Sixty Years Of War and Power

The Korean War - which was known as "the forgotten war" until "M*A*S*H" came along - stopped sixty years ago today, but it never technically ended.  The United Nations forces and North Korea and its Communist Chinese allies agreed to stop the fighting until a permanent peace agreement could be established.  There's still no agreement, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un indicated earlier this year that he could easily break the peace by invading South Korea again if he felt threatened by South Korea and the United States.  But, given that his bluster is backed up largely by pathetic excuses for missiles, we don't have to worry so much about him - yet. 

What we do have to worry about - and what we've had to worry about ever since Kim's grandfather gave the go-ahead to invade South Korea in 1950 - is the likelihood of a U.S. President launching a war without Congress declaring it, despite the Constitution specifically giving that power to Congress. The Korean War was an anomaly at the time in American history; we went to war against a foreign country without an official declaration.  But it must be noted that Korea was and is one country with two governments controlling separate halves, and the United States has always recognized the Republic of Korea in the south, not the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the north, as the sole legitimate government of all of Korea.  When North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, President Truman couldn't ask Congress for a declaration of war against a country we didn't officially recognize, and with the possibility of Communist aggression in Korea spreading elsewhere in Asia, it quickly became the U.N.'s responsibility to intervene militarily in what was essentially a civil war between the Communist north and the right-wing south. (Korea was divided into two countries by the Soviets and the Americans, who took over the former Japanese colony and set up separate governments in their respective occupation zones.)  There was just one thing . . . although billed as U.N. peacekeeping mission - a "police action" - it was in fact a war in which 88 percent of the U.N. soldiers were American.

While historians can sympathize with Truman for going around Congress to authorize a war against a country we couldn't legitimize with an official war declaration against it - we also fought the army of the People's Republic of China, another government the United States refused to recognize (and did not recognize until 1979) - Truman created a dangerous precedent for future Presidents who wanted to take the country to war.   Several Presidents have either asked for carte blanche authority in the form of "resolutions" to invade a foreign country on grounds of national security while some of our dirty little wars - Grenada, anyone? - were waged without even that.  The bottom line is this: Every war the United States has engaged in since 1945 - usually against a country with whom we have no diplomatic relations - has been directed by the President, without official congressional approval.  The conditions that justified Truman's actions in Korea - and I believe his actions were justified, under the circumstances - hardly pertained in Vietnam, Grenada, or Iraq, as national security was never in trouble in any of those places.  But the Presidents who pursued those wars all jumped at any opportunity - all of them greatly contrived - to pursue them, and as journalist Marvin Kalb argues in in his new book, "The Road To War," congressional disengagement in the issue of war has given the President complete control of the military as if he were a nineteenth-century European monarch.  

What should have been the exception for Korea has become the rule.  There's now talk of starting a war in Iran - with whom we cut diplomatic ties in 1980 after the Iranians kidnapped our diplomats - to stop its nuclear program in the interest of - you guessed it - "national security" . . . and we could go down a slippery slope to aiding rebels in the civil war in Syria.  It's time we Americans looked at our military complex (not to mention the military-industrial complex behind it, which President Eisenhower once warned about) and demanded a greater system of checks and balances over the issue of war . . . and demanded a role for ourselves and our representatives in Congress in whether we should have one anywhere.