On Wednesday morning, Tony Snow alluded to the “Korea model” to highlight the president’s vision for a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq. “The Korean model is one in which the United States provides a security presence, but you’ve had the development of a successful democracy in South Korea over a period of years, and, therefore, the United States is there as a force of stability,” Snow told reporters.
I thought it was possibly just some kind of rhetorical trial balloon. Occasionally, the Bush gang will think up some new sales pitch, try it out, and wait to see if anyone buys it. If there’s a strong, visceral reaction, they drop it. If not, it enters the White House lexicon.
The “Korea model” seemed just crazy enough to be one of those trial balloons that gets quickly shot down. Not only does the comparison not make any sense, but it suggests to the nation that U.S. troops are going to be in Iraq for the next five decades, with tens of thousands of troops remaining through the year 2057 and beyond.
Surely, the administration would quickly drop this talking point, right? Wrong.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and a senior U.S. commander said yesterday that they favor a protracted U.S. troop presence in Iraq along the lines of the military stabilization force in South Korea.
Gates told reporters in Hawaii that he is thinking of “a mutual agreement” with Iraq in which “some force of Americans . . . is present for a protracted period of time, but in ways that are protective of the sovereignty of the host government.” Gates said such a long-term U.S. presence would assure allies in the Middle East that the United States will not withdraw from Iraq as it did from Vietnam, “lock, stock and barrel.”
[Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, who oversees daily military operations in Iraq,] said he sees benefits in maintaining a South Korean-style force in Iraq for years. “I think it’s a great idea,” he said, adding that the Iraqi and U.S. governments would have to make that decision.
So, an Iraqi insurgency predicated in part on the idea that the United States has a long-term occupation-like presence in mind is effectively hearing from the Bush administration, “Yep, our troops will be sticking around for the better part of the 21st century.” The notion of a permanent military presence fuels violence in the region — and this talk certainly won’t help.
As for the historical comparison itself, just in case anyone still has any doubt over how absurd it is, Fred Kaplan sets the record straight.
In 1950, the United States beat back North Korea’s invasion of South Korea, became embroiled in a Chinese-assisted guerrilla war, fought the Communists to a stalemate, and, in 1953, after suffering 54,000 combat deaths, negotiated a truce (but not a formal peace). Ever since, American troops — at present, 37,000 of them, stationed at 95 installations across the Korean peninsula — have remained on guard at the world’s most heavily armed border.
In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, overthrew its regime (which posed a hypothetical threat), and, in the four years since, has kept about 150,000 troops in the country to kill terrorists (who weren’t in Iraq before the war), to train the Iraqi army (which the Bush administration, for still-mysterious reasons, dismantled at the occupation’s outset), and to keep a “low-grade” sectarian civil war (which erupted amid a vacuum of authority) from boiling over.
In the half-century-plus since the Korean armistice of 1953, just 90 U.S. soldiers have been killed in isolated border clashes in Korea. In the mere four years since the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, more than 3,000 American servicemen and women have been killed, and the number rises every day.
To sum up, we intervened in South Korea as a response to an invasion and as part of a broad strategy to contain Communist aggression. We intervened in Iraq as the instigator of an invasion and as part of a broad strategy to expand unilateral American power. We remained in South Korea to protect a solid (if, for many years, authoritarian) government from another border incursion. We are remaining in Iraq to bolster a flimsy government and stave off a violent social implosion.
In other words, in no meaningful way are these two wars, or these two countries, remotely similar. In no way does one experience, or set of lessons, shed light on the other. In Iraq, no border divides friend from foe; no clear concept defines who is friend and foe. To say that Iraq might follow “a Korean model” — if the word model means anything — is absurd.
I know the White House still hopes to rally some semblance of public support by creating some kind of historical parallel, but Korea isn’t it. It’s bad politics, it’s bad history, it’s bad rhetoric — and it’s a good opportunity for Dems to tell the nation, “We want the troops out within a year, but Bush and his Republican allies have a 50-year plan in mind.”