What Did The Korean War 60 Years Ago Teach us?

The demilitarized zone dividing the two Koreas, in Paju, about 55 km (34 miles) north of Seoul (Lee Jae Won/Reuters)

What We Learned From The Korean War -- James Wright, The Atlantic

Sixty years after the signing of a truce, it's clear that this conflict set the pattern for multiple American wars to come.

This week marks an important anniversary. Sixty years ago, on July 27, 1953, representatives of the United Nations, led by U.S. Army Lt. Gen William Harrison, met their North Korean counterparts in Panmunjom, Korea, to sign an armistice agreement ending the 37-month-long war. Negotiators had been discussing the agreement for nearly 25 of those months in 158 separate meetings.

The document was not a peace treaty. It provided for a truce. The historic occasion had no mark of formality and no sense of finality. The representatives signed the agreement without speaking a single word to each other, and no one offered handshakes. The South Korean representatives refused to sign and did not join in the meeting. There surely was no ceremony comparable to the one on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay in September 1945. The New York Times reported from the treaty site, "Outside the thin wooden walls there was the mutter of artillery fire - a grim reminder that even as the truce was being signed men were still dying on near-by hills and the fight would continue for twelve more hours."

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My Comment: There is a lot of truth in this analysis. In fact .... General MacArthur found himself being fired for refusing to fight the war that Washington ordered him to fight during the height of the Korean war .... a war strategy that the U.S. has been following ever since. In a way I understand why. We live in the nuclear age, and when conducting war policy I am sure that events that could spiral out of control into a nuclear conflict is always on the mind of every President. America has also changed, as well as the state of the world. Wars are no longer black and white and very clear cut .... instead .... lots of different shades of grey and our allies are sometimes just as bad as the enemy.