I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity. –Dwight D. Eisenhower.

When the war finally ended on July 27, 1953, the North had been devastated by three years of bombing attacks that hardly left a modern building standing. Both Koreas had watched as a virtual holocaust ravaged their country and turned the vibrant expectations of 1945 into a nightmare. The point to remember is that this was a civil war, and, as a British diplomat once said, “every country has a right to have its War of the Roses.” The true tragedy was not the war itself, for a civil conflict purely among Koreans might have resolved the extraordinary tensions generated by colonialism, national division and foreign intervention. The tragedy was that the war solved nothing: only the status quo ante was restored, only an armistice held the peace. Today the tensions and the problems remain. — Bruce Cummings “Korea’s Place in the Sun” (Norton, New York, 1997):