury bonds, as if these still were “as good as gold.” Central banks have been holding some $4 trillion of these bonds in their international reserves for the past few years — and these loans have financed most of the U.S. Government’s domestic budget deficits for over three decades. Given the fact that about half of U.S. Government discretionary spending is for military operations — including more than 750 foreign military bases and increasingly expensive operations in the oil-producing and transporting countries — the international financial system is organized in a way that finances the Pentagon, along with U.S. buyouts of foreign assets expected to yield much more than the Treasury bonds that foreign central banks hold.

It was this war and not World War II which established a far-flung American base structure abroad and a national security state at home, as defence spending nearly quadrupled in the last six months of 1950, and turned the United States in the policeman of the world.

It was this war and not World War II which established a far-flung American base structure abroad and a national security state at home, as defence spending nearly quadrupled in the last six months of 1950, and turned the United States into the policeman of the world.

The U.N. air interdiction against North Korea went on, destroying what little was left of its economy, making life utterly miserable for its people, but affecting the dug-in Chinese and North Korean armies, supplied from privileged sanctuary across the Yalu, hardly at all.

The US—a country that massacred its own indigenous populations—has pursued a global dominance agenda since World War II. America has built a global empire of repressive military power in service to private capital that has cost the lives millions in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and numerous other places.

Korea is often called the “Land of the Morning Calm.” It’s a country where you notice the filth and the smog on your first trip and you can’t imagine why you ever thought it was a good idea to visit. Then you meet the people and you walk among their culture and you get a sense there is something deeper beneath the surface, and before you know it, the smog doesn’t matter and the filth is gone—and in its place there is incredible beauty. The sun rises first over Japan, and as Korea is waiting for the earth to spin, for streaks of light to brighten its eastern sky, in that quiet moment there is a calmness that makes Korea the most beautiful country in the world.

Regional powers could redress the overall military balance by a strategy geared to prolonging any war beyond the willingness of the “advanced” country’s public to sustain it—as France experienced in Algeria and Vietnam; the United States in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Asymmetric warfare operated in the interstices of traditional doctrines of linear operations against an enemy’s territory. Guerrilla forces, which defend no territory, could concentrate on inflicting casualties and eroding the public’s political will to continue the conflict. In this sense, technological supremacy turned into geopolitical impotence.

North Korea’s defense budget eats up 25 percent of its gross national product—as opposed to an average of less than 5 percent for industrialized countries. Although there had been no fighting in Korea since 1953, the country kept one million men under arms, giving this tiny country, no bigger than Pennsylvania, the fourth-largest military in the world.

He had some new officers, some of them recallees. These men were not eager. They were patriotic men, with good records. But listening for the trumpet, they had received instead orders to Korea, telling them to go and serve, not saying why. They had little interest in holding the far frontier. They were citizens, and each of them had better things to do.

The Hitler War was my grandfather’s war; my father’s war – his and Uncle George’s – was Korea, which may have been just as well: George is famous for, amongst other superbly unselfconscious comments, his observation that France is a surprisingly nice bit of country, and the French, more agreeable than is commonly supposed, but the food, sadly, very French.

Sami and I had exactly one day together in the old world. On Tuesday the jihadists came to our front door and knocked down our buildings. Our new world was hijacked planes, anthrax, and Afghanistan. Then we had snipers inside the Beltway. Then came Iraq. With every military action we were told reprisals were not just probable, but a foregone conclusion. An intelligence officer with a fancy PowerPoint briefed teachers on ‘our new reality.’ He called us ‘targets.’ He said ‘get used to it.’ He told our Webmaster ‘get off your ass’ and remove bus routes/stops from the school’s website. Johnny Jihad would find that information especially helpful if he decided to plow through our kids one morning as they stood half-asleep waiting for the school bus.

Indeed, future historians may well attribute our recent successes—toppling the two worst regimes in the Middle East, presiding over the birth of consensual governments in their places, and losing fewer soldiers in the effort than during many individual campaigns of the Second World War or Korea—to an ever-innovative American military that learned quickly from mistakes of the kind described in Finding the Target and War Made New. The sometimes dour work of Frederick W. Kagan and Max Boot is itself emblematic of one of our society’s greatest strengths: the capacity to adjust to changing events with the help of thinkers who rely on a more deeply informed sense of historical reality than is conveyed in the panicked conclusions of the twenty-four-hour news cycle.

And, caught in a Communist trap, the moral courage of some leaders grew less. The pressure on Tokyo to hold down the loss never ceased. In Korea, on tile ground, it intensified. It was no longer possible to permit juniors any latitude, or any possibility for error. What Boatner foresaw happened. Soon battalion commanders led platoons, and general officers directed company actions, for the loss of one patrol could ruin the career of a colonel. In one way, it was an efficient system. It worked, for the lines were stable, and no senior officer had enough to do. But the damage done to the Army command structure would be long in healing. If a new war came someday, there would be colonels and generals—who had been lieutenants and captains in Korea—who had their basic lessons still to learn.

warfare would be waged west of the Mississippi as it had been earlier against the Abenakis, Cherokees, Shawnees, Muskogees, and even Christian Indians. In the Civil War, these methods played a prominent role on both sides. Confederate regular forces, Confederate guerrillas such as William Quantrill, and General Sherman for the Union all engaged in waging total war against civilians. The pattern would continue in US military interventions overseas, from the Philippines and Cuba to Central America, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The cumulative effect goes beyond simply the habitual use of military means and becomes the very basis for US American identity. The Indian-fighting frontiersmen and the “valiant” settlers in their circled covered wagons are the iconic images of that identity. The continued popularity of, and respect for, the genocidal sociopath Andrew Jackson is another indicator. Actual men such as Robert Rogers, Daniel Boone, John Sevier, and David Crockett, as well as fictitious ones created by James Fenimore Cooper and other best-selling writers, call to mind D. H. Lawrence’s “myth of the essential white American”—that the “essential American soul” is a killer.

On the TV and in the newspapers all we hear and read is 'live your life or the terrorists win' and it sounds great, I’m all for that, except my kids won’t ask for a bathroom pass because the faculty facilities are on the first floor of the building and the MPs patrolling the second floor won’t go downstairs on their shift—so I’ve got middle school kids afraid to take a piss because there might be a soldier in the stall next to them carrying a loaded M- 16—but hell yes, I’m all for 'live your life' and screw the terrorists, and screw all the countries who harbor and support them. I’m on board with that, except I’ve got these kids who stay home now, because they’re scared riding a bus with soldiers carrying guns, knowing that one soldier isn’t enough, so there’s a military truck full of soldiers with even bigger guns following the bus 'just in case.

The Muslim world in general, the Arab world in particular was confirmed in its grievances, particularly that the West was prepared to use its overwhelming military superiority to keep Muslims subordinate. 'Europe', the Europe of the Franco-German plan to create a federal union strong enough to stand on terms of equality with the United States as a world power, had been humiliated by the failure of its efforts to avert the war. Liberal opinion, dominant throughout the European media and academia, strong also in their American equivalents, was outraged by the spectacle of raw military force supplanting reason and legality as the means by which relations between states were ordered. Reality is an uncomfortable companion, particularly to people of good will. George H.W. Bush's proclamation of a new world order had persuaded too many in the West that the world's future could be managed within a legal framework, by discussion and conciliation. The warning uttered by his son that the United States was determined to bring other enemies of nuclear and regional stability to book - Iran, North Korea - was founded by his political opponents profoundly unsettling. The reality of the Iraq campaign of March - April 2003 is, however, a better guide to what needs to be done to secure the safety of our world than any amount of law-making or treaty-writing can offer.

If the United States ground forces had not eventually held in Korea, Americans would have been faced with two choices: holocaust or humiliation. General, atomic war, in a last desperate attempt to save the game, would have gained Americans none of the things they seek in this world; humiliating defeat and withdrawal from Korea would have inevitably surrendered Asia to a Communist surge, destroying forever American hopes for a free and ordered society across the world.

The nations of the earth through the centuries of time have waged war to gain territory. I think ours is the only nation on the face of the earth which has not claimed territory gained out of conflict. I have stood in the American Military Cemetery in Suresnes, France, where are buried some who died in the First World War. Among those was my eldest brother. It is a quiet and hallowed place, a remembrance of great sacrifice 'to make the world safe for democracy.' No territory was claimed by America as recompense for the sacrifices of those buried there. I have stood in reverence in the beautiful American military cemetery on the outskirts of Manila in the Philippines. There marble crosses and the Star of David stand in perfect symmetry marking the burial places of some 17,000 Americans who lost their lives in the Second World War. Surrounding that sacred ground are marble colonnades on which are incised the names of another 35,000 who were lost in the battles of the Pacific during that terrible conflict. After so great a sacrifice there was victory, but there was never a claim for territory except for some small islands over which we have had guardianship. I have been up and down South Korea from the 38th parallel in the North to Pusan in the South, and I have seen the ridges and the valleys where Americans fought and died, not to save their own land but to preserve freedom for people who were strangers to them but whom they acknowledged to be brothers under the fatherhood of God. Not an inch of territory was sought for nor added to the area of the United States out of that conflict. I have been from one end of South Vietnam to the other in the days of war. More than 55,000 Americans died in the sultry, suffocating heat of that strange and foreign place fighting in the cause of human liberty without ambition for territory. In no instance--not in the First World War or the Second, not in the Korean War or in Vietnam--did our nation seize and hold territory for itself as a prize of war.

Rolf Ekeus came round to my apartment one day and showed me the name of the Iraqi diplomat who had visited the little West African country of Niger: a statelet famous only for its production of yellowcake uranium. The name was Wissam Zahawi. He was the brother of my louche gay part-Kurdish friend, the by-now late Mazen. He was also, or had been at the time of his trip to Niger, Saddam Hussein's ambassador to the Vatican. I expressed incomprehension. What was an envoy to the Holy See doing in Niger? Obviously he was not taking a vacation. Rolf then explained two things to me. The first was that Wissam Zahawi had, when Rolf was at the United Nations, been one of Saddam Hussein's chief envoys for discussions on nuclear matters (this at a time when the Iraqis had functioning reactors). The second was that, during the period of sanctions that followed the Kuwait war, no Western European country had full diplomatic relations with Baghdad. TheVatican was the sole exception, so it was sent a very senior Iraqi envoy to act as a listening post. And this man, a specialist in nuclear matters, had made a discreet side trip to Niger. This was to suggest exactly what most right-thinking people were convinced was not the case: namely that British intelligence was on to something when it said that Saddam had not ceased seeking nuclear materials in Africa. I published a few columns on this, drawing at one point an angry email from Ambassador Zahawi that very satisfyingly blustered and bluffed on what he'd really been up to. I also received—this is what sometimes makes journalism worthwhile—a letter from a BBC correspondent named Gordon Correa who had been writing a book about A.Q. Khan. This was the Pakistani proprietor of the nuclear black market that had supplied fissile material to Libya, North Korea, very probably to Syria, and was open for business with any member of the 'rogue states' club. (Saddam's people, we already knew for sure, had been meeting North Korean missile salesmen in Damascus until just before the invasion, when Kim Jong Il's mercenary bargainers took fright and went home.) It turned out, said the highly interested Mr. Correa, that his man Khan had also been in Niger, and at about the same time that Zahawi had. The likelihood of the senior Iraqi diplomat in Europe and the senior Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer both choosing an off-season holiday in chic little uranium-rich Niger… well, you have to admit that it makes an affecting picture. But you must be ready to credit something as ridiculous as that if your touching belief is that Saddam Hussein was already 'contained,' and that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were acting on panic reports, fabricated in turn by self-interested provocateurs.

It was inevitable that the United States should take the position that the North Korean Communist State must now be destroyed for its lawlessness and that all Korea should be united under the government of the Taehan Minkuk. Actually, the Communist world had not broken the law, for one of the continuing tragedies of mankind is that there is no international law. The Communist world had tried to probe, a gambit, and had been strongly checked. And the Communists would regard an American move to punish the “law-breaker” not so much as justice but as a United States gambit of its own.

In fact the United States has had no exit strategy since 1945, expect in places where we were kicked out (Vietnam) or asked to leave (the Philippines): American troops still occupy Japan, Korea, and Germany, in the seventh decade after the end of World War II. Policymakers – almost always civilians with little or no military experience (Acheson is the archetype) – get Americans into wars but cannot get them out, and soon the Pentagon takes over, establishes bases, and the entire enterprise becomes a perpetual-motion machine fuelled by a defence budget that dwarfs all others in the world.

Perhaps the best example for the continuing power and importance of traditional religions in the modern world comes from Japan. In 1853 an American fleet forced Japan to open itself to the modern world. In response, the Japanese state embarked on a rapid and extremely successful process of modernisation. Within a few decades, it became a powerful bureaucratic state relying on science, capitalism and the latest military technology to defeat China and Russia, occupy Taiwan and Korea, and ultimately sink the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and destroy the European empires in the Far East. Yet Japan did not copy blindly the Western blueprint. It was fiercely determined to protect its unique identity, and to ensure that modern Japanese will be loyal to Japan rather than to science, to modernity, or to some nebulous global community. To that end, Japan upheld the native religion of Shinto as the cornerstone of Japanese identity. In truth, the Japanese state reinvented Shinto. Traditional Shinto was a hodge-podge of animist beliefs in various deities, spirits and ghosts, and every village and temple had its own favourite spirits and local customs. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the Japanese state created an official version of Shinto, while discouraging many local traditions. This ‘State Shinto’ was fused with very modern ideas of nationality and race, which the Japanese elite picked from the European imperialists. Any element in Buddhism, Confucianism and the samurai feudal ethos that could be helpful in cementing loyalty to the state was added to the mix. To top it all, State Shinto enshrined as its supreme principle the worship of the Japanese emperor, who was considered a direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, and himself no less than a living god.

What is the difference between a gangster pulling out a gun and demanding you give him a thousand dollars of “protection money,” and that same gangster pulling out a gun and demanding you provide him with a thousand-dollar “loan”? In most ways, obviously, there is no difference. But in certain ways there is As in the case of the U.S. debt to Korea or Japan, were the balance of power at any point to shift, were America to lose its military supremacy, were the gangster to lose his henchmen, that “loan” might start being treated very differently. It might become a genuine liability. But the crucial element would still seem to be the gun.

Today, we pause to remember and honour the Canadian women and men who have served our country and stood on guard for us and the values we hold dear. "Every generation of Canadians has answered the call to serve. From Ypres to Dieppe to Korea to Afghanistan, our servicemen and women have shown courage as a matter of course, and stood resilient in the face of great adversity. "This year, in marking the 150th anniversary of Confederation, we have paused and reflected on some of our most important military milestones. In keeping alive the memory of battles like Passchendaele, Hill 70, Vimy, and Dieppe, we remind this generation, and future generations, where their freedom comes from. "We owe an immeasurable debt to our veterans, to the fallen, and to the families who love them. Just as our servicemen and women have taken care of us, we must also take care of them. It is our sacred duty as a country to be there for our heroes when they need us most. "At 11:00 am, I encourage all Canadians – no matter where you are – to observe the two minutes of silence. We remember those who stepped forward to serve, who endured horror and hell, and made extraordinary sacrifices for our freedom. "We stand together, a grateful country, with poppies close to our hearts. "Lest we forget.

And while the most desperate hours of the men within the Perimeter were passing, a second battle had been raging in their rear, back in the continental United States. When American soldiers went into action, it had become customary to provide them with a free issue of candy, cigarettes—and beer. In the places American troops fought, there were rarely any handy taverns or supermarkets. Reported to the home front, the “beer issue” rapidly became a national controversy. Temperance, church, and various civic groups bombarded the Pentagon and Congress with howls of protest against the corruption of American youth. One legislator, himself a man who took a brew now and then, tried a flanking attack against the complainers, saying on the floor of the House, “Water in Korea is more deadly than bullets!” But no one either polled the troops for their opinion or said openly that a man who was old enough to kill and be killed was also old enough to have a beer if he wanted it. Unable to shake the habit of acquiescence, the Army leaders bowed to the storm of public wrath. On 12 September the day the 3rd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, lost half its strength securing Hill 314, Far East Command cut off its beer ration. The troops could still buy beer, but only when and if the PX caught up with them.

North Korea may be the craziest country in the world. It’s certainly a good competitor for that title. But it does make sense to try to figure out what’s in the minds of people when they’re acting in crazy ways. Why would they behave the way they do? Just imagine ourselves in their situation. Imagine what it meant in the Korean War years of the early 1950s for your country to be totally leveled, everything destroyed by a huge superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing. Imagine the imprint that would leave behind. Bear in mind that the North Korean leadership is likely to have read the public military journals of this superpower at that time explaining that, since everything else in North Korea had been destroyed, the air force was sent to destroy North Korea’s dams, huge dams that controlled the water supply -- a war crime, by the way, for which people were hanged in Nuremberg. And these official journals were talking excitedly about how wonderful it was to see the water pouring down, digging out the valleys, and the Asians scurrying around trying to survive. The journals were exulting in what this meant to those “Asians,” horrors beyond our imagination. It meant the destruction of their rice crop, which in turn meant starvation and death. How magnificent! It’s not in our memory, but it’s in their memory.

And then everything changed. Liberal democracy crawled out of history’s dustbin, cleaned itself up and conquered the world. The supermarket proved to be far stronger than the gulag. The blitzkrieg began in southern Europe, where the authoritarian regimes in Greece, Spain and Portugal collapsed, giving way to democratic governments. In 1977 Indira Gandhi ended the Emergency, re-establishing democracy in India. During the 1980s military dictatorships in East Asia and Latin America were replaced by democratic governments in countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Taiwan and South Korea. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the liberal wave turned into a veritable tsunami, sweeping away the mighty Soviet Empire, and raising expectations of the coming end of history. After decades of defeats and setbacks, liberalism won a decisive victory in the Cold War, emerging triumphant from the humanist wars of religion, albeit a bit worse for wear. As the Soviet Empire imploded, liberal democracies replaced communist regimes not only in eastern Europe, but also in many of the former Soviet republics, such as the Baltic States, Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia. Even Russia nowadays pretends to be a democracy. Victory in the Cold War gave renewed impetus for the spread of the liberal model elsewhere around the world, most notably in Latin America, South Asia and Africa. Some liberal experiments ended in abject failures, but the number of success stories is impressive. For instance, Indonesia, Nigeria and Chile have been ruled by military strongmen for decades, but all are now functioning democracies

Of all the misapplications of the word “conservative” in recent memory, Nisbet wrote in the 1980s, the “most amusing, in an historical light, is surely the application of ‘conservative’ to…great increases in military expenditures.… For in America throughout the twentieth century, and including four substantial wars abroad, conservatives had been steadfastly the voices of non-inflationary military budgets, and of an emphasis on trade in the world instead of American nationalism. In the two World Wars, in Korea, and in Viet Nam, the leaders of American entry into war were such renowned liberal-progressives as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. In all four episodes conservatives, both in the national government and in the rank and file, were largely hostile to intervention; were isolationists indeed.

Perhaps the best example for the continuing power and importance of traditional religions in the modern world comes from Japan. In 1853 an American fleet forced Japan to open itself to the modern world. In response, the Japanese state embarked on a rapid and extremely successful process of modernisation. Within a few decades, it became a powerful bureaucratic state relying on science, capitalism and the latest military technology to defeat China and Russia, occupy Taiwan and Korea, and ultimately sink the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and destroy the European empires in the Far East. Yet Japan did not copy blindly the Western blueprint. It was fiercely determined to protect its unique identity, and to ensure that modern Japanese will be loyal to “Japan rather than to science, to modernity, or to some nebulous global community. To that end, Japan upheld the native religion of Shinto as the cornerstone of Japanese identity. In truth, the Japanese state reinvented Shinto. Traditional Shinto was a hodge-podge of animist beliefs in various deities, spirits and ghosts, and every village and temple had its own favourite spirits and local customs. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the Japanese state created an official version of Shinto, while discouraging many local traditions. This ‘State Shinto’ was fused with very modern ideas of nationality and race, which the Japanese elite picked from the European imperialists. Any element in Buddhism, Confucianism and the samurai feudal ethos that could be helpful in cementing loyalty to the state was added to the mix. To top it all, State Shinto enshrined as its supreme principle the worship of the Japanese emperor, who was considered a direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, and himself no less than a living god.

Mattis and Gary Cohn had several quiet conversations about The Big Problem: The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments. They met for lunch at the Pentagon to develop an action plan. One cause of the problem was the president’s fervent belief that annual trade deficits of about $500 billion harmed the American economy. He was on a crusade to impose tariffs and quotas despite Cohn’s best efforts to educate him about the benefits of free trade. How could they convince and, in their frank view, educate the president? Cohn and Mattis realized they were nowhere close to persuading him. The Groundhog Day–like meetings on trade continued and the acrimony only grew. “Let’s get him over here to the Tank,” Mattis proposed. The Tank is the Pentagon’s secure meeting room for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It might focus him. “Great idea,” Cohn said. “Let’s get him out of the White House.” No press; no TVs; no Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s personal secretary, who worked within shouting distance of the Oval Office. There wouldn’t even be any looking out the window, because there were no windows in the Tank. Getting Trump out of his natural environment could do the trick. The idea was straight from the corporate playbook—a retreat or off-site meeting. They would get Trump to the Tank with his key national security and economic team to discuss worldwide strategic relations. Mattis and Cohn agreed. Together they would fight Trump on this. Trade wars or disruptions in the global markets could savage and undermine the precarious stability in the world. The threat could spill over to the military and intelligence community. Mattis couldn’t understand why the U.S. would want to pick a fight with allies, whether it was NATO, or friends in the Middle East, or Japan—or particularly with South Korea.

In the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the DOD presented its long-range assessment of United States military readiness and plans for the future. By statute, the National Defense Panel (NDP), a nonpartisan ten-member body appointed by Congress, is required to review the QDR’s adequacy. The panel concluded that under the Obama administration’s military plan “there is a growing gap between the strategic objectives the U.S. military is expected to achieve and the resources required to do so.”71 The significant funding shortfall is “disturbing if not dangerous in light of the fact that global threats and challenges are rising, including a troubling pattern of territorial assertiveness and regional intimidation on China’s part, the recent aggression of Russia in Ukraine, nuclear proliferation on the part of North Korea and Iran, a serious insurgency in Iraq that both reflects and fuels the broader sectarian conflicts in the region, the civil war in Syria, and civil strife in the larger Middle East and throughout Africa.

I can hardly believe that our nation’s policy is to seek peace by going to war. It seems that President Donald J. Trump has done everything in his power to divert our attention away from the fact that the FBI is investigating his association with Russia during his campaign for office. For several weeks now he has been sabre rattling and taking an extremely controversial stance, first with Syria and Afghanistan and now with North Korea. The rhetoric has been the same, accusing others for our failed policy and threatening to take autonomous military action to attain peace in our time. This gunboat diplomacy is wrong. There is no doubt that Secretaries Kelly, Mattis, and other retired military personnel in the Trump Administration are personally tough. However, most people who have served in the military are not eager to send our young men and women to fight, if it is not necessary. Despite what may have been said to the contrary, our military leaders, active or retired, are most often the ones most respectful of international law. Although the military is the tip of the spear for our country, and the forces of civilization, it should not be the first tool to be used. Bloodshed should only be considered as a last resort and definitely never used as the first option. As the leader of the free world, we should stand our ground but be prepared to seek peace through restraint. This is not the time to exercise false pride! Unfortunately the Trump administration informed four top State Department management officials that their services were no longer needed as part of an effort to "clean house." Patrick Kennedy, served for nine years as the “Undersecretary for Management,” “Assistant Secretaries for Administration and Consular Affairs” Joyce Anne Barr and Michele Bond, as well as “Ambassador” Gentry Smith, director of the Office for Foreign Missions. Most of the United States Ambassadors to foreign countries have also been dismissed, including the ones to South Korea and Japan. This leaves the United States without the means of exercising diplomacy rapidly, when needed. These positions are political appointments, and require the President’s nomination and the Senate’s confirmation. This has not happened! Moreover, diplomatically our country is severely handicapped at a time when tensions are as hot as any time since the Cold War. Without following expert advice or consent and the necessary input from the Unites States Congress, the decisions are all being made by a man who claims to know more than the generals do, yet he has only the military experience of a cadet at “New York Military Academy.” A private school he attended as a high school student, from 1959 to 1964. At that time, he received educational and medical deferments from the Vietnam War draft. Trump said that the school provided him with “more training than a lot of the guys that go into the military.” His counterpart the unhinged Kim Jong-un has played with what he considers his country’s military toys, since April 11th of 2012. To think that these are the two world leaders, protecting the planet from a nuclear holocaust….

oddly, it was with the Okies, Catholics, and Negroes that the Communists, on the whole, had small success. Many of the disadvantaged understood the dream of America better than those who had enjoyed its benefits. Sitting in the lecture room, Sergeant Schlichter, like so many others, was taken sick. He was sent to the crude Chinese hospital with pneumonia. He almost died. But here, as he said, he saw the greatest example of faith he had ever seen, in the actions of Chaplain Emil Kapaun, who had been taken at Unsan. Father Kapaun, ill himself, stood in front of the POW’s, prayed, and stole food to share with other’s. By his example, he sometimes forced the little bit of good remaining in these starving men to the fore. But Chaplain Kapaun could not take command, and he soon grew deathly ill, probably as much from sorrow as from his own starvation. Schlichter saw him put in a room, without food or medicine. No other American was allowed to treat the priest, and he soon died. He was not alone. Schlichter heard that no other chaplain survived the prison camps of Korea, the only class or group to be wiped out.

When she first arrived, Mi-ran was impressed. The dormitories were modern and each of the four girls who would share one room had her own bed rather than use the Korean bed mats laid out on a heated floor, the traditional way of keeping warm at night while expending little fuel. But as winter temperatures plunged Chongjin into a deep freeze, she realized why it was that the school had been able to give her a place in its freshman class. The dormitories had no heating. Mi-ran went to sleep each night in her coat, heavy socks, and mitten with a towel draped over her head. When she woke up, the towel would be crusted with frost from the moisture of her breath. In the bathroom, where the girls washed their menstrual rags (nobody had sanitary napkins, so the more affluent girls used gauze bandages while the poor girls used cheap synthetic cloths), it was so cold that the rags would freeze solid within minutes of being hung up to dry. Mi-ran hated the mornings. Just as in Jun-sang's school, they were roused by a military-style roll call at 6:00 A.M., but instead of marching off like proud soldiers, they shivered into the bathroom and splashed icy water on their faces, under a grotesque canopy of frozen menstrual rags.

Once beyond school age, individuals were all expected to carry out two functions: to contribute to production and to take part in military operations. The whole system was based on the “Four Military Lines.” The key tenets were “arm the entire people,” “fortify the entire nation,” “build a nation of military leaders,” and “complete military modernization.” So various militias were formed. When I grew too old for the Youth League, I had no choice but to join one of these militias. In my case, it was the Laborers’ and Farmers’ Red Army. I enlisted when I graduated from high school and embarked on a period of training. The training was professional enough. We learned how to dig trenches and fight to protect our position. We were well trained as snipers. Groups of individuals who were used to working together were formed into military units. The idea was that, in the event of a crisis, the units could be mobilized very quickly. We had exercises twice a year, at the hottest and the coldest time of year. We’d do things like climb a mountain or dig trenches out of the frozen ground. Right from the start, the one thing I kept asking myself was this: What was with the party’s obsession with militarizing the entire nation?

By 1949, both the United States and the Soviet Union had withdrawn their troops and turned the peninsula over to the new puppet leaders. It did not go well. Kim Il Sung was a Stalinist and an ultranationalist dictator who decided to reunify the country in the summer of 1950 by invading the South with Russian tanks and thousands of troops. In North Korea, we were taught that the Yankee imperialists started the war, and our soldiers gallantly fought off their evil invasion. In fact, the United States military returned to Korea for the express purpose of defending the South—bolstered by an official United Nations force—and quickly drove Kim Il Sung’s army all the way to the Yalu River, nearly taking over the country. They were stopped only when Chinese soldiers surged across the border and fought the Americans back to the 38th parallel. By the end of this senseless war, at least three million Koreans had been killed or wounded, millions were refugees, and most of the country was in ruins. In 1953, both sides agreed to end the fighting, but they never signed a peace treaty. To this day we are still officially at war, and both the governments of the North and South believe that they are the legitimate representatives of all Koreans.

They call me Mac. The name's unimportant. You can best identify me by the six chevrons, three up and three down, and by that row of hashmarks. Thirty years in the United States Marine Corps. I've sailed the Cape and the Horn aboard a battlewagon with a sea so choppy the bow was awash half the time under thirty-foot waves. I've stood Legation guard in Paris and London and Prague. I know every damned port of call and call house in the Mediterranean and the world that shines beneath the Southern Cross like the nomenclature of a rifle. I've sat behind a machine gun poked through the barbed wire that encircled the International Settlement when the world was supposed to have been at peace, and I've called Jap bluffs on the Yangtze Patrol a decade before Pearl Harbor. I know the beauty of the Northern Lights that cast their eerie glow on Iceland and I know the rivers and the jungles of Central America. There are few skylines that would fool me: Sugar Loaf, Diamond Head, the Tinokiri Hills or the palms of a Caribbean hellhole. Yes, I knew the slick brown hills of Korea just as the Marines knew them in 1871. Fighting in Korea is an old story for the Corps. Nothing sounds worse than an old salt blowing his bugle. Anyhow, that isn't my story.

Thou shalt give thy all in the struggle to unify the entire society with the revolutionary ideology of the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung. Thou shalt honor the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung with all thy loyalty. Thou shalt make absolute the authority of the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung. Thou shalt make the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung’s revolutionary ideology thy faith and make his instructions thy creed. Thou shalt adhere strictly to the principle of unconditional obedience in carrying out the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung’s instructions. Thou shalt strengthen the entire party’s ideology and willpower and revolutionary unity, centering on the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung. Thou shalt learn from the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung and adopt the Communist look, revolutionary work methods, and people-oriented work style. Thou shalt value the political life thou wast given by the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung, and loyally repay his great trust and thoughtfulness with heightened political awareness and skill. Thou shalt establish strong organizational regulations so that the entire party, nation, and military move as one under the one and only leadership of the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung. Thou shalt pass down the great achievement of the revolution by the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung from generation to generation, inheriting and completing it even unto the very end.

Back in America, Donald Trump had, as a candidate, preached the virtues of withdrawal. “We should leave Afghanistan immediately,” he had said. The war was “wasting our money,” “a total and complete disaster.” But, once in office, Donald Trump, and a national security team dominated by generals, pressed for escalation. Richard Holbrooke had spent his final days alarmed at the dominance of generals in Obama’s Afghanistan review, but Trump expanded this phenomenon almost to the point of parody. General Mattis as secretary of defense, General H. R. McMaster as national security advisor, and retired general John F. Kelly formed the backbone of the Trump administration’s Afghanistan review. In front of a room full of servicemen and women at Fort Myer Army Base, in Arlington, Virginia, backed by the flags of the branches of the US military, Trump announced that America would double down in Afghanistan. A month later, General Mattis ordered the first of thousands of new American troops into the country. It was a foregone conclusion: the year before Trump entered office, the military had already begun quietly testing public messaging, informing the public that America would be in Afghanistan for decades, not years. After the announcement, the same language cropped up again, this time from Trump surrogates who compared the commitment not to other counterterrorism operations, but to America’s troop commitments in Korea, Germany, and Japan. “We are with you in this fight,” the top general in Afghanistan, John Nicholson, Jr., told an audience of Afghans. “We will stay with you.

Most countries that make great economic and social progress are not democracies. South Korea moved from Level 1 to Level 3 faster than any country had ever done (without finding oil), all the time as a military dictatorship. Of the ten countries with the fastest economic growth in 2016, nine of them score low on democracy. Anyone who claims that democracy is a necessity for economic growth and health improvements will risk getting contradicted by reality. It’s better to argue for democracy as a goal in itself instead of as a superior means to other goals we like. There is no single measure—not GDP per capita, not child mortality (as in Cuba), not individual freedom (as in the United States), not even democracy—whose improvement will guarantee improvements in all the others. There is no single indicator through which we can measure the progress of a nation. Reality is just more complicated than that. The world cannot be understood without numbers, nor through numbers alone. A country cannot function without a government, but the government cannot solve every problem. Neither the public sector nor the private sector is always the answer. No single measure of a good society can drive every other aspect of its development. It’s not either/or. It’s both and it’s case-by-case. Factfulness Factfulness is … recognizing that a single perspective can limit your imagination, and remembering that it is better to look at problems from many angles to get a more accurate understanding and find practical solutions. To control the single perspective instinct, get a toolbox, not a hammer.

One might pause here to wonder how it is that the United States claims to support democracy and freedom in the world when it so often backs dictators like the Shah and Somoza. As I tell my human rights class every year, the United States always supports democracy and freedom, except when it doesn’t, which is all the time…. As political analyst Stephen Gowans explains, the United States is simply not what it claims to be, and most likely never has been: The United States—which began as 13 former British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America pursuing a “manifest destiny” of continental expansion, (the inspiration for Nazi Germany’s lebensraum policy); which fought a war with Spain for colonies; which promulgated the Monroe Doctrine asserting a sphere of influence in the Americas; which stole Panama to create a canal; whose special operations forces project US power in 81 countries; whose generals control the militaries of the combined NATO members in Europe and the military forces of South Korea; whose military command stations one hundred thousand troops on the territories of former imperialist rivals, manifestly has an empire. And yet this reality is denied, as assuredly as is the reality that the United States, built on the genocide of Native Americans and the slave labor of Africans, overtly white supremacist until the mid-1960s, and covertly white supremacist since, is unequivocally not a beacon of Enlightenment values, unless liberalism is defined as equality and liberty assigned exclusively to white men who own productive property. Indeed, so antithetical is the United States to the liberal values of the equality of all peoples and nations, freedom from exploitation and oppression, and the absence of discrimination on the bases of class, race, and sex, that it’s difficult to apprehend in what sense the United States has ever been liberal or has in any way had a legitimate claim to being the repository of the values of the Enlightenment.2

In Nevada, at Frenchman’s Flat, a bright flash and ugly mushroom cloud had signified a gigantic change in the tactical battlefield—a change that had not come about at Hiroshima, despite statements to the contrary. In its early years the atomic device had remained a strategic weapon, suitable for delivery against cities and industries, suitable to obliterate civilians, men, women, and children by the millions, but of no practical use on a limited battlefield—until it was fired from a field gun. Until this time, 1953, the armies of the world, including that of the United States, had hardly taken the advent of fissionable material into account. The 280mm gun, an interim weapon that would remain in use only a few years, changed all that, forever. With an atomic cannon that could deliver tactical fires in the low-kiloton range, with great selectivity, ground warfare stood on the brink of its greatest change since the advent of firepower. The atomic cannon could blow any existing fortification, even one twenty thousand yards in depth, out of existence neatly and selectively, along with the battalions that manned it. Any concentration of manpower, also, was its meat. It spelled the doom of Communist massed armies, which opposed superior firepower with numbers, and which had in 1953 no tactical nuclear weapons of their own. The 280mm gun was shipped to the Far East. Then, in great secrecy, atomic warheads—it could fire either nuclear or conventional rounds—followed, not to Korea, but to storage close by. And with even greater secrecy, word of this shipment was allowed to fall into Communist hands. At the same time, into Communist hands wafted a pervasive rumor, one they could neither completely verify nor scotch: that the United States would not accept a stalemate beyond the end of summer. The psychological pressures on Chinese Intelligence became enormous. Neither an evaluative nor a collective agency, even when it feels it is being taken, dares ignore evidence.

The best way not to have to use your military power is to make sure that power is visible. When people know that we will use force if necessary and that we really mean it, we’ll be treated differently. With respect. Right now, no one believes us because we’ve been so weak with our approach to military policy in the Middle East and elsewhere. Building up our military is cheap when you consider the alternative. We’re buying peace and we’re locking in our national security. Right now we are in bad shape militarily. We’re decreasing the size of our forces and we’re not giving them the best equipment. Recruiting the best people has fallen off, and we can’t get the people we have trained to the level they need to be. There are a lot of questions about the state of our nuclear weapons. When I read reports of what is going on, I’m shocked. It’s no wonder nobody respects us. It’s no surprise that we never win. Spending money on our military is also smart business. Who do people think build our airplanes and ships, and all the equipment that our troops should have? American workers, that’s who. So building up our military also makes economic sense because it allows us to put real money into the system and put thousands of people back to work. There is another way to pay to modernize our military forces. If other countries are depending on us to protect them, shouldn’t they be willing to make sure we have the capability to do it? Shouldn’t they be willing to pay for the servicemen and servicewomen and the equipment we’re providing? Depending on the price of oil, Saudi Arabia earns somewhere between half a billion and a billion dollars every day. They wouldn’t exist, let alone have that wealth, without our protection. We get nothing from them. Nothing. We defend Germany. We defend Japan. We defend South Korea. These are powerful and wealthy countries. We get nothing from them. It’s time to change all that. It’s time to win again. We’ve got 28,500 wonderful American soldiers on South Korea’s border with North Korea. They’re in harm’s way every single day. They’re the only thing that is protecting South Korea. And what do we get from South Korea for it? They sell us products—at a nice profit. They compete with us. We spent two trillion dollars doing whatever we did in Iraq. I still don’t know why we did it, but we did. Iraq is sitting on an ocean of oil. Is it out of line to suggest that they should contribute to their own future? And after the blood and the money we spent trying to bring some semblance of stability to the Iraqi people, maybe they should be willing to make sure we can rebuild the army that fought for them. When Kuwait was attacked by Saddam Hussein, all the wealthy Kuwaitis ran to Paris. They didn’t just rent suites—they took up whole buildings, entire hotels. They lived like kings while their country was occupied. Who did they turn to for help? Who else? Uncle Sucker. That’s us. We

Given this American interest, how might war between the United States and China develop? Assume the year is 2010. American troops are out of Korea, which has been reunified, and the United States has a greatly reduced military presence in Japan. Taiwan and mainland China have reached an accommodation in which Taiwan continues to have most of its de facto independence but explicitly acknowledges Beijing’s suzerainty and with China’s sponsorship has been admitted to the United Nations on the model of Ukraine and Belorussia in 1946. The development of the oil resources in the South China Sea has proceeded apace, largely under Chinese auspices but with some areas under Vietnamese control being developed by American companies. Its confidence boosted by its new power projection capabilities, China announces that it will establish its full control of the entire sea, over all of which it has always claimed sovereignty. The Vietnamese resist and fighting occurs between Chinese and Vietnamese warships. The Chinese, eager to revenge their 1979 humiliation, invade Vietnam. The Vietnamese appeal for American assistance. The Chinese warn the United States to stay out. Japan and the other nations in Asia dither. The United States says it cannot accept Chinese conquest of Vietnam, calls for economic sanctions against China, and dispatches one of its few remaining carrier task forces to the South China Sea. The Chinese denounce this as a violation of Chinese territorial waters and launch air strikes against the task force. Efforts by the U.N. secretary general and the Japanese prime minister to negotiate a cease-fire fail, and the fighting spreads elsewhere in East Asia. Japan prohibits the use of U.S. bases in Japan for action against China, the United States ignores that prohibition, and Japan announces its neutrality and quarantines the bases. Chinese submarines and land-based aircraft operating from both Taiwan and the mainland impose serious damage on U.S. ships and facilities in East Asia. Meanwhile Chinese ground forces enter Hanoi and occupy large portions of Vietnam.

The Fights 1962: US vs Russia in General / China vs Formosa over possession / India vs China over border territory / India vs Pakistan over possession Kashmir – Religious / India vs Portugal over possession Goa / India vs Nagas over Independence / Egypt vs Israel over possession of territory and Religion / E. Germany vs W. Germany sovereignty / Cuba vs USA – Ideas / N. Korea vs So. Korea – Sovereignty / Indonesia vs Holland – Territory / France vs Algeria – Territory / Negroes vs whites – US / Katanga vs Leopoldville / Russian Stalinists vs Russian Kruschevists / Peru APRA vs Peru Military / Argentine Military versus Argentine Bourgeois / Navajo Peyotists vs Navajo Tribal Council – Tribal / W. Irian? / Kurds vs Iraq / Negro vs Whites – So. Africa – Race / US Senegal vs Red Mali – Territory / Ghana vs Togo – Territory / Ruanda Watusi vs Ruanda Bahutu – Tribe power / Kenya Kadu vs Kenya Kana – Tribe power / Somali vs Aethopia, Kenya, French Somali / Tibet Lamas vs Chinese Tibetan secularists / India vs E. Pak – Assam Bengal over Border & Tripura / Algeria vs Morocco over Sahara.

We are confident enough of our military strength, but we fight defensively; we are like a strong animal at bay, turning this way and that, not being sure whether to fight on this flank or the other, whether to wait or to attack. As a nation we have had great difficulty deciding how far to go in Korea, whether we should make war here or there, or whether we should draw the line against totalitarianism at this point or that. If anyone should attack us, we should be completely united. But we are confused about constructive goals—what are we working for except defense? And even the gestures of new goals which give magnificent promise for a new world, such as the Marshall Plan, are questioned by some groups.

Civilians when in control are not invariably right, and if the military voice becomes too muffled and hesitant then national preparedness for war may suffer.

The political situation of the United States is far gone, and so is the country’s military situation. To put it bluntly, we are presently vulnerable to a mass missile strike from China, North Korea, and Russia. Looking at the incapable Mr. Biden, the United States is already pre-decapitated. You can paint whatever Happy Face you want on it, but fraudulent optimism will not stop a Russian or Chinese missile when deterrence finally fails. And yes, deterrence is about to fail. The signs are visible on every side. Our nuclear missiles are overaged and rotting. We will not have new replacement missiles or warheads until 2029.

Most defectors’ knowledge of history consisted of little more than shining legends from the lives of the Great Leader and the Dear Leader. This was when they were told that it was an unprovoked attack from the North, not from the South, that began the Korean War on 25 June 1950. Many rejected this loudly, and outright. They could not accept that our country’s main article of faith – believed by most North Koreans – was a deliberate lie. Even those who knew that North Korea was rotten to the core found the truth about the war very hard to accept. It meant that everything else they had learned was a lie. It meant that the tears they’d cried every 25 June, their decade of military service, all the ‘high-speed battles’ for production they had fought, had no meaning. They had been made part of the lie. It was the undoing of their lives.

Their [firms that grew up around the U.S. military] privileged position within the world economy, close to the source of standards and technology and with easy access to U.S. markets, allowed them to go global. In other words, the international order that the United States built around itself after 1945 redounded to its benefit, but not permanently. Once other countries mastered U.S. standards, they too could profit and even compete with the United States itself. It is telling that the countries hosting the most U.S. peacetime bases - such as Britain, Japan, West Germany, and South Korea - numbered among the United States' most formidable competitors.

Bradley admitted. “The swiftness and magnitude of the victory were mind-boggling. We had been on the point of despair, bracing for a ‘Dunkirk’ at Pusan and/or a disaster at Inchon. A mere two weeks later the North Korean Army had been routed and all South Korea had been regained. MacArthur was deservedly canonized as a ‘military genius.’ Inchon was his boldest and most dazzling victory. In hindsight, the JCS seemed like a bunch of Nervous Nellies to have doubted.

As a ground-combat force approaches the deadly zone and moves within range of the enemy’s rifles, mortars, and machine guns, the dynamics of war become more art than science. Intangibles such as training, confidence, leadership, and cohesion provide more secure mantle of protection than the possession of superior equipment.” There is as much folklore as science in the accounts of maneuver units that do exceptionally well in close combat. Empirical and anecdotal evidence gathered from combat studies of the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam has shown conclusively that elite maneuver units, carefully selected and trained, not only perform better in combat but do so with many fewer casualties from all sources of combat incapacitation (for example, from disease and combat fatigue). Such units fight so effectively because they are composed of soldiers of exceptionally quality – better trained and better led as well as coalesced through long-term association that builds familiarity and mutual trust. The difference between carefully trained and led units and those of lesser quality is dramatic.

It is important not to latch onto some strategic fad to justify radical cuts in the U.S. Army or Marine Corps. For two decades, since Operation Desert Storm, some have favored “stand-off” warfare, featuring long-range strike from planes and ships as the American military’s main approach to future combat. But it is not possible to address many of the world’s key security challenges that way including scenarios in places like Korea and South Asia, discussed further below, that could in fact imperil American security. In the 1990s, advocates of military revolution often argued for such an approach to war, but the subsequent decade proved that for all the progress in sensors and munitions and other military capabilities, the United States still needed forces on the ground to deal with complex insurgencies and other threats. A military emphasis on stand-off warfare is some- times linked with a broader grand strategy of “offshore balancing” by which the distant United States would step in with limited amounts of power to shape overseas events, particularly in Eurasia, rather than getting involved directly with its own soldiers and Marines. But offshore balancing is too clever by half. In fact, overseas developments are not so easily nudged in favorable directions through modest outside interventions. One of the reasons is that off- shore balancing can suggest, in the minds of friends and foes alike, a lack of real American commitment. That can embolden adversaries. It can also worry allies to the point where, among other things, they may feel obliged to build up their own nuclear arsenals as the likes of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia might well do absent strong security ties with America. Put bluntly, offshore balancing greatly exaggerates American power by assuming that belated and limited uses of U.S. force can swing overseas events in acceptable directions.

Terrorism suspects aren’t the NSA’s only targets, however. Operations against nation-state adversaries have exploded in recent years as well. In 2011, the NSA mounted 231 offensive cyber operations against other countries, according to the documents, three-fourths of which focused on “top-priority” targets like Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea. Under a $652-million clandestine program code named GENIE, the NSA, CIA, and special military operatives have planted covert digital bugs in tens of thousands of computers, routers, and firewalls around the world to conduct computer network exploitation, or CNE. Some are planted remotely, but others require physical access to install through so-called interdiction—the CIA or FBI intercepts shipments of hardware from manufacturers and retailers in order to plant malware in them or install doctored chips before they reach the customer.

Hush.  I just read a report from the 82nd Reconnaissance Squadron from Kadena.  A RIVET JOINT crew that was doing collection on China a few hours ago, flying off North Korea over the water.  They intercepted a Chinese flight crew putting down their gear.”      “So what?” exclaimed Robert.

What is the life of one person worth? Although the Supreme leader Kim Jong-un is not suicidal, life to him is relatively cheap, after all he had his half-brother murdered. The countries population of almost 25 million people is harshly subjugated and the military consists of 5,200,000 men and women both active and in the reserves. Although his military ranks as 25th of the worlds military powers, it is the development of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems that makes Kim Jong-un so dangerous. It is estimated that they have about a dozen nuclear devices that could most likely be delivered as far as Japan. Of course their future targets, including the United States are more ambitious. In contrast to their troop strength, the United States has 1,400,000 personnel under arms, South Korea has only 624,465 and China has 2,333,000 personnel. Our advantage is primarily technical, however regardless of our superiority in battlefield technology, oil which they get from China, remains the lifeblood of their supporting economy and army. North Korea has threatened to fire missiles at the U. S. military bases in Okinawa and Guam. The reality of a war is that we would most likely win such a conflict but at a very high cost. The biggest losers of a war on the Korean Peninsula would be South Korea, North Korea and the United States in that order. If there were to be a winner it would be Russia. What are we thinking? Perhaps we should come up with a better strategy.

The work’s persistent popularity in the modern era can be explained by its elevation of a neglected secondary son as a great hero. In the history of modern Korea, the people of the peninsula have experienced a series of humiliations from colonization, forced division, and domestic oppression. As a result, a central agenda in the political rhetoric of both North and South Korea has been the recovery of national dignity and respect, oftentimes through massive displays of newly acquired power in the realms of the military, economy, and culture. Starting from the attempt by imperial Japan to convince Koreans that they were inferior relatives who had to be civilized through colonial tutelage, the liberated but soon divided nations felt like the bastard children of foreign powers that set their destinies in motion without consulting them on their own desires for the future. As a result, the theme of being disrespected, unappreciated, and underrated by callous and unwise authority figures blind to the emotional needs and the substantial talents of the protagonist, so well portrayed in the first part of The Story of Hong Gildong, has a profound resonance in the Korean psyche. In other words, the Joseon dynasty story of a secondary son seeking to overcome the disadvantages of his background and the oppression of his society in order to prove his true worth as a man, a leader, and a ruler has become the story of modern Korea itself. MINSOO KANG

There will always be wars and rumors of wars... a military career is a good bet. Wars will be different but also the same - only getting more brutal with time and technology

Nuclear weapons have only been used twice, both times in the war against Japan. In each case it was used by the United States during World War II. The first was used on August 6, 1945, over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and the second was dropped three days later over the Japanese city of Nagasaki. The two bombs resulted in the deaths of nearly a quarter million people! Recently I have heard it said that since we have the second largest arsenal of nuclear bombs, we should use them to teach North Korea a lesson and reduce tensions. Perhaps we are the ones that need to learn a lesson, so let me start by saying that since these first two bombs that have been used in anger, over two thousand tests have been conducted and that it was Russia that tested the largest bomb ever detonated. On 30 October 1961, Russia which was then the Soviet Union, detonated what was called the Tsar Bomb, a hydrogen bomb with a yield of 50 megatons which is more than 3,000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Are we and our leaders insane? It is only the “Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons” of which we are a member that can reduce the spread and possible the use of nuclear weapons. Now with North Korea being a player, its effectiveness has been questioned and we are on the brink of engaging in a contest that threatens to kill 2,000,000 people in the first day. Many of these people are American military personnel and their families stationed in in Seoul, South Korea. Following any initiative on our part, including the taunts we are making, all bets will be off and there is the possibility that other countries will see the United States as the enemy that has to be stopped!

It was to be the longest flight I had ever made in my young life and one of the most interesting. Having always been interested in the magic of aviation I knew that the DC-6B, I boarded was an approximately 75 seat, trans-ocean, Pan Am Clipper. It would also be the last long distance propeller driven commercial airliner. The only difference between it and the DC-6A was that it didn’t have a large cargo door in its side, and it was also approximately 5 feet longer than the DC-6A. 1955 was a good year and people felt relatively safe with Dwight D. Eisenhower in the White House. “I like Ike” had been his political motto since before he assumed office on January 20, 1953, even many Democrats held him in high esteem for his military service and winning the war in Europe. Eisenhower obtained a truce in Korea and worked diligently trying to ease the tensions of the Cold War. He did however fail to win over Georgy Malenkov, or Nikolai Bulganin who succeeded him, as Premier of the Soviet Union in February of 1955. As a moderate Conservative he left America, as the strongest and most productive nation in the world, but unfortunately because of his lack of diplomacy and love of golf, failed to prevent Cuba from slipping into the communist camp. WFLA inaugurated its broadcasting in the Tampa Bay area on February 14, 1955. The most popular music was referred to as good music, and although big bands were at their zenith in 1942, by 1947 and music critics will tell you that their time had passed. However, Benny Goodman was only 46 in 1955, Tommy Dorsey was 49 and Count Basie was 51. So, in many sheltered quarters they were still in vogue and perhaps always will be. I for one had my Hi-Fidelity 33 1/3 rpm multi stacked record player and a stash of vinyl long play recordings shipped to Africa. For me time stood still as I listened and entertained my friends. Some years later I met Harry James at the Crystal Ballroom in Disneyland. Those were the days…. Big on the scene was “Rhythm in Blues,” an offshoot of widespread African-American music, that had its beginnings in the ‘40s. It would soon become the window that Rock and Roll would come crashing through.

People came to our house from far and wide. Party and military bigwigs, some guy known as the “combat commander,” the village headman, and various hangers-on all made an appearance. Though our house was in the depths of the mountains, they somehow all managed to get there. They were no fools. They knew we had delicious food and drink to share. They knew that our crummy Japanese house was—shock and horror—clean. And, perhaps most important, they knew that there was an abundance of alcohol to be had.

Countries such as Iran and North Korea (of which more in the next chapter) cannot hope to match the United States in their ability to project conventional or nuclear force; what the Pentagon describes as “kinetic power.” Cyberattacks, however, present second- and even third-tier military powers with a fresh avenue for projecting force in the heartland of their enemies, all while enjoying that additional element of deniability.

Kwon Tae-jin, a specialist on North Korean agriculture at the Korea Rural Economic Institute, which is funded by the South Korean government, told me in Seoul. In the far north, where food supplies are historically lean and farmers are regarded as politically hostile, the military takes a quarter of total grain production, Kwon

Kim Jong-il’s hold on power was tenuous at best. After the death of Kim Il-sung, the leading members of the party changed allegiance and took off to South Korea. And then the leading members of the military who were close to Kim Il-sung disappeared too. Kim Jong-il knew all the talk of unification was just a farce. He cared only that he was on the world stage and that he was finally being taken seriously.

The United States has no permanent enemies,” I said, citing Germany and Japan as prime examples of how bitter adversaries can become close, stalwart allies. I recounted my 2013 trip to Vietnam and told him how the United States had developed productive diplomatic, economic, and even military relations with a nation we’d gone to war against, and suggested the same could happen with North Korea. We didn’t need to be enemies in perpetuity, and the relationship could be quite different if we could find common ground. This was the only exchange we had all evening that did not evoke reflexive pushback from General Kim. We ate in silence for a few minutes before he remarked that I could foster that transformation by negotiating the normalization of relations.

Specifically, in 2012, the ACRC analyzed the complaints on 5 issues, including the damages caused by military facilities (Ministry of Defense), the approval of lending national forests (Korea Forest Service), and providing educational expenses for the low-income brackets (Ministry of Education). In 2013

Between social mobilization and liberal democracy From Alexis de Tocqueville onward there has been a large body of democratic theory arguing that modern liberal democracy cannot exist without a vigorous civil society.29 The mobilization of social groups allows weak individuals to pool their interests and enter the political system; even when social groups do not seek political objectives, voluntary associations have spillover effects in fostering the ability of individuals to work with one another in novel situations—what is termed social capital. The correlation noted above linking economic growth to stable liberal democracy presumably comes about via the channel of social mobilization: growth entails the emergence of new social actors who then demand representation in a more open political system and press for a democratic transition. When the political system is well institutionalized and can accommodate these new actors, then there is a successful transition to full democracy. This is what happened with the rise of farmers’ movements and socialist parties in Britain and Sweden in the early decades of the twentieth century, and in South Korea after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1987. A highly developed civil society can also pose dangers for democracy and can even lead to political decay. Groups based on ethnic or racial chauvinism spread intolerance; interest groups can invest effort in zero-sum rent seeking; excessive politicization of economic and social conflicts can paralyze societies and undermine the legitimacy of democratic institutions. 30 Social mobilization can lead to political decay. The Huntingtonian process whereby political institutions failed to accommodate demands of new social actors for participation arguably happened in Bolivia and Ecuador in the 1990s and 2000s with the repeated unseating of elected presidents by highly mobilized social groups.31

and offered them little in any event. There was even talk of pressuring North Korea to demilitarize significantly. The Chinese wished for peace, not conflict, in the region and James Marshall was the president’s man to make it happen. Lifelong friends, they had both excelled in their fields, President Jack King in the military and James Marshall in business. When James had announced his retirement on his fifty-fifth birthday, President King had pounced; Marshall was perfect to obtain the treaties that would secure the Far East. Jack loved and trusted him like a brother. With over four hundred million dollars in the bank, all James Marshall had wanted was to enjoy life but he’d never let Jack down and he’d certainly never

Conventional air action, in Korea, could be decisive only when coupled with decisive ground action.

But the damage done to the Army command structure would be long in healing. If a new war came someday, there would be colonels and generals—who had been lieutenants and captains in Korea—who had their basic lessons still to learn.

The United States military officially began using canines in World War I and by World War II more than four hundred scout dogs were taking part in combat patrols, finding and hunting the enemy. After Pearl Harbor, a group of dog breeders formed “Dogs for Defense,” with the goal of building a well-trained canine force in the event America went to war. Come Korea, roughly 1,500 canines performed guard duty with the Army while others joined patrols. During Vietnam, with its close-quarters combat in treacherous terrain and tropical climes, dogs were once again called into action: around four thousand joined patrols to hunt for weapons and enemies, and served duty on army bases, especially at night when soldiers were most vulnerable to attack. But many of the dogs that served alongside U.S. soldiers never made it home; some were euthanized and others abandoned in

Regardless of where the EPZs are located, the workers' stories have a certain mesmerizing sameness: the workday is long- fourteen hours in Sri Lanka, twelve hours in Indonesia, sixteen in Southern China, twelve in the Philippines. The vast majority of the workers are women, always young, always working for contractors or subcontractors from Korea, Taiwan or Hong Kong. The contractors are usually filling orders for companies based in the U.S., Britain, Japan, Germany or Canada. The management is military-style, the supervisors often abusive, the wages below subsistence and the work low-skill and tedious.

We Americans typically discover foreign lands as a result of our military involvement. Thus we now know some of the geography of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

On January 25, 1995, Russian president Boris Yeltsin came within minutes of initiating a full nuclear strike on the United States because of an unidentified Norwegian scientific rocket. Concern has been raised over a U.S. project to replace the nuclear warheads on two of the twenty-four D5 ICBMs carried by Trident submarines with conventional warheads, for possible use against Iran or North Korea: Russian early-warning systems would be unable to distinguish them from nuclear missiles, expanding the possibilities for unfortunate misunderstandings. Other worrisome scenarios include deliberate malfeasance by military commanders triggered by mental instability and/or fringe political/religious agendas. But why worry? Surely, if push came to shove, reasonable people would step in and do the right thing, just as they have in the past? Nuclear nations do indeed have elaborate countermeasures in place, just as our body does against cancer. Our body can normally deal with isolated deleterious mutations, and it appears that fluke coincidences of as many as four mutations may be required to trigger certain cancers. Yet if we roll the dice enough times, shit happens-Stanley Kubrick's dark nuclear war comedy Dr. Strangelove illustrates this with a triple coincidence.

The following day, I went to see Ho-chol. I’d decided to take him back home with me to Hamhung City. I told him how I’d tried to get him signed up at the recruitment center, but to no avail. His best chance would be to get away for a while and lie low until they forgot about him. Some young men wearing military uniforms stood in front of the station as we waited to board the train. They were new recruits, smiling and holding hands with their parents, looking very content with themselves. Some of them were taking souvenir photographs. I could picture the inscription, THE DAY OUR SON JOINED THE MILITARY. A happy memory. My son began to weep, but not tears of joy. The sight of him brought tears to my eyes as well. “Father! Please don’t cry too! You’ve done so much for me ever since I was born. I know that, and people in the village have told me as well. You’ve made it through so many hard times; I know you did everything you could.” At that, I broke down completely. I hugged him and started sobbing loudly, even though the station was full of people. The new recruits started walking proudly onto the platform. Suddenly, I had an idea. I told my son to get on the same train. I thought that maybe he could get swept along with them and end up in training with them. It also struck me that I might never see him again. I wanted to take a photograph with him, but of course that was impossible. I gave him ten won. It was all I had. “Look after yourself. I think the police will forget about you after a while, so try to make the best of it until then,” I said.

Most countries that make great economic and social progress are not democracies. South Korea moved from Level 1 to Level 3 faster than any country had ever done (without finding oil), all the time as a military dictatorship. Of the ten countries with the fastest economic growth in 2016, nine of them score low on democracy.

Equally, subordinates learn to be wary of superiors who show an inadequate understanding of the circumstances in which they are operating, so that they are asked to undertake impossible, illegal, or potentially suicidal missions. Respect for the chain of command, reinforced by the imperatives of military discipline, may not be enough to ensure that orders are followed effectively. Those issuing the orders should have the authority that brings the respect of colleagues and subordinates. Authority is something to be earned, not taken for granted – and that goes for the civilians as well as the generals

Koreans were even more outraged to learn that U.S. officials would govern South Korea with help from the Koreans’ former Japanese colonial masters. North Koreans watched uneasily as South Koreans who had cooperated with the Japanese occupation now helped the United States gain influence on the Korean Peninsula. Koreans had just suffered forty years of Nazi-like domination by the Japanese. North Korean leader Kim Il Sung had begun his military career fighting the Japanese in the spring of 1932, and his government was first of all, and above all else, anti-Japanese.

The Wise Men’s Policy for Asia was a blueprint for American disaster in post–World War II Asia, as it called for the U.S. military to enforce the Japan-centric model, a “for us or against us” policy designed to contain Mao Zedong. Bruce Cumings, one of the leading historians on Korea, wrote about the Policy for Asia, “The United States would now do something utterly unimagined at the end of World War II: it would prepare to intervene militarily against anti-colonial movements in East Asia—first Korea, then Vietnam, with the Chinese revolution as the towering backdrop.”33 In Korea, the two sides skirmished, each repeatedly violating the other’s borders. Acheson testified in secret to the Senate that the U.S. had drawn a line of containment in Korea and asked for funding to turn back Communism there.

U.S. chipmakers built facilities from Taiwan to South Korea to Singapore. These territories were defended from Communist incursions not only by military force but also by economic integration, as the electronics industry sucked the region’s peasants off farms—where rural poverty often inspired guerilla opposition—into good jobs assembling electronic devices for American consumption.

Both the American and Chinese militaries acknowledge that the US has lost, or at least failed to win, four of the five major wars it has entered since World War II.21 (Korea was at best a draw, Vietnam a loss, and Iraq and Afghanistan unlikely to turn out well. Only President George H. W. Bush’s war in 1991 to force Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to retreat from Kuwait counts as a clear win.) Reflecting on that record, former secretary of defense Robert Gates stated the obvious: “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”22

In the early 1980s, historian Jon Halliday asked Genaro Carnero Checa, a radical Peruvian writer and frequent traveler to the DPRK who published a book on the country in 1977 entitled Korea: Rice and Steel, his honest opinion of North Korea. Checa replied, “They fought the North Americans; they have done incredible things in the economy; it’s the only Third World country where everyone has good health, good education and good housing.” Halliday then asked Checa about his view of North Korea as a poet. Checa said, “It is the saddest, most miserable country I’ve ever been in in my life. As a poet, it strikes bleakness into my heart.” Checa’s statements reflect what many in the Third World thought of North Korea during the Cold War era. On one hand, this small nation overcame Japanese imperialism, brought the mighty U.S. military to a standstill in a three-year war, and rapidly rebuilt itself into a modern socialist state. For many struggling peoples in the Third World that recently overcame decades of Western colonialism and imperialism, North Korea’s economic recovery and military prowess were justifiably admirable. On the other hand, the oppressiveness and brutality of the North Korean political system undermined the appeal of the DPRK’s developmental model to the Third World. The growing inefficiencies of North Korea’s economic system also became too obvious to ignore. In fact, Kim Il Sung’s Third World diplomacy may have furthered the DPRK’s domestic economic troubles. A former member of the North Korean elite, Kang Myong- do, said after his defection to South Korea that “excessive aid to Third World countries had caused an actual worsening of North Korea’s already serious economic problems.

Korea culturally has much in common with China and historically has tilted toward China. For Singapore communist China was an enemy during the Cold War. In the 1980s, however, Singapore began to shift its position and its leaders actively argued the need for the United States and other countries to come to terms with the realities of Chinese power. With its large Chinese population and the anti-Western proclivities of its leaders, Malaysia also strongly tilted in the Chinese direction. Thailand maintained its independence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by accommodating itself to European and Japanese imperialism and has shown every intention of doing the same with China, an inclination reinforced by the potential security threat it sees from Vietnam. Indonesia and Vietnam are the two countries of Southeast Asia most inclined toward balancing and containing China. Indonesia is large, Muslim, and distant from China, but without the help of others it cannot prevent Chinese assertion of control over the South China Sea. In the fall of 1995 Indonesia and Australia joined in a security agreement that committed them to consult with each other in the event of “adverse challenges” to their security. Although both parties denied that this was an anti-China arrangement, they did identify China as the most likely source of adverse challenges.37 Vietnam has a largely Confucian culture but historically has had highly antagonistic relations with China and in 1979 fought a brief war with China. Both Vietnam and China have claimed sovereignty over all the Spratly Islands, and their navies engaged each other on occasion in the 1970s and 1980s. In the early 1990s Vietnam’s military capabilities declined in relation to those of China. More than any other East Asian state, Vietnam consequently has the motive to seek partners to balance China. Its admission into ASEAN and normalization of its relations with the United States in 1995 were two steps in this direction.

The United Front Department (UFD) is a key section in the Workers’ Party, responsible for inter-Korean espionage, policy-making and diplomacy. Since 1953, Korea has been divided by an armistice line known as the Korean Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), held in place by military force on each side. The division of the Korean peninsula is not based on a difference in language, religion or ethnicity, but on a difference in political ideology. The North Korean version of Socialism, founded as it is on the maintenance of absolute institutional unity, regards pluralism and individual determination as its greatest enemy. The Workers’ Party has therefore been active and diligent in psychological warfare operations aimed at Koreans in both the North and the South for over half a century.

Journey to the Plain July 1972–June 1976 I was raised to respect soldiers, leaders, and heroes. They were who I wanted to be. They were why I was there. And in the unblinking sunlight of an August morning at the United States Military Academy in 1972, the colonel in front of me looked like the embodiment of all I admired. Hanging on his spare frame, his pine green uniform was covered with patches, badges, and campaign ribbons. Even the weathered lines of his face seemed to reflect all he’d done and all he was. It was the look I’d seen in my father’s face. For a moment I could envision my father in combat in Korea, or as the lean warrior embracing my mother as he came home from Vietnam. He was my lifelong hero. From my earlier memories I’d wanted to be like him. I’d always wanted to be a soldier. Yet the colonel’s words were not what I wanted and expected to hear. As he stood in front of me and my fellow new cadets, he talked about collar stays, the twenty-five-cent pieces of wire cadets used to secure the collars of the blue gray shirts we would wear to class during the academic year. As he spoke, we tried not to squirm under the sun. Our backs were arched, arms flat to our sides, elbows slightly bent, fingers curled into tight palms, chests out, chins forward, eyes ahead. Mouths shut. I was five weeks into my education at West Point. We were still in Beast Barracks, or simply Beast, the initial eight-week indoctrination and basic-training phase during the summer before the fall term of our freshman year—plebe year, in West Point’s timeworn terminology. There were not many full colonels at West Point, so it was rare for cadets, particularly new cadets like us, to interact with them. It seemed like an extraordinary opportunity to hear from a man who’d done so much. But he wasn’t discussing his experiences and the truths they had yielded; he was talking about collar stays.

For about two minutes, Ingo and I weighed the idea of transferring M*A*S*H from Korea to Vietnam. But the current war was just too close for us to be funny or properly irreverent about it. By keeping our story at a safe distance in years and miles, we could safely look askance at an American military adventure in Asia, and let people draw their own parallels.

Polarization, of course, is no accident. A divide and conquer game is now underway inside the United States which is calculated to produce instability. It naturally comes on the heels of a societal demoralization (decades in the making). Given current preparations for war in Korea, stage three (crisis) will likely result from a military clash in the Far East. The final stage (normalization), signifies the acceptance by the United States of Russian and Chinese military dominance (formalized by a treaty). This, of course, is only one dimension of the crisis/normalization process. Yet, if things go according to plan, it will be the decisive dimension. Of course, destabilization is carried out by secret agent networks in much the same way as demoralization. It is a process guided by KGB officers and recruited agents. These agents not only operate on the political left. In order to guide the process the KGB has placed agents on the political right – in the guise of rock-solid conservatives. Bezmenov says that recruiting agents on the left is, in fact, not as important as recruiting (or planting) them on the right.

So instead of giving up fighting and settling reluctantly into American life, Poe followed the current of Cold War American policy in Asia. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, and the Truman administration sent US forces to the Korean Peninsula, Poe signed up for a job training Korean saboteurs and other infiltrators to slip into the North and attack infrastructure. Then when Korea settled into a cold peace, he spent three years training Tibetan and Muslim insurgents who were fighting Beijing as part of a CIA program to harass Mao Tse-tung’s regime. Next, Poe helped train guerillas trying to overthrow the left-leaning (though not communist) postindependence government of Indonesia.

The draft was created in the Civil War. Young men were conscripted again in World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Today, America does not need a draft to fill the ranks of the armed forces. But without one, there remains a civic obligation for the 99.5 percent to commit to much more than “Thank you for your service.” In my view, there is an obligation to understand the volunteer military class and understand what it is asked to do. We can repay their valor in battle with valor on the home front. This requires real effort to give our professional troops the same attention, care and scrutiny of policy as if they had left our own kitchen to go to war. It is noble to donate to wounded warrior charities, but it is patriotic to analyze and question the plans for war before our sons and daughters are sent to fight in the first place.

U.S. foreign debt, though, takes the form of treasury bonds held by institutional investors in countries (Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Gulf States) that are in most cases, effectively, U.S. military protectorates, most covered in U.S. bases full of arms and equipment paid for with that very deficit spending. This has changed a little now that China has gotten in on the game (China is a special case, for reasons that will be explained later), but not very much—even China finds that the fact it holds so many U.S. treasury bonds makes it to some degree beholden to U.S. interests, rather than the other way around. So what is the status of all this money continually being funneled into the U.S. treasury? Are these loans? Or is it tribute? In the past, military powers that maintained hundreds of military bases outside their own home territory were ordinarily referred to as “empires,” and empires regularly demanded tribute from subject peoples. The U.S. government, of course, insists that it is not an empire—but one could easily make a case that the only reason it insists on treating these payments as “loans” and not as “tribute” is precisely to deny the reality of what’s going on.

Washington granting the ROK control of the South Korean military in peacetime, i.e. when it's not fulfilling its primary power projection function, is tantamount to the United States yielding control of an asset when it's not in use but insisting on full control when it's needed.

In a book entitled Sweatshop Warriors, Miriam Ching Yoon Louie states that the Park government even built up South Korea’s sex industry as a means of earning foreign exchange receipts from Japanese businessmen and American soldiers on leave from the Vietnam War—all “for the sake of the nation.” An article in the New York Times by Choe Sang-hun quotes one former prostitute as saying, “The government was one big pimp for the U.S. military.... They urged us to sell as much as possible to the GIs, praising us as ‘dollar-earning patriots.

Ike learned the truth of the war. Visiting the First Marine Division at Panmunjom, just outside the Panmunjom Circle—the ten-mile area where lackluster and ineffectual talks were going on—he was outraged to find that as the North Koreans, now supported by the Chinese, shelled the troops regularly each day, American soldiers were under orders not to fire back. Eisenhower was president-elect, but in Korea everyone saw him as General Eisenhower. They were transported back in time to when he had last defeated a monstrous enemy. Ike’s warnings were not bluster, and he had the reputation to pull it off. He warned that unless there was an agreement to sit down at Panmunjom and work out an immediate truce, the war would resume full throttle. “They knew he wasn’t kidding,” said Hagerty. “The word was sent . . . you either sit down and settle this, or there’s going to be no imaginary line at the Yalu River, there’s going to be hot pursuit of your planes regardless of where they come from, and we’re going to end it.” The commanders on the ground favored a full-throttle approach, but Ike, the old general, wanted to see the fight come to an end. And he succeeded, within six months of taking office. After the Korean War, only one known military death (in Vietnam) occurred during his administration.

important. The enemy, already in Korea, never utilized it in his plan of action, because the terrain was virtually impassable. More important than the gap separating Eighth Army and X Corps were the maneuver formations of the armies

Contrary to how it may look, McEachern finds that North Korea is not a “one-man rule” state. He explains, “While Kim is certainly the most important political player in North Korea, he still must rule a complex political system and should not be understood as the system.” McEachern describes North Korean politics as “a type of highly centralized monarchy with some court politics at the top.” Drawing on North Korean media, elite speeches, and commentaries available through federal deposit libraries in the US, McEachern shows that the party, military, and cabinet contend for specific institutional interests within North Korea.

Fifty years ago, South Korea was an impoverished, war-torn country that lurched from brutal dictatorship to chaotic democracy and then dictatorship again. Few expected it to survive as a state, let alone graduate to becoming a prosperous and stable model for developing countries the world over-and one with an impressive list of achievements in popular culture, to boot. Quite simply, South Koreans have written the most unlikely and impressive story of nation building of the last century. For that reason alone, theirs deserves to be called "the impossible country." South Korea is home to not one, but two miracles. The first is the often-referenced "Miracle on the Han River," the extraordinary economic growth that led the country out of poverty and on the road to wealth, in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. That South Korea had a GDP of less than US $100 per capita in 1960, precious few natural resources, and only the most basic (and war-ravaged) infrastructure seems scarcely believable looking around Seoul these days. The second miracle is just as precious, though. As recently as 1987, South Korea was a military dictatorship, but today, it has stable, democratic leadership. As other Asian nations like Singapore, and now China, promote a mix of authoritarianism and capitalism, South Korea stands out in the region as an example of a country that values not just wealth but also the rule of law and rights for its citizens. There is another, more negative, source of inspiration for the subtitle, though. As we shall see, genuine contentment largely eludes the people of South Korea, despite all their material success and stability. This is a country that puts too much pressure on its citizens to conform to impossible standards of education, reputation, physical appearance, and career progress. Worldwide, South Korea is second only to Lithuania in terms of suicide per capita. The problem is getting worse, rather than better: between 1989 and 2009, the rate of suicide quintupled. South Korea therefore is "impossible" in its astonishing economic and political achievements but also in the way that it imposes unattainable targets on its people.

Military organizations need strong chains of command because they are about disciplined and purposive violence.

The only hope for countering the spread of Chinese influence is the United States, but American elites are busy dismantling the sources of American economic and military power to the benefit of the Chinese in order to enrich themselves. If this process continues, there will simply be no hope for preventing a Chinese-dominated future for the world. Having come from North Korea, it is difficult to convey how depressing this all is. The horror of North Korea is Exhibit A of what a more Chinese world would look like: more unspeakable crime, more abject human suffering, more terrifying exploitation of innocent people for the benefit of a communist party cadre. Instead of ending the North Korean nightmare, Chinese hegemony promises only to spread the North Korean experience to more people around the world.

she recited the story that she and Bohbeh had invented: I am the wife of a Japanese military officer in Korea. I need to go visit my husband with my son because he was injured and is gravely ill. This might be the only chance we have to see him alive.

Women were expected to keep the factories going, since North Korea was perpetually short of men—an estimated 20 percent of working-age men were in the armed services, the largest per capita military in the world.

Peacekeepers will not produce peace. They will produce a truce, a continued stalemate like the one in Korea which has never been resolved. Constant danger of war breaking out again. That is something that is emphatically not in anyone's interest. [...] Austria had a security guarantee that has guaranteed it for now 70 some years, and there no American or Russian or British or French troops on the ground in Austria at all. And yet it has a security guarantee. Switzerland has a security guarantee dating from 1820. I think it's entirely possible. People think about security guarantees in a purely military sense, that guarantees that military force will be used: it does not prevent it. (Excerpt from interview "AMB. Chas Freeman : Can the US Bring Peace?")

Many years later, serving time in a special detention center after yet another arrest, I sat in my cell reading a collection of newly published materials from the archives. These were secret reports by the KGB branch of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic proudly documenting an extraordinary operation involving a journalist from Newsweek who had visited Ukraine sometime after the accident. Some twenty or so individuals had been involved in this operation, including members of special militia units and retired KGB agents. The KGB arranged it so that everybody the journalist interviewed was an intelligence officer, and all of them assured him the consequences of the accident were minimal and that the public was impressed and delighted by the efficient way the party and government had dealt with it. Vast resources had been brought to bear to deceive a single reporter because it was the appropriate thing to do. We could hardly allow enemy journalists to slander the Soviet reality by twisting the facts. Therefore, we would rather twist the facts a little ourselves. None of these tricks were any more effective than the infamous grocery stores in North Korea in which plastic produce is strategically placed so foreigners being driven from the airport can see that bananas and oranges are freely available. For years now the foreigners have been merrily snapping photos of these stores as a tourist sight. Hey, look over there! The famous fake fruit! Paradoxically, people in Washington, London, and Berlin knew more about what was really happening than those living in the contaminated zones. Our family did not know the whole truth, but we knew a whole lot more than most: when the party and government robustly denied the "contemptible insinuations of Washington's propaganda" about an explosion in Chernobyl, our relatives phoned and told us everyone in the region was aware there had been an explosion at the power station and that there were soldiers all over the place. Then the nightmare began. Soon, everybody within thirty kilometers of the power plant was being evacuated, and no matter how glowingly state television reported a well-coordinated operation, we already knew better. Our numerous relatives had been dispersed all over Ukraine, to wherever empty accommodations, like Pioneer camps, could be found. People were in despair. It was unbearable to be forced to abandon your farmstead, a home you had built with your own hands, especially since these people could be considered well-off by Soviet standards. We were the poor relatives compared to them, even though my father was in the army, which meant his pay was above average. We were just living a standard Soviet life in a military unit, with an apartment and a salary, while they, with their orchards and cows and private plots of land, were better provided for, at least in terms of food. Now they were leading their children to a bus and being driven away permanently to who knows where with only their identification papers and a minimal set of clothes. There were cows mooing and dogs barking, just like in films about the war. A couple of days later soldiers went around the villages shooting the dogs. A starving cow will just die, but dogs go feral, form packs, and might attack the few remaining people. What a monstrous shambles it all was, and it could not be concealed...A total of 116,000 people were evacuated. They needed new housing, new jobs, and compensation for the property they had abandoned. Even for a rich, developed country that would be a big ask. For the U.S.S.R., with its planned economy, it was a nightmare. New homes were needed; new cars were needed.

The groundswell of outrage over the invasion of Iraq often cited the preemptive war as a betrayal of American ideals. The subtext of the dissent was: This is not who we are. But not if you were standing where I was. It was hard to see the look in that palace tour guide's eyes when she talked about the American flag flying over the palace and not realize that ever since 1898, from time to time, this is exactly who we are. And what's more, Hawaii is, just as Theodore Roosevelt's circle predicted, crucial to the American empire's military presence in the Pacific. Pearl Harbor is still the headquarters of U.S. Pacific Command, just as it was for all three of America's twentieth-century wars in the Pacific with Japan, North Korea, and North Vietnam.

A few autocracies still portray themselves to their citizens as model states. The North Koreans, famously, hold vast military parades with elaborate gymnastics displays and huge portraits of their leader, very much in the Stalinist style. But many of the propagandists of Autocracy, Inc., have learned from the mistakes of the twentieth century. They don’t offer their fellow citizens a vision of utopia, and they don’t inspire them to build a better world. Instead, they teach people to be cynical and passive, because there is no better world to build. Their goal is to persuade people to mind their own business, stay out of politics, and never hope for a democratic alternative: Our state may be corrupt, but everyone else is corrupt too. You may not like our leader, but the others are worse. You may not like our society, but at least we are strong and the democratic world is weak, degenerate, divided, dying.