Should we have fought harder in the Korean War?

[Pat Mustard]

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.

You do realise that for most of the period since the Korean War, South Korea existed in a dictatorship only slightly less brutal than the one to the North at that time? Until at least in the 1980's life wasn't all that spiffy in the South.

[CapnAwesome]

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.

You do realise that for most of the period since the Korean War, South Korea existed in a dictatorship only slightly less brutal than the one to the North at that time? Until at least in the 1980's life wasn't all that spiffy in the South.

Sure, but the difference today is enormous. If we hadn't intervened in Korea, it would stand to reason that it would all be like North Korea.

[The Grand Nudger]

OTOH..had we not intervened (or, rather, had we not blundered in that intervention so egregiously), and had we not maintained our stance against North Korea as a consequence of that intervention (and those mistakes)..it's difficult to state exactly what North Korea would be like, today. "The West" is the fuel that keeps the fires burning there in Kimland, slights real or imagined. It's difficult to add anything meaningful after Anoms breakdown...but there's my contribution.

Perhaps the south -would- be like the north...and perhaps both would be a bit like China. A vast improvement over the current situation, imo.

[God of Mr. Hanky]

As an American whose taxes will pay for our troops in Korea until I die, I think we should have stayed out of the Korean conflict. It's true they have a decent enconomy in the South, and the cars they make are ok, but our involvement made the conflict go on for decades, and it may continue for centuries. SK and NK bait each other like children on a playground, and once again the US has to keep them from killing each other. Will SK ever have a self-sufficient defense against its enemy to the North, or will it always hide behind other countries? Perhaps this war needed to end as Vietnam did (but with fewer American casualties before us pulling out), so that Korea could work out its own social problems without millions starving on barely-arable Northern land.

[Anomalocaris]

South Korea has more than enough military capability to stop any northern aggression. South Korea is also technologically a fairly advanced nation that is almost literally just a screw driver turn away from immediately building a far more advanced nuclear arsenal than the north can dream of.

But although the south will certainly be victorious in a conflict with the north, the conflict will be messy both for Korean pennisula, and for the larger east Asia region. Keep in mind the larger east asia region collective has over one of a half times the economic output of the United States. So American presence their to deter such a conflict is amply worth the cost.