ea serve as a stern warning of the precedents to today's war in the Gulf, reports JOHN LISTER. Saddam Hussein has bought or copied all his weapons, and learned many of his dirty tricks from the forces that now wage war against him in the Gulf, flying the United Nations colours as a flag of convenience.
The unholy alliance of greater and lesser imperialist powers, client regimes, opportunist dictatorships and Stalinist bureaucracies involved in the United Nations "coalition" against Saddam is a modem-day equivalent of the 16-nation army led into battle by the USA under the UN banner in Korea in 1950.
Then, as now, the other countries involved (including South Africa) were firmly under US control. Three years of brutal slaughter saw the US high command resort to ever-more genocidal tactics and war crimes in their effort to crush Kim II Sung's Stalinist-led regime in North Korea and repress the popular movement in the South against the USA's chosen stooge, Syngman Rhee.
By the time of the cease-fire in 1953, some 60,000 UN troops had died: but the war left over three million Koreans (mostly civilians) and a million Chinese soldiers dead, with every city in the North and most in the South destroyed.
Today the imperialist propaganda tries to
T exploit Saddam's cynical use of Scud missiles to strike civilian targets in Israel, even while allied bombers drop tons of high explosive onto Iraqi civilian ("economic") targets in Baghdad and Basra.
But in 1950, it was the USA, under UN auspices, which led the way in using its unchallenged air supremacy to flatten civilian targets and whole tracts of North Korea. From November 1950 US General MacArthur ordered his airforce to create a 'wasteland' from the battle-front to the Chinese border, and to destroy by bombing "every installation, factory, city and village".
On November 8, 1950, the US airforce dropped 550 tons of fire bombs on Sinuija "removing it from the map". On December 14-15, Pyongyang was hit by 700 500-16 bombs, napalm, and 175 tons of delayed-action demolition bombs specifically designed to maximise civilian casualties after the raid. During the spring of 1951 the US navy begun a seige of Wonsan, shelling it for "41 straight days and nights: the longest sustained naval or air bombardment in history grew into an 861 day seige, lasting to the end of the war.
Any target was fair game to the USA. Anxious to delay any peace settlement, US planes in 1952 strafed and bombed an agreed "neutral zone" and even bombed the Northem negotiators en route to peace talks!
The US targets became more callous and enormous. In June 1952, 500 US planes bombed the huge Supung dam on the Yalu river, causing huge floods and cutting electricity throughout much of the North. On August 29, a UN air mid on Pyongyang dropped 10,000 litres of napalm, fired 62,000
Page 21
rounds of ammunition strafing civilins at low level, and dropped 697 tons of bombs. 6,000 civilians died.
And in a conscious attempt literally to starve the civilian population of the North, the USA in May 1953 led massive air raids against five dams which were key to the irrigation of three quarters of North Korea's rice. "The last time an act of this kind had been carried out, which was by the Nazis in Holland in 1944, it had been deemed a war crime at Nuremburg". (1)
Not content with ordinary genocide, MacArthur, echoed by other US top brass and by Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, itched to use nuclear Chinese, taking the war into China itself, and even the USSR.
As early as 1950, Truman and MacArthur uttered threats that they might exploit the US superiority in atomic bombs (they had 450 compared to just 25 in the USSR's arsenal). MacArthur went on to draw up a lunatic scheme to use 26 atomic bombs, plus another four to drop directly on the Northern "invasion forces". He later confessed (in an interview only posthumously published) that:
"I would have dropped between thirty and fifty atomic bombs ... strung across the neck of Manchuria ... "to "spread behind us - from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea - a belt of radioactive cobalt ... it has an active life of between 60 and 120 years".
Though Mac Arthur was clearly out of control - and was eventually removed as an embarrassment by Truman - the threat to use nukes was repeated by the incoming President Eisenhower in 1953.
The full horror of US chemical warfare -the use of defoliants and other toxins - did not unfold until Vietnam 15 years later: but there is evidence that the Americans used biological weapons - germ warfare - against Chinese and North Korean troops, including plague, anthrax, cholera and encephalitis. An expert inquiry concluded that Chinese allegations were true: and this fits in with the US policy of protecting and reemploying war criminals who had run germ warfare research for the Japanese and the Nazis.
Imperialist indignation at Saddam Hussein's cowardly abuse of prisoners of war in the Gulf also has the ring of hypocrisy in the light of the Korean war, in which the UN/USA shamelessly sought to breach the Geneva Convention in order to introduce the concept of "voluntary" rather than automatic repatriation of POWs after the peace was signed
The Chinese and Northern troops comPage 22
GULF SPECIAL plained that this was backed up by the use of violence to prevent POWs choosing to return to the North - for propaganda reasons. Those siding with the communists were, in the (private) words of one top US general beaten black and blue or killed". Indeed the death toll of POWs in UN custody was massive - over 6,600 by the end of 1951, while the toll of dead US POWs was much lower, at 365.
During 1952, the USA mobilised a batalPyongyang devastated by US bombing lion of tanks and resorted to a shoot-to-kill policy against a revolt of pro-communist POWs at Koje camp. The US troops were ordered to use too much violence rather than too little - and massacred hundreds with tanks and flame throwers.
There are other, sick, political parallels between today's events in the Gulf and those of the Korean War. While today's conflict is conducted in the name of 'containing" Saddam, "liberating" what will be left of Kuwait, restoring its vicious feudal rulers and preserving the reactionary sheikhdoms through which imperialism dominates the Gulf, the Korean war was to 'contain" and roll back the the Stalinist Kim Il Sung regime, and prop up the wildly unpopular right wing dictatorship of Syngman Rhee against mass workers' opposition in the South.
Rhee's regime, installed by the US after a hasty "partition" line had been drawn by US army chiefs at the time of the Japanese surrender, rested on brute force: an army headed by former commanders, officers and col laborators of the Japanese colonial occupation. The spontaneous people's committees that sprang up throughout Korea in 1945 were savagely repressed in the South, along with every spark of popular opinion, through the familiar tactics of imprisonment, torture and mass executions of opponents which have characterised so many US-backed regimes.
The UN support for this dictator reflected the total US domination - but also the conscious abstention of Stalin's USSR, which would not use its veto to block the war drive. Instead the Kremlin sabotaged the war effort in North Korea, refusing to supply Kim I
Sung with fighter aircraft to enable them to challenge the US aerial bombardment. Following the same cynical line he adopted in the Spanish revolution (and his heirs later adopted in Vietnam), Stalin severely restricted supplies of arms and equipment to the North and the Chinese - and insisted that everything be paid for.
Stalin regarded the Korean struggle, given a degree of independence under Kim II Sung's
leadership, as a threat to the Kremlin's efforts to reach a global settlement with postwar imperialism. He preferred to sit back and allow the imperialists to crush this troublemaker. Only when it was clear that the North and the Chinese were going to hold firm were Soviet planes (and pilots) eventually sup plied. Today, Gorbachev's sup port for the US/UN offensive against Saddam coincides with his short-term economic interests - seeking loans and aid from the west - and with the Kremlin's global line of compromise with imperialism at the expense of working class struggles.
It is also worth remembering that another US accomplice was the British Labour government, which sent 12,000 conscript troops, navy and marines to support Truman's war drive. Labour leaders then - like Kinnock today - threw in their lot to defend "democracy" by propping up a dictatorship, and to oppose "communism" by embracing the most brutal and ruthless exponents of imperialism.
There is one final lesson, however. which Korea passed on to Vietnam and the dozens of illE victorious colonial liberation struggles that followed: despite the US barbarism, the Americans did not win! The resistance of the North, backed by the Chinese Stalinists, who saw the dangers if a US stooge regime was installed on their border, could not be broken.
Northem cities were flattened, millions killed and maimed; but Kim II Sung's fighters went literally underground, into huge fortified bunkers, complete with subterranean factories. Braving the blitzkreig, a support force of 700,000 transported supplies across a 200mile stretch from the Chinese border to maintain what rose to 1.2 million communist troops.
The USA threw everything, short of nuclear bombs, at them - and failed to crush their resistance. For all the determination of today's imperialists in the Gulf, there is no guarantee they will wind up with any more decisive result. All quotations from the excellent book Korea, the unknown war by Halliday & Cummings (Viking, 1988) SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 30, February 1991
Bey