Four Baker's Dozen and Seven Years Ago Today

The Korean War began. Two days later, Harry S. Truman, declared his infamous "police action," setting the precedent for imperial America's undeclared and unconstitutional wars that followed. A little over three years and millions of dead, including tens of thousands of our own, later, the fighting ceased along the same borders upon which it had started.

After the war, China left the North largely to its own devices and the state is now on the verge of collapse, having spent away all its resources on the military. In contrast, America made the South a protectorate for six decades, allowing it to build itself into an economic powerhouse by opening our markets to their products while it closed its to ours. After allowing cheap South Korean imports (along with those from other protectorates) to undermine our own manufacturing base, the country now owns a good share of our debt. Apparently, this arrangement is so beneficial to America that there are no signs of us leaving.

"It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world," we were instructed in Washington's Farewell Address. Not long after, Jefferson's First Inaugural Address advised us to pursue "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." We've been in Korea fully one-quarter of our Republic's history, in an "alliance" that may as well be "permanent" and certainly is "entangling."

Today, it is only America, not any of the other 15 countries that came to South Korea's aid, that has to waste time with annoying headlines like this — North Korea threatens Hawaii with missile. (Had we listened to the last president to take the first's and third's advice seriously, Grover Cleveland, we would have never annexed those islands in the first place, avoiding an even bigger headache, our last declared war that began in a certain harbor there one infamous day.)

Six decades here is long enough. Bring our boys (and shamefully, girls) home!

[title a tribute to Wilson Revolution Unplugged]