Divided lands, phantom limbs: partition in the Indian subcontinent, Palestine, China, and Korea.

Greenberg, Jonathan D.

A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again. It will listen to no reformer, to no philosopher, to no preacher, until the demand of the Nationalist is granted. It will attend to no business, however vital, except the business of unification and liberation.

George Bernard Shaw, Preface to John Bull's Other Island, 1904 (1)

In the immediate wake of Allied victory in the Second World War, the world lay in pieces. In Western but not Eastern Europe, battered nations and peoples that had been conquered by Axis powers regained their sovereignty and self-determination. In territories throughout Asia, particularly those that had been long subject to Japanese or European colonial control, the war's end undermined civil order and domestic security that had been previously imposed by external forces. Rival groups confronted each other with increasing violence--each seeking to define the national identity of their people, and to establish long-awaited national liberation on their own terms. These groups often had no choice but to await fateful decisions by foreign leaders in Washington, Moscow, London, or Paris. (2)

In a number of important cases, the victorious powers sought to manage extraordinarily difficult problems of postwar governance, civil strife, and territorial boundaries by dividing previously-unified lands. This essay remembers the partition of land by ethnicity in the Indian Subcontinent and in Palestine in 1947-48 following the collapse of British control, and the division of territory by Cold War political affiliations and ideology in Korea and China in the years following Japan's defeat.

In each of these cases, partition involved the creation of new boundaries and borders: new lines on a new map, new citizens of new states. But geographical division severed the already tenuous fabric of social relations, and unprecedented political achievement arrived with overwhelming human catastrophe. This is why Mahatma Gandhi called partition "vivisection": the carving-up of the body politic, the bloody dismemberment of the motherland. Truncated landscapes, lost to political enemies or abandoned by the mass exodus of refugees, became "phantom limbs" in a nation's identity. Severed more than five decades ago, they have not ceased to generate pain and trouble. By examining partitions generated in the immediate postwar period, and comparing them across national borders and regional distances, I hope to suggest an expanded framework in which these cataclysmic events, and their unresolved legacy, can be more effectively addressed.

BRITISH DECOLONIZATION/ETHNIC PARTITION

 We British are no more suited in India than in Palestine by nature,
 by upbringing and by our system of government and way of life, to
 deal with intemperate, cruel and foolish outbreaks of violence.
 We have given in and have drawn out of both countries. Intemperate
 people must be dealt with by more severe,
 perhaps intemperate, measures than we British are accustomed to use.

 General Francis Tuker, While Memory Serves

British control over India and Palestine began to erode long before the last Viceroy and High Commissioner finally lowered the Union Jack. In retrospect, Ireland's 1921 partition (and Irish bloodshed from the 1916 Easter Rising through the 1922-23 civil war) foreshadowed the collapse of British rule, and its consequences, in both territories. As in Ireland, protests, terror, ethnic violence, and rioting in the Subcontinent and in the Holy Land eventually dissolved the will of colonial administrators and the appetite for empire back home.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah had formally declared the objective of establishing an independent Pakistan in his Presidential Address to the Muslim League in March 1940. But Jinnah's intentions and strategy were ambiguous, and the Indian National Congress held out for a unified state. A tumultuous political struggle ensued in which British intermediaries sought repeatedly to negotiate agreement. In June 1946, Jinnah and the League accepted a British Cabinet mission proposal for a unified federalist India as a less-worse alternative to a "moth-eaten" Pakistan without intact Bengali and Punjabi provinces. But the plan was effectively sabotaged promptly thereafter by Nehru's implicit threats to seize more power for the Congress in a unified government. In response, on 27 July, Jinnah repudiated the agreement, and mass rioting ensued. (3)

"You cannot in any case have a secure base on top of a wasps' nest," wrote Hugh Dalton, chancellor to the exchequer, to Prime Minister Attlee on 11 August 1947. Dalton was referring to Palestine. (4) But his analogy also reflected British sentiment about its Indian crown jewel, abandoned just four days later. General Tuker's memoir calls 1947 "the year of quittance." (5) On 20 February Attlee announced that Britain would withdraw from India on or before June of the following year. Five days later, the United Kingdom officially handed over the problem of Palestine to the United Nations.

On 22 March Lord Louis Francis (Dickie) Mountbatten arrived in Delhi, as the 34th and last Viceroy of the Raj, with a mandate "to wind up the 182-year-old British Indian Empire in fifteen months." (6) By then it had become clear that the territory would indeed be partitioned along ethnic lines. Civil society faced "signs of imminent disintegration"; "law and order became practically non-existent over large tracts of the sub-continent." (7) In response to the escalating chaos, Mountbatten suddenly announced that the date of British withdrawal would be moved forward, by 10 months, to 15 August--little more than ten weeks hence. "In spite of the fact that nothing was prepared and no one was ready," writes Akbar Ahmed, "London agreed." (8)

"At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom." So "at the stroke of the midnight hour" on 14 August Jawaharlal Nehru declared, on behalf of the Indian National Congress, the fulfillment of India's awakening "to life and freedom." But the Indian nation's "tryst with destiny," and Pakistan's simultaneous birth, came at an extraordinarily high cost.

By all accounts, the scale of human migration, communal riots, and mass killing triggered by partition was unimaginably vast. In the first 1953 issue of this journal, William Henderson describes "the holocaust of burning communal hate that followed the decision of the British Raj to transfer sovereignty to two independent states, rather than to a united India." (9) Henderson maps out the "contagion of fear" that spread from Punjab to the North West Frontier, Baluchistan, Karachi, Sind, the Bahawalpur State, and East Bengal--where non-Muslims fled toward India; and to Kashmir, Delhi (and surrounding areas) and other parts of Northern India, and later Hyderabad, where Muslims sought refuge in the emerging state of Pakistan. He estimates that "by November 21, 1947, only three months after partition, some 8 million evacuees had crossed the India-West Pakistan border in both directions" and "by the first anniversary of partition the total stood at approximately 12 million." Thousands of rapes and abductions were perpetrated on Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh women. (10)

On 29 November the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for partition in Palestine. The UN-endorsed plan envisioned the creation of two independent, democratic states: one Jewish (5,700 square miles for approximately 600,000 Jews, although that territory included approximately 500,000 Palestinian Arabs) and one Arab (4,300 square miles for the remaining 900,000 Palestinians and Bedouins), with Jerusalem and Bethlehem under international control. The Jewish Agency officially accepted the UN plan; the Palestinian Arabs, and the surrounding Arab states, rejected it. Jewish paramilitary groups (the Irgun and Stern Gang) also opposed the plan. "No one believed in the UN's map," concludes Israeli historian Tom Segev; "everyone knew there would be war." (11)

Following Britain's 4 December announcement that it would be leaving Palestine within six months, "it was as if on a signal Arabs and Jews squeezed the trigger and exchanged fire." (12) As they had done on the subcontinent, British troops in Palestine stood aside as communal violence intensified. Right on schedule, on the morning of 14 May His Majesty's last High Commissioner for Palestine, Lieutenant General Sir Alan Cunningham departed from Jerusalem. Just hours later, as Cunningham sailed off in the HMS Euryalus from the bay of Haifa for England, Ben Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. On the following day, the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq and a contingent force from Saudi Arabia joined indigenous Palestinian and volunteer Arab League forces in a poorly-coordinated and ultimately failed effort to destroy the Jewish state. The war cost Israel roughly 6,000 lives, about one percent of the total Jewish population.

Between 600,000 and 760,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees in a mass exodus of various stages triggered by multiple causes in combination and degree that differed radically from region to region, if not from village to village, including the pressures of accumulated deprivations, the desire to protect family members in the face of the escalating war, and a "psychosis of flight" triggered by the witnessing of fleeing neighbors and the "general sense" of Arab Palestine's collapse. Dominant Israeli narratives emphasize the early departure of wealthy families with second homes outside Palestine; evacuation orders from Arab commanders and pleas of local Palestinian Arab leaders; pledges by the grand mufti and other influential religious and secular Arab leaders that the Jews would be exterminated or forced off the land; and the near-unanimous belief that an anticipated Arab victory would ensure that any departure would be temporary and brief. (13)

In contrast, dominant Palestinian narratives (and, with an academic emphasis, Israeli revisionist historiography) emphasize the successful Haganah offensives against major population centers; specific campaigns of forcible expulsion and related forms of ethnic cleansing, including the panic generated by attacks against nearby villages; instances of atrocity by paramilitary units and the fear that more atrocity would follow; and the 16 June 1948 decision of the new Israeli state that the Palestinian refugees would never be permitted to return.

In the end, the land previously controlled under the British Mandate was partitioned--not between Jews and Palestinians, as contemplated by the 1947 UN Resolution, but between Israelis and existing Arab states. After the war, Israel controlled almost 80 percent of the land. Having lost their homes in cities and villages in what became the Israeli state, the Palestinian Arab refugees failed to achieve a state of their own. Egypt annexed the Gaza Strip, and Jordan's King Abdullah the West Bank of the river Jordan. The 1948 war ended in a number of extremely weak bilateral armistice agreements between Israel and neighbors. Full-scale Arab-Israeli war broke out again in 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982. The first Palestinian intifada (uprising) extended from 1987 to 1993. A second and much bloodier intifada, which began in 2000, continues relentlessly today.

Meanwhile, in Kashmir, on 26 October 1947, the new Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, airlifted troops against a Muslim insurgent movement backed by Pakistani forces. Amidst a series of failed cease-fires, India fought Pakistan in a bloody cycle of offensive and counter-offensive. A 1 January 1949 UN-sponsored truce also proved to be temporary. War between India and Pakistan simmered in 1950-51 and erupted in 1965, and again in 1971 and 1999. According to Indian government statistics, 13,500 people were killed in Kashmir between 1988 and 1995; unofficial statistics suggest a figure of 40,000. (14) Kashmir, like Palestine, remains violently contested terrain to this day.

"If a Muslim majority can remain a part of India, then the raison d'etre of Pakistan collapses," declared Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, then Pakistani Foreign Minister, in 1969, but the logic continues. "Pakistan is incomplete without Jammu and Kashmir both territorially and ideologically." (15) A comparable logic applies, in reverse, for India: if the Muslim majority population of Kashmir cannot live in peace under Indian national sovereignty, then India's raison d'etre (its existence as a secular multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy) collapses; in turn, a Kashmiri succession could pave the way for a violent unraveling of India's great project of national assimilation. In 1999, returning from his first visit to Pakistan, current Indian Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee declared that "Kashmir was an integral part of India and not a single area of Indian soil would be given away." In 2002, Pakistani President, General Pervez Musharraf reasserted Bhutto's claim. "Kashmir is in our blood," he affirmed. "No Pakistani can sever his relationship and link with Kashmir." (16)

ASSESSING BRITAIN'S COLONIAL ENDGAME

 A friend asked me if I was rent by the thought of the turmoil,
 inefficiency, and horror from which I was parting. No, I was not.

 Francis Tuker (17)

In neither context was partition Britain's initial policy or preferred outcome. Referring to Ireland, India, and Palestine, T. G. Fraser notes: "Partition only won through against the most determined opposition. Sinn Fein, the Indian National Congress, and the Arab Higher Committee were undoubtably reflecting majority opinion in their respective countries in rejecting it." (18) In the end, partition was adopted as the best available (or least worst) policy to achieve three goals: first, to effectuate a rapid British evacuation under the cover of face-saving claims to principle; second, to enable national self-determination for a politically well-organized minority; and third, to achieve a lasting resolution of profound ethnic conflict. In each case, the first two goals were successfully achieved, though at great cost. However, from the moment each new state was declared, each region has suffered bitterly from the failure of partition to resolve ethnic conflict or bring peace.

Partition's achievements

Partition enabled Britain to receive approval from external actors, and a reasonable claim to propriety, fair dealing, and political legitimacy in the resolution of competing claims to post-colonial sovereignty. It provided a necessary imprimatur for Empire's collapse and a modicum of honor, or at least its appearance, amidst a hasty retreat.

Partition also enabled the achievement of relentless demands for self-determination from well-organized ethnic populations within each territory: Indian Muslims represented by the Muslim League under the leadership of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and the Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) represented by the Zionist movement, and the Haganah under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion. In the violent political and ethnic struggles that defined the final years of colonial rule, each of these organizations and leaders defined their constituency, and the minority community they represented, as nations. Fearful for the security of their people, and seeking nothing less than their national self-determination, each group refused to agree on a solution in which they would live as minority communities within undivided independent states.

Partition thereby enabled the dominant national liberation organizations of Indian Muslims and Palestinian Jews (and the larger Zionist movement) to realize their declared objective: the establishment of a sovereign, internationally recognized state of their own. This was a stunning achievement from the perspective of populations that suddenly became Pakistani and Israeli citizens.

Ironically, however, one lesson suggested by Jinnah and Ben-Gurion's success--that national self-determination can be achieved by minority groups effectively mobilized under national liberationist ideologies--did not go unheeded by communities that increasingly rejected the mission of the new Pakistani or Israeli states that had determined their fate. Pakistan's achievement was compromised by its own bloody partition in 1971, when East Pakistan became Bangladesh.

The massive displacement of the Palestinians Arabs in 1948-49 (and the subsequent occupation of the West Bank in 1967) created the precondition for the gradual development of a radicalized national liberation movement within the Palestinian diaspora. Today, after the failure of the Oslo Accords to achieve a negotiated settlement, this movement includes a dominant political and military organization (the PLO and Fatah) struggling to maintain an extremely weak, if not collapsing "Palestinian Authority," as well as competing organizations and guerilla forces (both secular/nationalist and Islamicist) that continue to pursue "armed struggle" (including the "weapon" of suicide bombings) against the Jewish state.

Prophets and warnings

In both India and Palestine, partition was adopted in large measure according to the belief that a division of territory into separate nation states based on ethnic affiliation would provide antagonistic communities the best security against mutual threats. Indeed, one could argue that these were, and perhaps still are, reasonable assumptions. But there were some, like Gandhi and the Muslim leader Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Nehru's predecessor as President of the Indian National Congress, as well as isolated Zionist intellectuals like Judah Magnes and Martin Buber in Palestine, who warned that partition would lead to disaster.

Azad, for his part, tried desperately to persuade his fellow Muslims that their interests would best be protected in a multi-ethnic India. Why grant a victory to the corrosive effects of a century and a half of political subjection under British imperial policies of "divide and rule"? But Azad's effort failed. Under Jinnah's leadership, the Muslim League eventually cast its fate to the establishment of a sovereign Pakistan.

In Palestine, only the most idealistic dreamers among Zionist partisans held out for a binational solution. In addition to Magnes and Buber, the spiritual leaders of Brit Shalom, these included the Hashomer Hatzair Worker's Party of Palestine, the young members of Poale Zion, and other splinter groups on the far left of the movement's political spectrum. But the Jewish binationalists failed to identify legitimate Palestinian Arab partners who could help them build support among Arab communities for such a state. Palestinian Arabs had no use for them; adherents to the militant, revisionist Zionism of Jabotinsky and Begin condemned them as traitors; most importantly, they were marginalized or dismissed by the dominant Labor Zionist leadership.

Still, in retrospect, one is haunted by Magnes's warnings (in testimony to the Anglo-American Commission of Enquiry in 1946) that "partition is going to create war." "Satisfactory national boundaries, if the object is to promote peace, cannot be drawn. Wherever you draw those boundaries, you create an irredenta on either side of the border. An irredenta almost invariably leads to war." So Hashomer Hatsair (Young Watchman) predicted that partition, and thus the establishment of a Jewish state, would not eliminate the conflict between Jews and Arabs but perpetuate it, "project it into the future by fixing and amplifying its causes." (19)

In both cases, partition represents the culmination of ethnic violence that had been steadily increasing in intensity over prior months. In the end, rather than diminishing violence between antagonistic communities, partition escalated ethnic conflict and violence to unprecedented levels, exactly as Azad and Gandhi, Buber and Magnes had warned.

Empire's collapse

In the end--after acceptance by the Congress and the Muslim League, after the Punjabi and Bengali plebiscites, after the UN Palestine resolution--one cannot reasonably fault Britain for reaching the conclusion that there was no realistic, and perhaps even just, alternative to partition in these circumstances. But the haste of Britain's military and political withdrawal in each case, the failure to provide security and protection to vulnerable civilian populations during a transitional period, and the total collapse of the rule of law (and the police, military, and legal institutions necessary to keep it alive) suggest a failure of colossal proportions that significantly contributed to partition's humanitarian catastrophe.

JAPANESE DECOLONIZATION/COLD WAR PARTITION

American officials were directly responsible for dividing Korea at the 38th parallel in 1945. Of course, they were not responsible for Jiang Jieshi's flight to Taiwan (Formosa) or the occupation by Nationalist Guomingdang (or GMD) forces in Taiwan in 1949. (20) On the contrary, the United States had made it clear that it would not defend the Generalissimo upon the soon-anticipated attack by the People's Liberation Army.

But everything changed on the morning of 25 June of that year, as more than a hundred thousand of Kim Il Sung's soldiers crossed the 38th parallel toward Seoul and Korea's southern zone. Decisions made in Washington during the next few days, and in the weeks and months that followed, ensured that what Koreans and Chinese had seen as temporary divisions would instead become permanent borders.

Envisioning postwar Korea

In early 1943, Roosevelt had initially proposed the establishment of a trusteeship with Britain, China, and the Soviet Union to govern Korea for an interim period after the war. Britain didn't like this idea, as it suggested an anti-colonial position that threatened its interests in maintaining control over India. The Koreans didn't like it either--they wanted independence immediately following Japan's defeat. FDR's trusteeship idea never got off the ground. (21)

In the closing days of November, as war raged between Japanese and Allied forces throughout Asia (including allied Nationalist and communist forces in China), Roosevelt and Churchill met with Jiang at the Mena House Hotel in Cairo, Egypt. (Stalin was not present; the Soviet Union and Japan, "guided by a desire to strengthen peaceful and friendly relations between the two countries," had signed a neutrality pact in April 1941.) On 1 December the three leaders produced the Cairo Declaration, announcing plans for a postwar restoration of sovereignty of islands and territories seized or occupied by Japanese forces.

Specifically, the Declaration made it clear that the island of Formosa would be "restored" to the Republic of China. In addition, the Declaration also made it clear that "Japan will also be expelled from all other territories which she has taken by violence and greed." Above all, this meant expulsion from Korea, a nation that had suffered horribly under Japanese colonial rule since 1910. "The aforesaid three great powers," the Cairo Declaration announced, "mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea, are determined that in due course Korea shall become free and independent."

Korea's partition, a drama in four acts

On 6 August 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Two days later, Stalin entered the war against Japan. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers invaded Manchuria, racing toward Korea. On 9 August the second atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki. The Americans anticipated an immediate Japanese surrender. Suddenly, as battalions of Soviet troops moved south with all deliberate speed, the problem of Korea, and the divisions of Cold War geopolitics, became starkly apparent.

Korea's 38th parallel was "a line on a map, nothing more" that "followed no political boundaries or physical features within Korea." (22) How did this "unnatural barrier" (23) come to define the borders between two separate, antagonistic Korean states?

Act one: the Rusk-Bonesteel line

During a meeting of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC), held in the Pentagon office of Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy late into the night of 10 August, U.S. officials planned for the anticipated Japanese surrender in Korea.

James Byrnes, two weeks into his new appointment as Secretary of State, had made clear the American's objective: "to receive the surrender as far north as practicable." However, "[t]he military was faced with the scarcity of U.S. forces immediately available and time and space factors which would make it difficult to reach very far north before Soviet troops could enter the area." Meeting participants shared the view that if the U.S. proposal for receiving the surrender "greatly overreached our probable military capabilities, there would be little likelihood of Soviet acceptance." McCloy then asked two Army colonels, Dean Rusk and C. H. Bonesteel III, "to retire to an adjoining room and come up with a proposal." Rusk and Bonesteel drew a line on the Korean map at the 38th parallel, just above the Korean capital, Seoul. This line, further north than U.S. troops could swiftly reach, lay on the outer limit of what meeting participants believed the Soviets would accept. (24)

Japan surrendered on 14 August. Still, Soviet troops continued to cross the border into Manchuria, pushing deeper into the Korean peninsula. But Stalin, in the end, accepted the American-drawn boundary, pulling his Red Army troops north to allow U.S. forces to reach as far north as Seoul. (25) General John Reed Hodge, commander of the XXIV Corps of the U.S. Tenth Army, initiated what he called "our scramble move": a rushed transfer of American forces from Okinawa to Seoul. (26) General Hodge and his troops accepted the Japanese surrender in Korea on 2 September.

Act two: Hodge's about-face

The Korean people's joy at the Japanese defeat, after decades of bitter servitude (including the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Korean "comfort women" conscripted to provide sex to Japanese troops in the field) promptly disintegrated into shock and dismay. There would be no national liberation after all. Throughout the ensuing months, American occupying forces faced mass demonstrations by Koreans who saw in their country's unwanted division a betrayal of the Cairo Declaration's promise that the Korean nation would become "free and independent" after the Japanese defeat.

"Southern Korea can best be described as a power keg ready to explode at the application of a spark," wrote H. Merrell Benninghoff, political advisor to the Secretary of State, in a 15 September memorandum to Foggy Bottom. "There is great disappointment that immediate independence and sweeping out of the Japanese did not eventuate." As a result, "Korea is completely ripe for agitators." In the northern zone, the Soviets "have not respected the rights of individuals, either Japanese or Korean, and constant reports of indiscriminate rape, pillage, and looting are received from all areas occupied by Soviet forces." Most disturbingly for occupation authorities, "communist-inspired" demonstrations had spread throughout the southern zone, which had become "fertile ground" for such activities, especially as they called for the immediate seizure of Japanese properties. Benninghoff's memo suggested that escalating agitation could "bring about chaos in our area so as to cause the Koreans to repudiate the United States in favor of Soviet 'freedom' and control." (27)

General Hodge was an American hero of the Pacific War. He commanded forces at the battles of Guadalcanal, Leyte, and Okinawa, and had been widely recognized for his heroism (he was awarded the Legion of Merit and the Distinguished Service Medal) and aggressive warfare (war correspondents called him "the Patton of the Pacific"). In a 24 September memorandum to General MacArthur in his Tokyo headquarters, Hodge endorsed and added to Benninghoff's lament: "There is no change in attitude of Koreans toward the Japs and/or in their attitude toward independence." In Seoul, Koreans are "beginning to settle on the surface."

 However, there is a growing deep-seated distrust of Allied
 intentions concerning, and real dissatisfaction with the division of
 Korea along the 38[degrees] line into two occupation zones occupied
 by forces with such widely divergent policies.

Hodge, now serving as the commander of the American military occupation of the southern zone, offered the following conclusion:

 I consider the current division of Korea into two occupational zones
 under widely divergent policies to pose an insurmountable obstacle
 to uniting Korea into a nation. In my opinion the Allied Powers, by
 this division, have created a situation impossible of peaceful
 correction with credit to the United States unless immediate action
 on an international level is forthcoming to establish an overall
 provisional government which will be fully supported by the
 occupation forces under common policy.

National division and parallel U.S./Soviet military occupations, in Hodge's view, placed the Korean people in an intolerable position in the context of Korea's still-searing memories of Japanese imperial subjugation. They "cannot be so treated without the everlasting enmity of Koreans toward those nations who so treat them." In this context, "[c]ontinuation of separation of the country into two parts under opposed ideologies will be fatal." (28)

Endorsing its "reiteration of certain facts and recommendations," General MacArthur on 16 December forwarded to the Joint Chiefs of Staff another memo from Hodge advocating that the 38th parallel "barrier" be promptly removed. Writes Hodge: "the US [is] blamed for the partition and [there] is growing resentment against all Americans in the area including passive resistance to constructive efforts we make here.... The word pro-American is being added to pro-Jap, national traitor and lap collaborator." (29)

But Hodge's urgent recommendation for a reversal in policy went nowhere. As he had predicted, circumstances grew increasingly desperate. But Hodge was not about to resign his post over the issue. Rather, his role in the partition drama gradually shifted from partisan opposition to pragmatic accommodation. In the end, as much as any U.S. official, Hodge was responsible for building political institutions in the southern zone that heightened Korea's division.

But what if U.S. decisionmakers had followed the approach Hodge had recommended in the initial weeks of his command? We can never know, and counterfactual arguments are inherently suspect. On one hand, there is reason to assume that efforts to negotiate agreement with the Soviets to create a unification process would have failed. Even if a unification process could have been initiated, on the basis of a planned, mutual Soviet--American withdrawal, it is likely that it would have been extremely violent--although almost certainly less bloody than the catastrophe of the 1950-53 civil war. Perhaps any such process would have led to a consolidation of power under Kim Il Sung's pro-Soviet regime. On the other hand, popular democratic leaders in the southern zone achieved national authority as anti-Japanese independence fighters and might have succeeded in establishing a transition regime of national reconciliation.

Act three: Rhee's success, and Kim's

The greatest hope for such unified national leadership, however nascent, had come from the Korean People's Republic (KPR), and its most prominent organizer, Yo Unhyong, a leading anti-Japanese resistance fighter and the most widely supported populist leader in the southern zone. His political convictions were on the left, but he was not a communist. According to Bruce Cumings, "Yo's views were a mixture of socialism, Christianity, and Wilsonian democracy." (30)

 Yo had reflected the aspirations of the great majority of the
 Korean people in 1945, as well as the peculiar class structures of
 Korean society as it emerged from the Japanese grip: at home with
 the vast peasantry, he also had a bit of the bourgeous gentleman
 about him. He was an ardent nationalist, too, and the most vocal
 critic of the retention of the hated Korean police who had done
 Japanese bidding. (31)

Above all, Yo advocated national unification on the basis of political reconciliation, and his memory is honored in both South and North Korea today. But Yo was rejected by U.S. officials.

From the days prior to the Japanese surrender, the United States and the Soviet Union understood Korea to represent a key battleground in their intensifying ideological and geopolitical struggle. In this process, U.S. occupation authorities increasingly promoted conservative groups (including right-wing extremists) on the basis of their anticommunist zeal and pro-American allegiance, rather than on their popular support among the local population. In this political environment, Syngman Rhee (Yi Sung-man) masterfully utilized his knowledge of American political processes and interests to manipulate U.S. occupying authorities, maneuvering his way to the top.

With American backing, Rhee used the Japanese-affiliated Korean National Police to eliminate political opposition. He was responsible for the assassination of Yo and the murder of tens of thousands of his supporters, paving the way for his election as President in May 1948. In August the newly elected President Rhee announced the establishment of the Republic of Korea. In the following month in Pyongyang, Kim announced the establishment of the pro-Soviet Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Soviet and American occupation forces soon returned home, with respective regimes in place. Neither government accepted the legitimacy of the other regime or the sovereignty of the other declared republic. Both regimes sought to reunify the Korean nation under their respective leadership, ideology, and armed forces.

The United States, having no desire to ignite an explosive war in the Korean Peninsula, did not provide Rhee with the military capacity to attack the North. But Kim, after repeated efforts to receive offensive military support from the Soviet Union--and after the Truman Administration had suggested that South Korea did not fall within the U.S. Pacific Command's "defensive perimeter"--eventually succeeded in persuading Stalin to back a full-scale DPRK invasion of the south. Thus began act four of the drama, its bloody denouement: a fratricidal civil war, internationalized by the introduction of U.S. and Chinese forces. But the 1950-53 war resolved nothing. Its embers continue to burn, and threaten to re-ignite with even greater terror.

Before examining the Korean War and its legacy, it is necessary to identify its larger regional context. Specifically, Korea's war cannot be adequately described in isolation from China's war, and American intervention in each.

The Chinese Civil War

The Chinese civil war of 1946-50 had a momentous impact on the future of China and the lives of millions of Chinese people, the balance of power in Asia, and the geopolitics and security of the postwar international system. It is the story of the fateful struggle between the Nationalist forces of Jiang Jieshi and the communist People's Liberation Army of Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung).

We remember General George C. Marshall for his decisive role in shaping Allied victory in the Second World War, and for the 1947 European assistance plan that bears his name. We may not recall Marshall's representation of the Truman Administration, throughout most of 1946, as a "neutral" mediator between Jiang's Nationalists and Mao's communists in an impressive effort to avert a full-scale civil war. Marshall's vigorous efforts in Nanjing to mediate a deal between Mao and Jiang were initially successful, obtaining an early cease-fire and preliminary agreement on coalition. However, perhaps inevitably given the intense and irreconcilable animosity between these two leaders and their respective political and military organizations--and Stalin's pressures and incentives in a global security environment of escalating ideological division--the U.S. mediation collapsed. Marshall returned to Washington with no agreement as fighting between the GMD forces and the People's Liberation Army exploded into all-out war. (32)

Upon the failure of neutral facilitation, the U.S. announced a policy of non-interference vis-a-vis China's internal conflict. As the war continued, Mao's People's Liberation Army increasingly gained the upper hand in battle against Jiang's forces. By December 1948, the Chief of Naval Intelligence informed the CIA Director that "the situation north of the Yangzi is hopeless and [it] is just a matter of days or weeks before the whole thing folds up." (33) Communist forces took Beijing in February 1949. On 20 and 21 April, tens of thousands of People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers crossed the Yangzi river in makeshift boats. Amidst massive defections of Jiang's Nationalists troops, the GMD strongholds of Nanjing and Hangzhou soon fell to Mao's forces; in May, the PLA took Shanghai. At this point, Mao feared that U.S. naval forces, supporting Jiang's remaining troops, might initiate a counter-offensive in North China. Instead, in early June, the U.S. Navy fled from Qingdao--abandoning Jiang to his oval fate. (34)

In contrast to Korea, the Allied pledges of the Cairo Declaration had been carried out in Taiwan, which was returned to Chinese national sovereignty, under GMD control, following Japan's defeat. (In effect, this portion of the Cairo Declaration had been Jiang's gift to himself.) In July, with his forces smashed throughout the mainland, the Generalissimo fled to Taiwan. It was a move Jiang had well prepared for in advance, having already transferred hundreds of thousands of Nationalist officers and troops, GMD authorities and machineries of governance, and carrying with him the gold and silver reserves in the China's national treasury. In October, in Beijing's Tian'anmen Square, Mao stood atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace and declared the establishment of the People's Republic of China.

From his new base in Taipei, Jiang proclaimed that his forces would retake Beijing and establish GMD rule throughout mainland China. Truman was skeptical at best. With resignation, U.S. officials accepted what was perceived to be the inevitable conclusion of the war: Taiwan's conquest by Mao's forces and the island's integration into the PRC-governed Chinese nation. On 5 January 1950, Britain withdrew recognition from Jiang's regime. On the same day, Truman announced: "the United States Government will not provide military aid or advice to Chinese forces on Formosa."

But on 24 June, as Kim Il Sung's Soviet-backed forces pushed south across Korea's 38th parallel, everything changed. Two days later, before the United States committed troops to fight DPRK forces in Korea, it dispatched the Seventh Fleet of the U.S. Pacific Command from the Philippines to the Taiwan Straits in defense of Jiang's regime. China, through its Foreign Minister Chou En-Lai, immediately denounced the intervention as "armed aggression against the territory of China in total violation of the United Nations charter." The assertion that Taiwan is a province of China, and that the completion of the Chinese civil war is an entirely internal issue in which the United States has no right to intervene, has consistently been made by the PRC government, in crisis after crisis, from 1950 until this day. As a result, the Chinese civil war remains unresolved; its final contest has yet to be played out.

In supporting a North Korean offensive to unify Korea by force, Stalin in effect chose Kim over Mao. The U.S. response to that invasion aborted Mao's plans to conquer Jiang's Taiwan. According to Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai, "Stalin was profoundly disturbed by Britain's recognition of China and considered it the forerunner of a Sino-American normalization that would ruin all his strategic calculations." In this context, Stalin was troubled that Truman's "announced hands-off policy toward Taiwan" and "seeming willingness to tolerate a PLA seizure of the island might well lay the basis for a Beijing-Washington rapproachment." But as Kim's invasion of South Korea triggered U.S. intervention in the Taiwan Straight, "[s]uddenly the tables were turned." (35)

Of course, Stalin's decision to support Kim's invasion represented a colossal miscalculation in the Korean context: the anticipated communist revolution in the south in support of DPRK troops did not take place; and U.S. forces intervened in support of Rhee's regime, defeating Kim's reunification project, after all. Moreover, Stalin's boycott of the United Nations, to protest its continued recognition of Jiang's regime, prevented a Soviet veto on the resolution endorsing the use of force against Kim's invasion. But Russians were not dying in Korea, only Koreans, Chinese, and Americans were. In the geopolitical power game, Stalin came out on top: Kim's invasion set off a chain of events that blocked a PLA conquest of Taiwan, destroyed any possibility of U.S.-PRC normalization against the Soviets, and pushed Mao inescapably into Stalin's camp.

Occupied territories

The story of Korea's partition is a story of the military occupation of the Korean people, territory, and nation. More precisely, it is the story of six different military occupations, and the violent tensions between them. As discussed above, the first series of three occupations defined Korea's sovereignty during the transition from the end of the Second World War to the initiation of the Cold War:

First, the context--Japan's annexation, colonization of Korea, and its brutal repression under Japanese forces from 1910 to Japanese Imperial defeat;

Second, Soviet Red Army occupation, from the 38th parallel north, from mid-August 1945 through 1948, some weeks after the Kim declared the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in September of that year;

Third, American military occupation, from the 38th parallel south, from 8 September 1945 through Rhee's proclamation of the Republic of Korea in August 1948.

Following a brief hiatus, the second series of three occupations defined Korea's sovereignty during the initial months of the Korean War, and determined its future ever since:

The fourth occupation, initiated by the vicious military invasion by Kim Il Sung's DPRK forces, and repressive control of Seoul and nearly all of the south, from the days following 24 June until the end of September, following MacArthur's successful amphibious landing at Inch'on;

Fifth, the comparably destructive military occupation by U.S. and allied forces (under a UN banner and General MacArthur's command) and ROK soldiers and police of Pyongyang, and the entire Korean territory to the Yalu River, in the "rollback war" from October through December 1950;

Sixth, following the December entry into the war by divisions of "volunteer" soldiers of Mao's People's Liberation Army, the occupation of Korea by Chinese forces, in support of Kim's regime, from 4 January 1951, when Chinese soldiers entered Seoul, through 7 March, when U.S. forces re-took the capital city.

With opposing armies facing each other, once again at the 38th parallel, armistice talks commenced on 10 July. Nevertheless, the war continued for another two years, without territorial gains for either side, at the cost of hundreds of thousands more Korean, Chinese, and American lives. (Approximately 45 percent of the war's casualties occurred after the armistice negotiations began.) (36) On 20 January 1953, Eisenhower replaced Truman with a promise to end the war and bring the troops back home. But the armistice talks dragged on, with each day giving greater diplomatic advantage to Mao and Kim, for whom the continued prosecution of war met no domestic challenge.

In the end, the Korean stalemate, and the de facto partition of the Korean peninsula, became formalized in the armistice treaty signed at Panmunjom on 27 July by the United States, China, and North Korea. Rhee's South Korean regime, which had opposed a negotiated treaty leaving the 38th parallel in place, urged the United States to keep fighting--until the Chinese and DPRK forces were defeated, or unconditionally surrendered, in the north. (37)

Three years of war killed between three and four million Korean people. (38) The survivors were left to face each other, ravaged and bitter, across the same line that divided them before the war began. An armistice ended hostilities, but it brought no reconciliation to the Korean people. Nor did it bring mutual recognition or normalization between rival South and North Korean states. Nor did it bring peace. Rather, it institutionalized the mutual hostility between the opposing regimes. In effect, the Korean War never ended; it just shifted to a different, if frozen, phase.

North Korea today maintains an army of more than one million soldiers on active duty. (39) This is more than twice the size of the entire U.S. Army (which in 1999 had approximately 450,000 troops). (40) A total of more than one million DPRK and ROK troops, more than one million land mines, "abundant chemical weapons, and fortified defensive positions," has transformed the 38th parallel the most heavily militarized border, and potentially dangerous "tripwire," in today's world. (41) With vital Soviet military and economic support cut to zero by the fall of the U.S.S.R., and Chinese support severely curtailed in the wake of China's recognition of (and prosperous relationship with) South Korea, the North Korean population has been decimated by famine, and the Kim Jong Il regime has redoubled its efforts to obtain its long-sought nuclear deterrent.

Mao's path, 1953-54

Why did Mao agree, after all, to end the Korean hostilities? This is a question of contentious historical debate. But Eisenhower suggested an answer of his own: "Danger of an atomic war." According to John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State, "[We] had already sent the means to the theater for delivering atomic weapons. This became known to the Chinese through their good intelligence sources and in fact we were not unwilling that they should find out." (42)

What lessons did Mao take from the Korean catastrophe? On one hand, U.S. "imperialists" had stolen Taiwan from its rightful place in a unified People's Republic of China, and some one million Chinese "volunteers" perished in the struggle against American forces. (43) On the other hand, PLA intervention successfully blocked the establishment of a potentially threatening U.S.-sponsored Korean regime at China's border. In a solidified alliance with the Soviet Union, Mao's People's Republic proved itself an ideological and military leader in the world communist movement, and a rising, influential power in Asia.

How did these lessons play out in the year following the Panmunjom truce? Following the Chinese shelling of the islands of Quemoy and Matsu, off China's coast in the Taiwan Straits, the U.S. sent nuclear-capable carrier battle groups to the East China Sea, Jiang's Nationalist forces sank eight PRC gunboats off the Chinese coast, and Washington signed a Mutual Defense Treaty with Taipei. Mao promptly initiated a program to develop his own arsenal of nuclear weapons. (44)

PARTITION, IN RETROSPECT

Partition was not inevitable in any of these cases. History could have evolved along a number of different courses; in each case, but for a small number of shifts and "tipping points," political gambles, and mistaken assessments at key moments, a different outcome could have emerged.

Here a great deal of blame can be assigned to the great powers, whose failures contributed significantly to partition's catastrophe. In each context, the strategic interests of foreign states trumped concern for the well-being, security, and freedom of indigenous populations subject to their control. In remembering the causes and consequences of partition in these cases, we recall the dominant role of strategic interests in great power decision-making, the abandonment of local communities to escalating violence, the exploitation of power and power imbalances between competing groups, and the suffering of dislocation, atrocity and bloodshed that each partition wrought.

And yet, in none of these cases was the initial partition decision itself necessarily heinous, or even wrong, under the circumstances. None of these decisions can be honestly described as an effort to perpetuate a neo-colonial subjugation of native peoples. Indeed, what is most striking about the great power actors in each drama is their weakness, not their strength: their inability to successfully determine outcomes, or guide events in a preferred direction; their impotence in the face of regional conflicts spiraling out of control.

In retrospect, we can imagine a range of alternative paths that might have led to healthier, more peaceful results. Perhaps, but not necessarily so. Hard as it may be to imagine, it could have been worse.

In each case, the division of land represented a political compromise, a "lesser evil" chosen by controlling powers under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. (45) In each case, legitimate arguments were made that partition enabled opposing populations to achieve national self-determination in a situation where group self-determination, and a minimally adequate foundation of social harmony and common national allegiance, could not likely be achieved within the boundaries of a single, integrated state.

The immediate postwar period was a historical moment of great optimism and hope. In some measure, each partition reflected this spirit of rejuvenation, and human possibility, following long decades of imperialism and colonization, and the cataclysmic suffering of the World War. Each partition coincided with the birth of new states, and the initiation of historic nation-building projects of tremendous ambition and scope.

And yet the same partitions made it impossible for leaders of these new states to live up to their promises, and sustain the hope generated at independence. Most of all, in each case, partition failed to solve the underlying problem of national identity, or to bring peace to long-suffering regions. In each case, the unrequited political demands of the group on one side of the new border interfered with the self-determination claims of the group on the other side. This perceived crime became institutionalized in the political apparatus and armed forces of the opposing state. (46) In turn, the unceasing reminder of the other's nationalism remains underlines the incompleteness, and hence failure, of one's own.

This is why partition's history is so tragic--and why it won't go away. In each case, Cold War geopolitics intervened to "freeze" an unstable status quo, and to prevent successful resolution of the underlying political issues. Yet the end of the Cold War, and the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has brought little if any progress to heal partition's old wounds. (47)

CONCLUSION

The legacy of partition in the wake of post-Second World War Japanese and British decolonization sustains grave threats to global security today: the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict in the Middle East; the unfinished Chinese civil war across the Taiwan Straits (and the U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan in the event of invasion by PRC forces); the imminent threat of a nuclearized Korean peninsula (and the potential nuclear arms race it could generate throughout Northeast Asia); the precarious rise and fall of tensions between a nuclear-armed India and a nuclear-armed Pakistan regarding the sovereignty of Kashmir; and the intersection of these conlicts, including the ominous black market in which China gives nuclear weapons technology and knowledge to Pakistan, and Pakistan does the same for North Korea and other states or terrorist organizations able to pay.

We can't say we didn't know.

The Journal of International Affairs was founded in 1947, as the events leading to partition in these cases were unfolding. More than half a century ago, the initial volumes of this journal include an article about the plight of the Palestinian refugees; (48) an essay by Abba Eban, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations ("There has never been a time when so many Middle Eastern problems have stood on the international agenda in a state of acute tension"); (49) an entire issue on the Korean conflict ("After two years of fighting and stalemated negotiations," the Editor's Foreword reflects, "the situation in Korea may appear to be roughly the same as in June, 1950); (50) an article about the "embittered relations" between India and Pakistan on the issues of refugees and Kashmir; (51) an article by a young assistant professor at Harvard's Department of Government named Samuel P. Huntington on national defense policy ("The strategic premise of the 'New Look' is that air power and nuclear weapons will be decisive in a future war"); (52) a piece on the newly-formed National Security Council ("From its deliberations stem the decisions which will lead to U.S. survival or defeat in the atomic age."); (53) and an analysis by Lindsay Rogers of "The Political Setting of American Policy." (54) Professor Rogers's paper concludes with the following lines:

 General MacArthur and senators say that if our allies do not wish to
 agree, "we can go it alone." They should remember the maxim of La
 Rouchefoucauld: "It is a great folly to insist on being wise all
 alone." And who knows what some future historian, burrowing in the
 files at Foggy Bottom, may not come on a British note which quotes
 the words that Cromwell addressed to the General Assembly of the
 Church of Scotland: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think
 it possible that you may be mistaken." (55)

(1) Cited in Christopher Hitchens, "The Perils of Partition," Atlantic Monthly (March 2003): 99, 105.

(2) The story of Vietnam--the postwar decolonization struggle against French authorities, and the partition of territory following the 1954 French defeat at Dienbienphu--is not discussed in this paper, although its themes resonate. Nor do I address the history of Germany's postwar partition. In contrast to the cases discussed below, the German and Vietnamese divisions are no longer in place, and the conflicts underlying each partition have been resolved.

(3) See Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1997), 600-601.

(4) Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 495.

(5) Francis Tuker, While Memory Serves (London: Cassell, 1950), 207.

(6) Tuker, 191.

(7) Tuker, 198.

(8) Akbar S. Ahmed, Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 141.

(9) William Henderson, "The Refugees in India and Pakistan," Journal of International Affairs 7, no. 1 (1953): 57

(l0) Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 7.

(11) Segev, 497.

(12) P. J. Vatikiotis, Among Arabs and Jews: A Personal Experience 1936-1990 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), 59, cited in Ahron Bregman, Israel's Wars, 1947-93 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 9.

(13) Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 286-87.

(14) Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 183.

(15) Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, The Myth of Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), cited in Sumit Ganguly, Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions Since 1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 32.

(16) Vajpayee, 1999, cited in Schofield, 208. Musharraf, 2002, cited in Muthiah Alagappa, "Introduction: Predictability and Stability Despite Challenges" in Muthiah Alagappa, ed., Asian Security Order." Instrumental and Normative Features (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1.

(17) Tuker, 531-32.

(18) T. G. Fraser, Partition in Ireland, India and Palestine: Theory and Practice (London: Macmillan, 1984), 195.

(19) See Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York: Schocken, 2003 [1972]), 251-69.

(20) Jiang Jieshi is better known as Chiang Kai-shek; his Nationalist organization is often transliterated as "Kuomingtang" and abbreviated as "KMT." This paper adopts Chinese transliterations used in recent English-language scholarship; see e.g. Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

(21) A second UN-mediated effort in 1946-47 to establish a trusteeship over Korea also failed.

(22) William Stueck, Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 12. As described by the official U.S. Army history of the Korean War, this line traversed "75 streams and 12 rivers, intersected many high ridges at variant angles, severed 181 small cart roads, 104 country roads, 15 provincial all weather roads, 8 better-class highways, and 6 north-south rail lines." U.S. Department of the Army, United States" in the Korean War, Vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1961-72), 11, cited in Stueck, 12.

(23) Lt. Colonel Jack P. Napier and Arnold Nestel, "Military-Civilian Relations in the Occupation of Japan and Korea," Journal of International Affairs 8, no. 2 (1954): 163.

(24) Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) 6 (1945): 1039.

(25) David Holloway points out that the Soviets were set to occupy the northern half of Hokkaido. On 19 August, Marshal Vasilevskii ordered the 1st Far Eastern Front to prepare for the invasion. But Stalin changed his mind, rescinding the order to occupy Hokkaido just three days later. David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 131. Had the United States not destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic weapons, would an eventual Allied victory in Japan, perhaps several months later in 1945, have resulted in a U.S.-Soviet partition of Japan itself?

(26) Bruce Cumings, The Origin of the Korean War, Vol. 1: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes (1945-1947) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 125.

(27) FRUS 6 (1945): 1049-53.

(28) FRUS 6 (1945): 1054-55.

(29) FRUS 6 (1945): 1144-48.

(30) Cumings, 474-75.

(31) Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: Norton, 1997), 209.

(32) Westad, 31-32.

(33) Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945-1950: The Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996), 895-96; cited in Westad, 218.

(34) Westad, 221-53.

(35) Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners': Stalin, Mao and the Korean War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 211; see Holloway, 276-78.

(36) Stephen Hugh Lee, The Korean War (Harlow, England: Pearson Education, 2001), 96.

(37) Lee, 93.

(38) Jonathan Glover cites a figure of three million; Steven Hugh Lee, a figure of four. Lee, 124; Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 47. Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings estimate that over 3 million Korean civilians died, in addition to a half a million DPRK soldiers and approximately 100,000 South Korean soliders. Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War (London: Viking, 1988), 200.

(39) Michael O'Hanlon and Mike Mochizuki, Crisis on the Korean Peninsula: How to Deal With a Nuclear North Korea (New York: McGraw Hill/Brookings Institution Press, 2003), 65.

(40) Ashton B. Carter and William J. Perry, Preventive Defense: A New Security Strategy for America (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 124.

(41) O'Hanlon and Mochizuki, 63.

(42) John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 107. Perhaps the key intermediary was Indian Prime Minister Nehru. Lee, 94-95.

(43) Halliday and Cumings, 200. 54,246 Americans and 3,194 allied soldiers also died in the Korean War.

(44) See John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, China Builds" the Bomb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 22-72.

(45) See Radha Kumar, Divide and Fall: Bosnia in the Annals of Partition (London: Verso, 1997), 18-26.

(46) In the case of the Taiwanese, their quasi-state; in the case of the Palestinians, their liberation organization, Authority, and insurgents.

(47) In recent months India's Prime Minister Vajpayee and Pakistan's President Musharraf have reached out to each other to find "a lasting solution to the Kashmir problem." Vajpayee, January 2002, cited in Sumantra Bose, Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 1. Official peace talks began in February 2004, in a moment of enormous hope and goodwill throughout the Subcontinent. But we would be mistaken to assume that peace processes operate, as if on their own accord, inexorably toward peace. The 1993 signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords was such a hopeful time for the Middle East, and the June 2000 summit meeting in Pyongyang between South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and North Korean leader Kim Jong II was such a time for the Korean people and region.

(48) "Scattered through the Arab world in organized camps, or in sub-standard dwellings and abandoned public buildings, the refugees, with their future still a matter of dispute between the Arab States and Israel, form centers of squalor and discontent. Because of the refugee problem's disruptive influence on the politics of the area, Western policy makers, already deeply concerned about Middle East instability, view a settlement as especially urgent, and the United Nations, which has been channeling international aid to the uprooted Arabs, is striving to terminate its burdensome relief operations." Lucille W. Pevsner, "The Arab Refugees," Journal of International Affairs 7, no. 1 (1953): 42.

(49) Abba Eban, "The Middle East in World Affairs," Journal of International Affairs 6, no. 1 (1952): 25.

(50) "Intense friction remains, and the possibility of a third world war seems as strong as ever." Editors Foreword, Journal of International Affairs 6, no. 2 (1952): 105.

(51) "Little progress has yet been made in resolving this complex dilemma.... Moreover, millions of Muslims and Hindus remain as minorities in India and Pakistan, and there is no assurance that communal violence will not again flare up...." William Henderson, "The Refugees in India and Pakistan," Journal of International Affairs 7, no. 1 (1953): 57, 65.

(52) Samuel P. Huntington, "Radicalism and Conservatism in National Defense Policy," Journal of International Affairs 8, no. 2 (1954): 206, 222.

(53) George A. Wyeth, Jr., "The National Security Council: Concept of Operation; Organization; Actual Operations," Journal of International Affairs 8, no. 2 (1954): 185, 195.

(54) "[I]t has been a well known and saddening fact that our European allies are distrustful--not of our good intentions, but of our constancy, our judgment and our tactics." Lindsay Rogers, "The Political Setting of American Policy," Journal of International Affairs 6, no. 2 (1952): 135, 143.

(55) Rogers, 144.

The author wishes to thank Dominic Ayine, Bart Bemstein, Rafiq Dossani, Ruthie Epstein, Corey Fisher, Roger Friedland, Ruth Gavison, David Holloway, Avishai Margalit, Elizabeth Muli, Erik Jensen, Paul Scham, Sangmin Shim, Matt Sommer, and Daria Vaisman. This paper is for my nephew Teddy Joshua Greenberg, may he live in a more peaceful world.