Lessons of history for the U.N. presence in Iraq

Amidst the recent hullabaloo over Iraq, there was virtually no mention of a significant (and far from irrelevant) anniversary: July 27th marked fifty years since the end of the Korean War, a particularly brutal and messy conflict which pitched South Korea, the United States and a number of allies (including Britain, France, Turkey and even Colombia) against the armies of North Korea and communist China. The conflict was rooted in a civil war on the Korean peninsula, but it quickly descended into a genuinely international bloodbath. Three years after the fighting began in earnest, at the signing of the armistice in July 1953, the war had claimed more than 50,000 American lives and had killed as many as four million Koreans and a million Chinese.

At the time, the war appeared to be a terrible exercise in futility and attrition; the eventual armistice line not only confirmed the division of the Korean peninsula, but roughly corresponded to the status quo before the war. Perhaps the one useful consequence of the Korean War might have been the lessons it offered to American policymakers: Don't treat every civil war as if it were the first salvo of World War III; don't respond with Cold War logic and weaponry to indigenous struggles for land reform or decolonization. Tragically, however, America's leaders discarded these lessons at the first opportunity and, in another east Asian conflict, an even greater number of American soldiers and Vietnamese paid the price for this collective amnesia. By the 1970s, with Vietnam established as an indelible scar on the national psyche, perhaps it's not surprising that – with the exception of the comedy M*A*S*H, in which Korea was made to stand in for Vietnam — the Korean War had entirely disappeared from the consciousness of most Americans.

The Bush administration's invasion of Iraq, of course, is supposed to have taken care of any lingering anxieties about American military prowess. Conservative commentator William Kristol gushed in April that the American assault on Saddam had been "like Vietnam in reverse"; Jay Garner, the U.S. military administrator of "liberated" Iraq, maintained that the United States would have won the Vietnam War if only Bush had been president in the 1960s. If Vietnam is passé, then, perhaps it's time to return to Korea for some cautionary tales. One that struck me this past week concerned what's been presented as a triumph for the United States: the unanimous vote in the Security Council last Thursday offering the sanction of the United Nations to the continuing American occupation.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial page presented the Security Council's vote as "a more or less total capitulation by France, Russia, Germany and the secretary-general, Kofi Annan"; after all, those familiar holdouts had previously balked at giving the U.N.'s blessing to America's tactics in Iraq, which have been characterized by a desire to retain political and military control and a reluctance to set a deadline for the transfer of authority to Iraqi leaders. What's changed, it seems, is that these skeptical players have concluded that they have more to lose by denying U.N. authority to the United States than they would gain by preserving the perceived neutrality and independence of the United Nations. While many countries are unwilling to participate (either financially or militarily) in an occupation that remains under exclusive American control, diplomats from Europe and beyond are nervous that they'll somehow be blamed for the failures in Iraq if they withhold "the U.N. fig leaf that both Colin Powell and the Bush administration wanted." (That's the Wall Street Journal again.)

What does this have to do with Korea? Well, the United States managed in 1950 to win U.N. approval for its military campaign, thanks to political turmoil in China and the absence of the Soviet ambassador. Subsequently, the U.S. military controlled the entire "U.N." operation independently of the Security Council and the other governments that had contributed troops to the South Korean side. The huge civilian casualties and the dubious tactics of the American assault — including the decimation of North Korea's agriculture after the bombing of its huge dams and the widespread use of napalm against civilians — besmirched the reputation of the United Nations. Worse, the U.N.'s implication in the fighting meant that it could hardly be trusted as an honest broker in establishing and monitoring a peace treaty between the sides.

The decision of Russia, Germany and France to offer the U.S. its "fig leaf," then, raises the troubling possibility that the United Nations will seem to Iraqis like a mere extension of the American military. Kofi Annan undoubtedly fears this outcome, and the terrible bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August demonstrates that the "fig leaf," though it may preserve Washington's blushes, will give little cover to U.N. diplomats and peacekeepers who brave America's ongoing and chaotic occupation. Nicholas Guyatt is a lecturer in the history department. He is from Bristol, England.