The war in Korea that never ended

The war in Korea that never ended
By W. THOMAS SMITH JR.
Guest Columnist

The Korean War — America’s first “limited war” and the first war fought under a United Nations flag — was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century. An estimated 3 million people (military and civilian) were killed between 1950 and 1953. Yet the war never ended.

Granted, on July 27, 1953 — exactly 53 years ago today — a cease-fire agreement was signed between the two belligerents: U.N. forces supporting the Republic of (South) Korea led by the United States on the one hand, and Communist North Korea supported by China on the other. But it was an uneasy agreement, and for the past five decades two enormous armies — a joint U.S.-South Korean force and that of North Korea — have faced down one another across the most heavily fortified border on earth, the 151-mile-long demilitarized zone. And there has been some low-grade fighting.

As a young Marine in the early-to-mid 1980s, I spent several weeks training with the South Korean marines on the eastern coast of the Korean peninsula. There, I remember waking up one night to the distant staccato of machine-gun fire: A few quick bursts, then all was quiet.

I believed it to be some training exercise. The next morning, we discovered the South Koreans had killed a few Communist sappers attempting to infiltrate a beach not far from our position.

The oddness of it all was that it seemed to be a routine incident to our South Korean counterparts.

Fact is, the war has continued as something of a smoldering shootout since 1953, and now with North Korea in possession of nuclear weapons and the means of launching — or even selling —those weapons, the conflict threatens to escalate into something almost incomprehensible.

Consider the following:

From 1953 through the mid-1960s, North Korea conducted hundreds of covert operations inside South Korea. Most were aimed at gathering intelligence and spreading propaganda in the backcountry. But by 1968 — when all of America was focused on the war in Vietnam — the North’s intelligence operations in South Korea had morphed into a series of violent excursions from commando raids to artillery duels aimed at destabilizing the South’s government.

In January alone, more than 600 cross-border operations were conducted by North Korea, the most dramatic being an ill-fated raid on the South’s presidential residence by North Korean Special Forces. That same month, Communist Naval forces attacked and seized the USS Pueblo.

Since then, countless raids have taken place, South Korean leaders have been plotted-against, sometimes assassinated, and American aircraft have been shot at, occasionally shot down.

In 1976, two U.S. Army officers trimming a view-blocking tree in the DMZ were attacked by some 30 North Korean soldiers who bludgeoned and hacked them to death with metal pipes, axe handles and the Americans’ own hatchets.

In late 1984, a full-blown, albeit brief, gun battle erupted between the two Koreas in the DMZ’s Joint Security Area.

In 1996, a North Korean submarine ran aground off the South’s coast. Twenty-six heavily armed commandos then disembarked, split up and moved inland on various deep-reconnaissance missions aimed at gathering intelligence on South Korean military bases.

All this is just scratching the declassified surface of the North’s covert actions.

Moreover, the new nuclear variable and recent missile tests have now ratcheted the stakes up to levels never before seen.

The Korean War never officially ended. No peace agreement was ever reached. North Korea now declares it has nuclear weapons. It has defiantly fired ballistic missiles that could potentially reach North America. It is a cash-strapped, starving nation whose eccentric and unpredictable leader, Kim Jong Il, would have no qualms about selling nuclear weapons to sworn enemies of the U.S., such as al-Qaida or any affiliates of that terrorist network.

North Korea has already sold missiles to the likes of Iran and Syria.

Even more unsettling is that Iranian guests of North Korea were on hand to observe the July 4-5 missile tests, suggesting some sort of increased collaboration between the two countries.

This is what we know: Imagine what we don’t.

Mr. Smith is executive editor of World Defense Review and a frequent contributor to National Review Online. He lives in Columbia.