War Crimes and Unprovoked Attacks

"As soon as Chinese troops intervened in force, MacArthur ordered that a wasteland be created between the war front and the Yalu River border, destroying from the air every 'installation, factory, city, and village' over thousands of square miles of North Korean territory." (Cumings 29).
When I read about the complete devastation that MacArthur ordered from his troops, I was struck by how much excessive damage of property happened in North Korea in the very beginning of the war because of this.  One of the "grave breaches" listed in the Geneva Convention was "extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly," of which MacArthur was completely guilty during this period and throughout the war.  There is no way that ordering a "wasteland" to be made could not be considered "extensive destruction".  I thought that it was interesting that the U.S. was never held accountable for any of their napalm, bombings, and massacres.

When we watched Homes Away last night, I was struck by how out-of-touch the military men they interviewed seemed with all the events we've been reading and talking about, and how much anti-American sentiment existed in South Korea.  This reminded me of the controversy about Psy's anti-American lyrics last month.  This is the ABC clip of that story:

After doing the readings for this week and watching the documentary, Psy's anger towards the U.S. is easy to understand, especially since he was responding to the Iraq War, and in the other case, to the deaths of two South Korean school girls who were accidentally killed by a U.S. tank.  A lot of bloggers glossed over the details about the Iraq war and the deaths of the two girls, and complained about how America's response to Psy's comments was so forgiving and overly-generous instead. I thought that was an interesting response, especially since Cumings calls the U.S. the "Party of Forgetting", and so many U.S. blogs framed Psy's words as an unprovoked attack.

Claire Davidson