When In
Doubt, Nuke China
A situation in which the US military feels
'unhampered' has precedent – and, as General
MacArthur's endeavors in Korea prove, it's
something to be afraid of
By Pepe Escobar
July 29,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- The current collapse of the unipolar world,
with the inexorable emergence of a multipolar
framework, has enabled a terrifying subplot to
run amok – the normalization of the idea of
nuclear war.
The latest exhibit comes in the form of a US
admiral assuring everyone he’s ready to follow
President Trump’s orders
to launch a nuclear missile against China.
Forget
about the fact that a 21st century
nuclear war involving great powers will be The
Last War. Our admiral – admirably named Swift
– is simply preoccupied by democratic minutiae,
as in “every member of the US military has sworn
an oath to defend the constitution of the United
States against all enemies foreign and domestic
and to obey the officers and the president of
the United States as commander and chief
appointed over us.”
So it’s
all about loyalty to the President, and civilian
control over the military – irrespective of the
risk of incinerating untold masses of said
civilians, Americans included (as there would be
an inevitable Chinese response).
Swift,
once again, to the rescue: “This is core to the
American democracy and any time you have a
military that is moving away from a focus and an
allegiance to civilian control, then we really
have a significant problem.”
It
doesn’t matter that the proverbial spokesman on
behalf of the US Pacific Fleet – in this case,
Charlie Brown (an apt name?) – swiftly engaged
in damage control, deriding the premise of the
(nuclear) question as “ridiculous.” Both the
question and the answer are in fact quite
revealing.
MacArthur’s park is melting
in the dark
To shed
extra nuances on “civilian control of the
military,” a flashback to September 1950 and the
Korean War, with some help from Bruce Cumings
and John Halliday’s Korea: The Unknown War,
may be far from “ridiculous.” Especially now
that factions of the War Party in Washington
have been pressing the case for nuking not China
but North Korea itself.
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It’s
key to remember that by 1950 President Truman
had already issued a “civilian control of the
military” order to drop two atomic bombs over
Japan in 1945 – a historical first.
Truman
had become Vice-President in January 1945. FDR
treated him with the utmost disdain. He was
clueless about the Manhattan Project. When FDR
died he had been Vice-President for only 82
days, and became POTUS knowing absolutely
nothing about foreign policy or the new
military/nuclear equation.
Truman
had five years after bombing Japan to learn all
about it, on the job. Now the action was on the
Korean front. Even before an amphibious landing
in Inchon, led by General MacArthur – the
greatest since D-Day in Normandy, in 1944
– Truman had authorized MacArthur to advance
beyond the 38th parallel. There’s
substantial historical debate that MacArthur was
not told exactly what to do in detail – as long
as he was winning. Fine for a man who was fond
of quoting Montgomery: “Generals are never given
adequate directives”.
Still,
MacArthur did receive a top secret memorandum
from Truman stressing that any operations north
of the 38th parallel were authorized
only if “there was no entry into North Korea by
major Soviet or Chinese Communist forces, no
announcements of intended entry, nor a threat to
counter our operations militarily”.
And
then, MacArthur received an eyes-only message
from Pentagon head George Marshall: “We want you
to feel unhampered tactically and strategically
to proceed north of the 38th
parallel.”
MacArthur kept going. He was sure China would
not intervene in Korea: “If the Chinese tried to
get down to Pyongyang there would be the
greatest slaughter.” Well, he was wrong. US
forces captured Pyongyang on October 19, 1950.
Exactly the same day, no fewer than 250,000
soldiers of the 13th Army Group of
the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army crossed the
Yalu river and entered Korean territory. US
intel was clueless about what military historian
S.L.A. Marshall described as “a phantom which
cast no shadow”.
MacArthur progressively ran amok, including
calling for nukes to be used on North Korea. He
had to go. The question was how. The civilians –
Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman – were for it.
The Generals – Marshall, Bradly – were against
it. But they were also worried that “if
MacArthur were not relieved, a large segment of
our people would charge that civil authorities
no longer controlled the military”.
Truman
had already made up his mind. MacArthur was
replaced by Lt. Gen. Ridgway. But the war folly
still raged, hostage to the Sino-Soviet “threat”
of “communist world domination”. Over
two million North Korean civilians were killed.
And what General Curtis LeMay – a real- life Dr.
Strangelove – later said about bombing Vietnam
“back to the stone age” actually was inflicted
by the US on North Korea.
The
North’s industry and infrastructure was totally
destroyed. It’s impossible to understand the
actions of the leadership in Pyongyang over
these past decades without considering how this
human and physical destruction is still very
much alive in their minds.
So what
Admiral Swift actually said, in code, is, if a
civilian order comes, the US military will start
WWIII (or WWIV, if one counts the Cold War),
duly applying the Pentagon’s first-strike
doctrine. What Swift did not say is that
President Trump also has the power to pull a
Truman and fire any run-amok, aspiring MacArthur
clone.
Pepe
Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst.
This article was first published by
Asia Times
-
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.