Not more than 25,000 survivors of the Inmun Gun were able to retreat north of the 38th parallel, and with victory, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), came the determination to punish them for starting the war:
If the fighting, with its resultant death and destruction, its loss of American lives, resulted only in the return of the status quo, then almost all Americans would feel cheated.
War could never be part of a system of checks and balances; the view seemed immoral. War must always be for a cause, a transcendental purpose: it must not be to restore the Union, but to make men free; it must not be to save the balance of world power from falling into unfriendly hands, but to make the world safe for democracy; it must not be to rescue allies, but to destroy evil.
Americans have always accepted checks and balances within their own system of government, but never without, in the world. Because in the world such checks have never been achieved with votes or constitutions but with guns, and Americans have never admitted that guns may serve a moral purpose as well as votes.
They have never failed to resort to guns, however, when other mean fail.
It was inevitable that the United States should take the position that the North Korean Communist State must now be destroyed for its lawlessness and that all Korea should be united under the government of the Taehan Minkuk.
Actually, the Communist world had not broken the law, for one of the continuing tragedies of mankind is that there is no international law. The Communist world had tried to probe, a gambit, and hand been strongly checked.
And the Communists would regard an American move to punish the “law-breaker” not so much as justice but as a United States gambit of its own.
The question was not whether the American desire to reunite Korea under non-Communist rule was a proper goal for the United States, but whether the Communist world could sit by as the United States in turn ruptured the status quo ante.
The desire to join the two halves of Korea under Syngman Rhee was unquestionably proper, and in the best interests of the United Nations — if the U.N. had the power to accomplish it.
On 27 September 1950 the Joint Chiefs of Staff instructed General MacArthur as follows:
- His primary objective was to be the destruction of all North Korean military forces.
- His secondary mission was the unification of Korea under Syngman Rhee, if possible.
- He was to determine whether Soviet or Chinese intervention appeared likely, and to report such threat if it developed.
With the third instruction appeared sign of an elementary weakness in American policy — a decision by the powerful Communist nations to intervene or not to intervene was a political question, on the highest level. The indications would be apparent — or nonapparent — not on military levels but through the channels of political intercourse.
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Military intelligence, quite competently, can determine the number of divisions a nation has deployed. Military men can never wholly competently decide, from military evidence alone, whether such nation will use them.
Such decision is not, and will never be, within the competence of military intelligence.