The damn diplomats make the wars and we win them.

The Coldest Winter by David Halberstam, page 60.  Referencing General MacArthur.  

The changes in Japan, and the coming of a Japanese Peace Treaty, absorbed almost all of the general’s working day. He was paying very little attention to the American troops under his command—the occupation army—by then a military force that bore only a passing resemblance to the formidable army that had defeated the Japanese in the Pacific. That his troops were understrength, poorly equipped, and increasingly poorly trained did not seem to bother MacArthur. He paid even less attention to South Korea, the southern half of the former Japanese colony, liberated and divided by American and Russian troops in 1945, the Americans taking their sphere of influence in the south, the Russians theirs in the north. South Korea interested him so little that he had visited it but once—and then briefly—since it had been created. He had ignored the repeated pleas of General John Hodge, the American commander in South Korea who wanted the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (or SCAP), as MacArthur was officially known, far more involved there. Instead, MacArthur ordered the general to use his own best judgment. “I am not sufficiently familiar with the local situation to advise you intelligently, but I will support whatever decision you make in this matter,” he said in reply to one of these requests.

It became clear that MacArthur wanted no part of Korea in the period from 1945 to 1950. There were countless cables coming across his desk from Hodge, pleading for his help or his advice: “I urgently request your active participation in my difficult position…” Faubion Bowers, who was a principal MacArthur aide in those days because of his ability to speak Japanese, remembered Hodge deciding on his own to come to see MacArthur, and being kept waiting for hours, hoping to see the general, only to be told that he was to take care of Korea himself. “I wouldn’t put my foot in Korea. It belongs to the State Department,” MacArthur told Bowers later as he was driven home. “They wanted it and got it. They have jurisdiction. I don’t. I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot barge pole. The damn diplomats make the wars and we win them. Why should I save their skin? I won’t help Hodge. Let them help themselves.” His single visit there had been for the inauguration of the newly installed South Korean president, Syngman Rhee, at which time he had told Rhee rather casually, if grandly—for he had checked with no one in Washington about this pledge—that the United States would defend South Korea if it was attacked, “as we would California.