[LINK] "It’s time to end the Korean War"

[rfmcdonald]

Thomas Walkom's Toronto Star op-ed, pointed out by Facebook's John, makes an interesting argument. What think you? The argument that the armistice intended to be temporary has been violated by both sides, the South with the presence of nuclear-armed American troops and the North via its various attacks, makes some sense. The noxious quality of the North Korean government and its actions, though, makes the idea of signing a peace treaty with the DPRK and expecting the DPRK to live up to it implausuible.

The armistice called for negotiations to begin within three months on a comprehensive political settlement for the peninsula.

And it called for all foreign troops — UN and Chinese — to be eventually withdrawn.

The Chinese did withdraw, as did the Canadians, British and most other UN forces. But the Americans, at the behest of the South Korean government they had set up, stayed. They are still there.

In violation of the armistice, the U.S. arbitrarily set the maritime boundary between the two Koreas. Between 1958 and 1991, the U.S. armed its forces in South Korea with nuclear weapons, another violation.

So when Pyongyang says, as it did this week, that the terms of that armistice have been breached by the UN side, it is not entirely inaccurate.

To assign blame for the standoff on the Korean peninsula is a mug’s game. Most historians agree that the Northern troops did invade the South in 1950. But they also agree that both North and South had been conducting raids into one another’s territory during the months before.

During the war, both sides committed unspeakable atrocities. Both lost hundreds of thousands of civilians although, thanks to UN bombing raids, the North lost markedly more.

The North has been a dictatorship since its inception. The South, while a military dictatorship for most of the post-war period, embraced democracy in 1987.

The UN side may have broken the armistice by keeping U.S. troops in the South. But the North broke the ceasefire in even more outrageous ways — from its assassination forays to its 2010 shelling of South Korean civilians.