Pursuing a Will-o-the-wisp - 30 June 2000

There was a weird sort of anniversary celebrated last Monday. Celebrated is a strong word - it was mentioned on the evening news and the next night it had gone.

It was the 50th anniversary of what they called the "forgotten war" - the Korean War.

Every news programme made a respectful note of the date - 25 June - mentioned that 34,000 Americans had died, remarked - with a sigh - that at the last Memorial Day ceremonies - Memorial Day annually commemorates the dead of all American wars - at the last Memorial Day ceremonies everywhere there were honoured guests - veterans of World War II, of Vietnam, of the desert Gulf War - but veterans of the Korean War were forgotten or uninvited.

Why? That war, which today the vast majority of Americans think of as an American war with an unhappy conclusion, was in truth a United Nations war - in fact the only United Nations war ever voted by the Security Council and the vote acted on at once by the military forces of 15 member nations.

It was a rousing moment in June 1950 and some of us were aglow with the thought that after five helpless years of failing to stop aggression, the United Nations was able to do what it was set up to do - to resist aggression from any nation and secure the peace and security of all of us.

Why, in 1950, after five years of the United Nations existence, should it have failed so disastrously to stop any war through the terms of the United Nations charter?

It did stop the threat of several little wars thanks to small volunteer units from Tunisia, Ireland, Canada, I remember.

But why it failed in its main purpose goes to two reasons which takes us back to the founding of the United Nations, indeed before that by nine months to the drafting of the charter at a private estate in Washington DC in the fall of 1944.

In September 1944 when we were well on the way to the invasion and conquest of Nazi Germany this private meeting, at a place named Dumbarton Oaks, was a meeting of the foreign ministers to draft the UN charter. And it was there that their strong disagreement on two vital points practically decided that the United Nations would be rendered impotent in its cradle.

The main quarrel was over the voting powers of the five permanent members of the council - the United States, the USSR, the United Kingdom, France and at that time China represented by the Chinese Nationalist Forces - the huge land mass of China had not yet fallen to the Communists.

Now, the argument was whether the big five in the Security Council could vote for a war to take military action at all times - in other words could they veto any military action that ran against their own interests? Or whether - as the British and the Americans proposed - the big five should always abstain in any issue which affected their own national interests?

The Russians - I'd better say Stalin for it came down to a personal appeal from President Roosevelt to Stalin - Stalin said each of the big five must have the right, at all times, to veto any military action voted by the council.

At one hopeless stage in the meetings the British Foreign Office head - Sir Alexander Cadogan - told the implacable Russian Foreign Minister - one Mr Gromyko: "Look, you can't have a system in which anybody can stop any order of the council. Do you want a world organisation or not?"

Gromyko, like Roosevelt was waiting for the word from Stalin. It came. Mr Gromyko said the word: "No".

Stalin simply would not join an organisation in which he couldn't have a perpetual veto and that was it. That fatal clause of the veto went into the draft, also into the charter itself at San Francisco 10 months later.

Cadogan noted in his diary that they had been pursuing a will-o-the-wisp. He glumly couldn't see how the council could work at all. It would claim a power it didn't possess. And so it was.

There was one other insuperable obstacle to the United Nations acting out the fantasy we all embraced - the notion of an international force, superior to a single nation aggressor or any combination.

This second big question of the long private debate in this drafting session at Dumbarton Oaks was this: How could the Security Council acquire the actual military forces to bring about that big, insuperable international force? First off, Stalin from Moscow proposed an international air force run by the Security Council and after two days of thinking and nattering it became clear that this was going to be a practical impossibility.

At the end of long arguments a famous clause of the charter was drafted and it went into the charter. It was Article 43.

It empowered the Council to call on every member, shortly after the charter would be signed the following June, to furnish whatever warring skills - equipment, manpower - it could best provide. One nation tanks, another nation, say, bombing planes, another submarines, another transport, even just rights of passage - all the weapons and means of war.

The charter didn't set a date to have every member send in its list but in the dizzy air of jubilation and clinking glasses that followed the charter's signing I gathered from most delegates they assumed that the lists would be presented by the autumn, through the winter of '45-'46 at the latest.

Well you know what happened. First: As for the main UN purposes stated in the preamble - "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war" - since the charter was signed there have been 240 wars.

And the reports of each member's military contribution never happened. To put it in the dignified official jargon "the implementation of article 43 has, regretfully, never occurred."

In brutal truth the Security Council - the guardian of peace and security - never had the actual power with which the charter endowed it.

But how come I called the Korean War the only United Nations war? In the plain sense that it was voted by the Security Council and at once the forces of 15 nations went into battle on the Korean peninsular.

How did it happen? By a sheer freak. By the fact that when the Council voted, one nation - the Soviet Union - was missing. Why? Because they didn't have a jet plane. How is that?

Well, first, Korea - a small peninsula dropping into the Sea of Japan - has been a pawn of neighbouring nations, especially the Chinese and Japan, for centuries.

In 1910 Japan seized it and had it through the Second War. By then, however, the long peninsula was divided into two republics - North Korea was a communist satellite of the Soviet Union, the Republic of South Korea was backed by the United States.

It was at the 1945 meeting at Potsdam, on the verge of victory, that Stalin, Churchill and Truman agreed that North Korea should be occupied for the time being by Soviet forces and the South by American forces - already a prescription for trouble.

This led to a Communist Republic of North Korea at the end of the 1940s and at the same time the setting up of an independent quasi-democratic republic in the South. The two republics were separated at Potsdam by a demilitarised zone.

By the way Churchill later admitted in a private conversation that at Potsdam "I had never heard of the bloody place." At Potsdam the big three were dealing with mightier matters - the future of Europe, the eastern nations of which were already doomed to fall into Soviet domination.

Anyway in June 1950, suddenly at dawn on the 25th, seven infantry divisions and one armoured division of the North Korean armies launched an attack on the South across the DMZ line. Never has the United Nations been forced to move with such lightning speed, by President Harry Truman.

In an early morning telephone call the president called a White House meeting of his closest advisors and he told his secretary of state - Dean Acheson - to call an immediate meeting of the United Nations Security Council:

"Get to New York and now" was the summons.

Why the rush? Because President Truman was the first to put together two facts, only one of which was public knowledge.

In the spring of 1950 the Soviet Union had decided to boycott the Security Council because the General Assembly refused to have the Communist regime of mainland China replace Formosa - Taiwan - in the Security Council.

So at dawn of the North Korean invasion of the South, if the Russians wanted to have a say in the Security Council's response, in other words if it was going to use its veto as it surely would have done, it would have to get a representative Russian delegate to New York as soon as possible.

What Harry Truman instantly remembered was that the Russians, at that time, had not developed a big commercial jet. They boasted about the superiority of a giant turbo-prop, but it was slower than a jet. Hence Harry Truman's snappy order to Secretary Acheson: "Get to New York now - take a vote - go."

At that hurried meeting in the White House, before the final order - a meeting of Truman's top advisors at State, Defence, General Bradley - Acheson said that the most shocking and wonderful thing about the meeting was a swift, expert lecture in front of a globe by President Truman on the history of China, Japan and their relations with Korea, which ended with his saying:

"If we don't go in now, at once, we'll doom the United Nations just as the British and French doomed the League of Nations by simply slapping Mussolini on the wrist for invading Abyssinia. Dean, on your mark, go."

He went. The Council met, voted within the hour, unanimously - that is without the Soviet Union - and 15 armies led by General Douglas MacArthur began the long haul of throwing the North Koreans back where they belonged, and still belong.

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