The Department of History at the College of Education for Girls at the University of Basra organized a scientific seminar on the 1968 USS Pueblo crisis and its repercussions.
The study, which was lectured by researcher Saba Abdel-Hussein Mohsen, as part of her master’s thesis project, aimed to highlight North Korea’s goal of seizing the American ship in order to humiliate the United States of America globally and distract it from the Vietnam War by forcing South Korea not to send its forces to support the United States of America.
It also addressed the main goal of the crisis, the attempt to reunify the two Koreas and to occupy the North Korean people with foreign issues and keep them away from the country’s internal politics, especially with Kim Il Sung purging the members of the Gapsan faction loyal to him in mid-May 1967. After he announced the Juche regime and subjugated the North Korean people, he began to occupy them with external conflicts. With the United States of America, he had two main goals: to humiliate the United States of America globally, which is what actually happened, and to impose his opinion on the socialist camp “the Soviet Union and China” without referring to them in making his decisions, which is what he did in the crisis that was called the Second Korean War because it reached the stage where both sides were ready to declare war.
Media and Government Communication Division/College of Education for Girls.
