Yet throughout the whole uneasy fall of 1950, Washington kept relaying information to Tokyo. And Tokyo, very early, had made up its mind, as expressed by MacArthur: The Chinese would not dare to intervene. Because Washington permitted soldiers to make and to act on decisions that were beyond the purview of the military, because it forced them to bring purely military thinking into matters that remained in essence political—in short, because Washington still sometimes acted as if there could be a separation between war and politics, the United States, intoxicated with the heady taste of
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