Iraq Is the New Korea (by Robert Scheer for Truthdig)

[marmar]

Iraq Is the New Korea

Posted on Jun 6, 2007


By Robert Scheer

The 50-year Iraq war—bring it on. Not that the media or the Democrats made much of it, but the White House’s admission that President Bush is modeling America’s presence in Iraq upon the 54-year-old stationing of U.S. troops in South Korea is as outlandish as it is alarming. Outlandish, when the president of what is still presumably a representative democracy willfully ignores voters’ demands that the occupation be brought to a timely end; alarming, because Bush has clearly not understood that it is the U.S. occupation that feeds the nationalist and religious frenzy roiling Iraq, and the entire Middle East.

The president, obviously clueless as to the widespread resentment in the region over a history of Western plunder of Mideast oil, seems determined to give the insurgents of every stripe their best recruiting poster. The analogy with South Korea, an artificially divided country that does not possess oil or any other exploitable resource, is wrong—except for one ominous parallel. The main U.S. military mission in South Korea is to protect the border against a well-armed northern enemy; likewise, Bush administration officials cited protecting Iraq’s borders, particularly with Iran, as the major task of a future American deployment.

One could not conjure up a better prescription for embroiling this nation in an increasingly deadly quagmire. The chaos attendant to bringing order to Iraq’s cities is nothing compared to the attempt to police some of the world’s most porous borders while fervid allies abound on both sides. Clearly, someone in the White House has noticed by now that the folks pretending to rule Iraq from the U.S. protectorate of the Green Zone are closely tied to the leaders of “rogue nation” Iran, where top Shiite leaders spent decades being trained in exile during Saddam Hussein’s reign. Policing that border means severing long-standing radical religious ties that have been mobilized to support those Iraqi militias trained in Iran and now fully incorporated into the Iraq army and police force. A similar conundrum exists on the borders with Arab countries that have their own deep ties to the Sunni insurgency.

Thus, the proper analogy is not with Korea but rather Vietnam, where porous borders allowed the northern regime to support their southern surrogates, first with equipment and later with troops, in a war against foreign occupation that most Vietnamese believed was just. Yet the Bush administration references the lengthy occupation of Vietnam only by disingenuously referring to the United States’ departure as an abrupt end to a brief occupation (actually 20 years) that would have proved successful if allowed to continue. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said the United States must assure Middle Eastern allies that it will not withdraw from Iraq as from Vietnam, “lock, stock and barrel.” .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070606_iraq_is_the_new_korea/

[frogcycle]

1. this fits with the comments the other day

about chest-thumping and setting Iraq up to "fulfill Americas destiny"

bush is a complete loony. He has some sort of delusion that he's on a mission from god or something. Talk about the Assault on reason! He thinks that America should "own" the mideast - whether oil or the "holy land" is his bigger motive I don't know - but he is driving his own personal agenda against any and all rational thought to the contrary


The Korea analogy is completely whacko - but he wants a permanent outpost, and that's the best he could come up with. He is trying to come up with a new "talking point" to rationalize his preconceived, ill-conceived, notion of "destiny"