I heard a strange thing on the news just now, someone called some show on CNN or something, and said "Didn't we learn our lesson in Korea last time when we got our asses kicked there?"

Strangely, I've heard this sentiment often lately, and I'm not sure where people are coming from. This is totally false. Setting aside the issue of whether we should be attacking Korea now, lets look at the outcome of the Korean War.

Basically, communist expansion into S. Korea was halted after years of bloody fighting, ending with the same situation as where we started. We weren't really fighting N. Korea, though, we were fighting Russia and China. Millions of North Koreans died during the fighting, but a huge number of those were civilians. The US lost about 50 thousand troops, and the UN forces lost some smaller number, and the Chinese lost over half a million troops. Russian losses are classified, because they were hiding their involvement in the war.

So what it comes down to is that even with China being willing to throw 10 of their lives at every American life, they weren't able to advance, and we finally called a stop to it because it was just a horrible slaughter over there. Between Ike getting elected and Stalin dying, we were able to call a truce, and leave the lines where they were originally.

We certainly didn't "lose" the battle of Korea, and in the sense that we stopped communist expansion, it can be said that we won at least that aspect. Most of the wars we've lead against other countries have only lasted as long as they did because of the strange swarming quality of their leaders' attacks, seeming to value the lives of their troops very little. This is very different from the way we approach war, but we've almost always had informational, technological, and stratetic superiority.