"President Bush envisions a long-term U.S. troop presence in Iraq similar to
the one in South Korea where American forces have helped keep an uneasy peace
for more than 50 years, the White House said Wednesday," the Associated Press
reports:
Presidential spokesman Tony Snow said Bush has cited the long-term
Korea analogy in looking at the U.S. role in Iraq, where American
forces are in the fifth year of an unpopular war. Bush's goal is
for Iraqi forces to take over the chief security responsibilities,
relieving U.S. forces of frontline combat duty, Snow said.
"I think the point he's trying to make is that the situation in
Iraq, and indeed, the larger war on terror, are things that are
going to take a long time," Snow said. "But it is not always going
to require an up-front combat presence."
The president is of course right on the substance, but the Korea analogy
strikes us as a really bad one. The two Koreas have remained formally at war
since the July 1953 armistice, and while South Korea has thrived, the North
Korean regime has brutally repressed its own people and become an
international menace through the acquisition of nuclear weapons. In
retrospect, it's hard to deny that victory would have been a better outcome
than "uneasy peace."
In fact, Korea is a better analogy for Iraq in 1991-2003 than today. The Gulf
War cease-fire froze into place the status quo ante, with Kuwait liberated but
Iraq remaining under Saddam's heel (with the addition of U.N. sanctions that
impoverished ordinary Iraqis but allowed Saddam and corrupt foreigners to
enrich themselves). The now-ended U.S. presence in Saudi--al Qaeda's chief
grievance--was necessary to preserve the "uneasy peace" and protect the
Arabian Peninsula from Saddam's ambitions.
President Bush recognized that this state of affairs was unacceptable. So did
many Democrats, even though they now pretend they hadn't been born yet. In his
Second Inaugural Address, Bush said his "ultimate goal" was "ending tyranny in
our world." Some said this was overly ambitious, even for an "ultimate" goal.
Even if so, we'd like to see the president set his sights a bit higher than
"uneasy peace."
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