President Roh Moo-hyun, in a meeting with Korean expatriates in Cambodia on Monday, described the 1950-53 Korean War as a "civil war." "South Korea had quite a difficult history including the Japanese colonial rule and a civil war, but we now provide aid to many countries,” he said. The point of the expression “civil war,” the Cheong Wa Dae spokesman tells us, was to find a similarity in the history of Korea and Cambodia “in the sense that both fought fratricidal wars.” But he asked people not to apply “an outdated ideological yardstick” to the loaded term. In other words, what’s the fuss?

Well, how many South Koreans would sort of accidentally describe the Korean War as a civil war? If it really slipped out without any particular intent, it suggests the notion that it was a civil war is deeply embedded in the president's brain.

The Korean War was the biggest tragedy in our history. It killed over four million people and displaced 10 million. Documents pouring out of the Soviet Union since the collapse of communism reveal without an iota of doubt that the Korean War was caused by an invasion from Kim Il-sung. Even the die-hard revisionists who think it was a war of unification daren’t peddle that view in international academic circles for fear of being laughed out of court. Hence they sell it only at home; “they” being people like Prof. Kang Jeong-koo of Dongguk University, who famously asserted that but for the U.S. intervention the war would have ended “in a month.” The view that the U.S. is the enemy of the 4 million war victims is quite unique to South Korea. The word "invasion” is missing from their dictionaries.

"The Korean civil war" is a term coined to glorify the invasion by North Korea. It does not appear in our elementary, middle and high school textbooks. Yet it comes out of the mouth of the president, who symbolizes the legitimacy of the republic, and who doesn’t mean anything by it. What is it he left unsaid?