WASHINGTON, May 30 (Reuters) - President George W. Bush would like to see a lengthy U.S. troop presence in Iraq like the one in South Korea to provide stability but not in a frontline combat role, the White House said on Wednesday.
The United States has had thousands of U.S. troops in South Korea to guard against a North Korean invasion for 50 years.
Democrats in control of the U.S. Congress have been pressing Bush to agree to a timetable for pulling troops from Iraq, an idea firmly opposed by the president.
White House spokesman Tony Snow said Bush would like to see a U.S. role in Iraq ultimately similar to that in South Korea.
"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.
He said U.S. bases in Iraq would not necessarily be permanent because they would be there at the invitation of the host government and "the person who has done the invitation has the right to withdraw the invitation."
"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. But it is not always going to require an up-front combat presence," Snow said.
"The president has always said that ultimately you want to be handing primary responsibility off to the Iraqis," he said.
"You provide the so-called over-the-horizon support that is necessary from time to time to come to the assistance of Iraqis but you do not want the United States forever in the front."
You have to wonder just how much deeper down the rabbit hole we can go with this administration. Marshall lays out the differences between Iraq and Korea--Korea is an ethnically and culturally homogeneous state while Iraq is not. Korea was a democracy for the last fifteen years, but before that it was a military dictatorship during the Cold War. Iraq is a occupied country with a puppet state, propped up by the U.S. military. U.S. troops are in South Korea to ward off an invasion from North Korea. As Marshall asks, "US troops aren't in Iraq to ward off any invasion. Invasion from who? Saudi Arabia? Syria?"
Daily Kos user LarryInNYC also makes an interesting comment regarding President Bush's comparison between Iraq and South Korea. LarryInNYC writes:
Josh Marshall has a quick round-up of reasons why South Korea is different from Iraq (ethnic homogeneity, a history as a military dictatorship) but in my opinion he misses the most critical -- there was no large-scale objection within South Korea to the presence of American forces, and certainly never an active insurgency against them.
One can understand, perhaps, (if one is very generous) that the Bush Administration and members of the Think Tank of Magical Thinking who pushed for the Iraq invasion in the first place may, at one time, have imagined that the situation would develop along the lines of South Korea. Anyone with a modicum of sense would have believed otherwise, but let's grant for the sake of argument that the war supporters thought so.
In the current circumstances, however, it's madness to believe that American soldiers will ever perform a function in Iraq related in any way to the role we've played in South Korea. There isn't any scope of opinion on this issue -- it's a form of lunacy.
LarryInNYC is correct. The Korean War started when North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950. On that same day, the United Nations Security Council "immediately drafted UNSC Resolution 82, which was unanimously passed in the Security Council since the Soviet ambassador was boycotting the U.N. at the time. This led to direct action by the United States and other U.N. members." This brought the U.S. into the Korean war under the flag of the United Nations. The Bush administration's Iraq war was really an invasion of a sovereign country to depose Saddam Hussein, to occupy Iraq's oil reserves, and to project American military power in the Middle East as prescribed in the PNAC Doctrine. There was certainly never an objection to the American military intervention by the South Koreans during the Korean War, and the current American military presence is a simple tripwire to keep the North Koreans from invading into South Korea--a presence that has lasted for over 50 years.
There are days that even I can't understand the lunacy of this Bush administration. This linking of the American occupation of Iraq with the American military presence in South Korea does not make any logical or political sense. But there is a perverse PR-logic to this latest Bush statement. The U.S. military presence in South Korea has kept North Korea from invading for 50 years. Since the Bush administration wants to maintain a permanent U.S. military occupation of Iraq, then it makes political sense to equate the U.S. war in Iraq with the Korean War, and hope for a political stalemate that allows the U.S. military to maintain their permanent presence in Iraq. The key factor is who is the Bush administration selling this political argument to? The Democrats, while they've conceded to Bush's blank check war funding without timetables until September, are certainly going to initiate another push for legislation which includes benchmarks and timetables. I would say that this latest Bush argument is a push to keep American public support from further eroding regarding the Bush administration's Iraq policy.
Down the rabbit hole we go....
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