With Korea as Model, U.S. Ponders Long Role in Iraq

For the first time since the invasion of Iraq the Bush White House have now started hinting that they see an American presence in Iraq for decades to come, which explains why the embassy they are building in Baghdad is the size of Vatican city.

President Bush has long talked about the need to maintain an American military presence in the region, without saying exactly where. Several visitors to the White House say that in private, he has sounded intrigued by what he calls the “Korea model,” a reference to the large American presence in South Korea for the 54 years since the armistice that ended open hostilities between North and South.

But it was not until Wednesday that Mr. Bush’s spokesman, Tony Snow, publicly reached for the Korea example in talking about Iraq — setting off an analogy war between the White House and critics who charged that the administration was again disconnected from the realities of Iraq. He said Korea was one way to think about how America’s mission could evolve into an “over-the-horizon support role,” whenever American troops are no longer patrolling the streets of Baghdad.

The next day, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates also mentioned Korea, saying that establishing a long-term American garrison there was a lot smarter than the handling of Vietnam, “where we just left lock, stock and barrel.” He added that “the idea is more a model of a mutually agreed arrangement whereby we have a long and enduring presence but under the consent of both parties and under certain conditions.”

The Korean analogy is as useless as the analogy with Japan and Germany they were fond of quoting when they first invaded Iraq:

Historical analogy has been a problem for this administration since the start of the Iraq war in 2003. In the months before the invasion, there was talk of modeling a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq after the successful occupations of Japan and Germany. But even then, historians and analysts were warning against such comparisons, arguing that those were two cohesive societies that were exhausted by years of war and bore little resemblance to the fractured Iraqi society and its potential for internal violence.

The core problem with the Korea comparison, many experts on Asia note, is that when the war ended in 1953, there were bright lines drawn across the 38th Parallel, separating the warring parties. That hardened into the formal Demilitarized Zone, exactly the kind of division that the Bush administration has said it wants to avoid in Iraq.

I reported before that the US was seeking to establish a series of "enduring bases" in Iraq, which made many of us at the time question whether the US ever had any real intention of leaving the country. Now, Snow and others are stating what we always suspected: the US intends to keep it's footprint in Iraq for the foreseeable future.

This appears to fly in the face of Bush's claims that the US remained in Iraq only at the request of the Iraqi regime and that they would leave if the Iraqis asked them to go.

Apparently, from the reports, there are very few administration officials prepared to talk on the record about American plans, although off the record the plans they are talking about are rather detailed.

It calls for maintaining three or four major bases in the country, all well outside of the crowded urban areas where casualties have soared. They would include the base at Al Asad in Anbar Province, Balad Air Base about 50 miles north of Baghdad, and Tallil Air Base in the south.

“They are all places we could fly in and out of without putting Americans on every street corner,” said one senior official deeply involved in the development of Iraq strategy. “And our mission would be very different — making sure that Al Qaeda doesn’t turn Iraq into a base the way it turned Afghanistan into one.”

Of course, talk of preventing al-Qaeda from turning Iraq into a base is simply a way to sell America's continued presence in a country with substantial oil reserves and is also a way to continue to put pressure on neighbouring Iran who would surely object to a continuing American presence on her border.

Unspoken in all of this is the fact that the American bases would continue to be targets for insurgents and probably would engender the same level of anger amongst Muslims as the American presence in Saudi Arabia generated. A presence that bin Laden cited as one of the reasons for the 9-11 attacks.

Of course, there are some who think that Bush is flattering to deceive when he compares Iraq to Korea:

“If we can make this like Korea, then we have been successful,” said the Donald L. Kerrick, a retired general who spent 30 years in the military and has now emerged as one of a cadre of generals criticizing Mr. Bush’s strategy. He said that he did not believe the analogy fit.

Mr. Bush himself has made clear, while in Hanoi late last year for a summit meeting, that he believes America’s mistake in Vietnam was that it gave up too early. “We’ll succeed unless we quit” he told a small group of reporters who asked him what lessons he drew for Iraq. He declined to engage in deeper comparisons, including the fact that President Lyndon Johnson’s dire warnings about what would happen if the United States pulled out of Vietnam — that Communism would spread across Asia — never came to pass.

Analogies with Korea are meaningless here, what Bush is actually talking about is maintaining a US presence in a country in the middle of a civil war, a civil war that came about because of the American invasion of that country.

Those of us who have long felt that the US were in Iraq to maintain control over the country's oil reserves will feel that Bush is doing little do dissuade us that this was his intention all along. The continuing American presence in Iraq and the newly passed Iraq oil laws all show that the administration, despite all it's rhetoric, has always had it's eye on the ultimate prize.

However, what is really galling is to look again at Bush's statement that, "U.S. troops would not remain in the region "for one day longer than is necessary.""

I suppose the question we should have asked was, "Necessary to whom?"

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