Should we have fought harder in the Korean War?

[Drich]

This is an idea that I've been thinking about more and more and it's a hard one for me to come to grips with since I generally have considered myself a pacifistic/non-interventionist.

Most people are aware of the totally messed up state of North Korea, where people live in a starvation/slave state, everyone worships the Kims as though they were living Gods, and there are literally concentration camps where generations of people are born and die. Comparatively South Korea is a well off democracy that enjoys the relative freedoms of the first world. My question is: should we have fought harder and longer in the Korean war and made all of Korea more like South Korea? A lot of times wars like Vietnam and Korea are portrayed as a complete waste of American lives, but when you consider that generations of people in North Korea are living in a brainwashed slave state and we helped save generations of South Koreans from living under the same slave state, it's hard to say that the lives weren't spent in a greater moral good and wouldn't it be an even greater moral good if we had stayed longer and liberated all of Korea for the future?

Keep in mind these are not rhetorical questions, I'm really not sure.

If we had I might not be here... So there's that. Or at least 1/2 of me would not be here anyway.

It wasn't North Korea we could not beat. It was China. We had North Korea on it's heels and almost pushed them completely out, very quickly. (almost like the attack on Iraq) but we did not have the infrastructure/roads to keep our front line well supplied. Then China backed by russia were funneling troops and materials into the breech on the north korean side, and we fell back and lost all the land we'd gain to the 38th paralell. (the current old and New North Korean boarder.)

Technically our conflict is still active, we are just at a cease fire. We do not invade because again China supports the Kims, and now they have nukes, and even worse they have artillery that can hit Seoul from within their boarders (no defense for that)

If we would have kept pushing we would have been in an all out war with china and russia which by then also had nukes (which is why we did not use ours) and is also what started the cold war stalemate.

So that also means alot if not all of you d-bags would not be here either.

So no, we should not have pushed any further than we did. Yes it sucks for those stuck under the kims, but it also sucked durning and before WWII being annexed by Japan when their claim to korea was a 'war prize' for supporting the allies after WWI, which turned the whole country into Japanese slaves. And before that China owned korea or rather parts of it. (Think england and scotland) Korea has always been in the middle of conflict, and has very little identity of it's own/not forced on it by other cultures. Even now western influence causes a sharp divide between older and younger generations. right now under the kims as bad as we might think it to be, that family's rule is actually pretty close to how Korean society would be without any outside influence. As a result many N.Koreans would rather die than live any other way.