Crossing the Parallel

South Korean units, under direct orders from Lieutenant General Walker, have crossed the thirty-eighth parallel. Thus a complicated political problem which second academic two weeks ago when United Nations troops were fighting to held a small beachhead has not only caught up with us but has in a sense already passed us by. It may even be too late for us to catch up with it.

Since the initial United Nations debate on Korean aggression, Korea has been primarily a symbol--a symbol meaning different things to different nations. It does not appear that General Walker and his superiors have taken propre consideration of the symbolic aspects of the situation.

There are cogent military reasons for pressing the fight before the battered North Korean armies have time to regroup, and sound political reasons for uniting the country immediately and instituting a single democratic government. But there are even stronger reasons at this time why the United States should not have made an apparently unilateral move.

First, there was the possibility, however faint, that the North Korcan leaders would have heeded General MacArthur's surrender appeal and given in to the U.N. armies within a short time. In that event the peaceful occupation of North Korea would have been less subject to misinterpretation than the present armed entry.

Second, there was a good chance the General Assembly would have passed the resolution, sponsored by eight nations, which recommends that "all stability throughout Korea" and that "U.N. forces should not remain in any part of Korea" after they have done everything necessary to establish "a unified, independent, and democratic government in the sovereign state of Korea." Although this resolution if passed now, will give U.N. backing to the military crossing of the north-south frontier, it would have been far better to have waited for that justification before proceeding at all.

It is regrettable that the entry into North Korea should not have been an official U.N. action, since Communist propagandists have claimed that the entire Korean campaign was American aggression. There are a billion Asians watching Korea to whom Soviet charges of "white imperialism" are not empty phrases.

But the most important reason why we should not have taken this step is one that will not be altered by any future U.N. legitimization. This is the effect of the seemingly unilateral American action on Asia, especially on India and Communist China. India had always hoped for some solution in Korea that would not involve going beyond the thirty-eihth parallel, and Chou En-Lai, China's foreign minister, announced Saturday tha this country would not "supinely tolerate seeing her neighbors being savagely invaded by imperialists." India may eventually go along with the eight-nation proposal in the Assembly, and China's threats may be purely for propaganda purposes, but that was no reason for us to disregard the statements o these two countries altogether.

Naturally, we could not have held U.N. forces at the border forever in deference to Indian reservations or Chinese threats. The dangers of a divided Korea were too well shown in the present conflict. But taking the United Nations Korean campaign out of the hands of that organization now, before the General Assembly had a chance to demonstrate what it could do, was both unwise and dangerous.