TPM Reader WG on Bush, Korea and all the flailing spinmeisters at the White House ginning up more ideas of what the hell it is we’re doing …
I find it hard to believe that people are actually taking Bush’s Korean analogy seriously with respect to Iraq. And, so far, the Democratic Congress seems to be giving him a pass on it. The timing was good, of course. He caught Congress with barbeque on their collective chin.
As you noticed, there are some remarkable differences between Korea and Iraq, not the least of which is the fact that there never was a Korean resistance to our occupation of the South or to the Soviet occupation of the North, following the liberation, division and occupation of Korea after World War II. The struggle for unification between the South and the North came down to a rather traditional war and a test of military power between the US on one side and the Soviets and China on the other.
The proper analogy for Iraq is still Vietnam. While the government we created in South Korea was functional and able to control its population, the government we have created in Iraq, like the government we created in South Vietnam, has been largely irrelevant. In Iraq, Shiites and Sunnis are fighting us, our al Maliki government, the Kurds, each other and themselves in a last-man-standing free-for-all. While it’s tempting to try to find some method to the madness of the last few years, you won’t find it in a 50-year plan to control the oil supply of the Middle East. That’s a pipe dream that didn’t survive the occupation. By floating the Korean occupation as an analogy for Iraq, Bush has created one more leaky vessel to cling to as his presidency is swept into the backwaters of history. We may be in Afghanistan 50 years from now, but we won’t be in Iraq.
To a degree I agree the whole ‘control the natural resources of the region’ idea didn’t survive ‘first contact’, to paraphrase the US Army line about military planning. But denial is a useful thing. And a lot of the flailing about of recent years, actually most of it, has been an effort to find some way to sustain the original vision.
