Police Action or War?

If the U.S. had reacted to the Pearl Harbor attack merely by trying to clear the Japanese out of Hawaiian waters, World War II would be still going on--or else the enemy would have won it by now. The U.S. and its allies won because they immediately understood that they were in a war with Japan and that their ultimate goal was the destruction of the enemy's will to fight.

The U.N. suffered another Pearl Harbor in November when the Chinese crossed the Korean border in force. But it did not recognize that it was at war with Red China. Last week the U.N. was still acting as if it was engaged in a police action to round up law-breaking individual Communist soldiers instead of recognizing the struggle with a law-breaking government in Peking.

If the Korea struggle was still considered a police action, then the forces of law & order were in a bad way. The robbers had backed the cops into a corner. If, however, Korea was part of a war between the U.N. forces and China, the picture was much less black for the U.N.

China, gambling on U.S. confusion on the war issue and relying on Washington's refusal to let Chiang Kai-shek strike from Formosa, had sent into the Korean war the vast majority of the well-trained Chinese Communist armies. If U.S. leaders realized they were in a war, they would also realize that China's flank was wide open and the supply line of the Chinese fighting armies was highly vulnerable to air and sea attack.

If the U.S. was in a war with China, MacArthur had a lot of opportunities. He could regain his freedom of action and give air and sea support to a Chinese Nationalist push in South China. If he was still in a police action, MacArthur could not even leave Korea; the cops could not run away, leaving the scene of the crime to "volunteer" criminals.

Nations have lost wars for many and strange reasons. The U.S., if its leaders did not wake up, might be the first to lose a war because it did not know it was in one.

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