Bush administration leaders have lately taken to citing South Korea – where the U.S. still has nearly 30,000 troops stationed 54 years after the 1953 armistice that halted fighting – as a model for a future U.S. role in Iraq.
Regrettably, the comparison seems more like another outbreak of the “rationale of the month for the war” syndrome than a serious geopolitical analysis.
Leave aside the fact that American taxpayers aren’t eager to shoulder another open-ended obligation in Iraq to match the one we carried out in the the Land of the Morning Calm. In truth, the U.S. success in Korea benefitted from many factors that are woefully missing in Iraq.
The struggle in Iraq is an insurrection rapidly mutating into civil war. The Korean War began as an unprovoked attack across a recognized international border when North Korea’s Stalinist lickspittle, Kim Il-Sung, hurled his army across the 38th parallel in 1950.
The naked aggression was the first serious challenge to the newly formed United Nations – and the U.N. rose to the occasion. The Soviet delegate boycotted a key session of the Security Council and thus could not veto the resolution authorizing force to repel the invaders. While U.S. forces carried out the bulk of the subsequent fighting, they were aided by troops of many other U.N. members, and the effort to keep South Korea free enjoyed the full moral and diplomatic support of the world organization. In contrast, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was launched without U.N. support and with no major ally other than Great Britain.
Importantly, South Korea was led by a resourceful and determined leader, Syngman Rhee, who rallied his nation and, with U.S. help, rebuilt his army into an effective fighting force. The Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has shown no similar ability to unite the warring Sunni, Shiite and other factions.
South Korea’s ancient culture provided a unifying force for its people.
In contrast, Iraq is an artificial nation drawn up by colonial powers after World War I. The U.S. overthrow of the brutal Saddam Hussein regime seems to have unleashed the centrifugal forces of ethnic and religious hatred that may tear that artificial nation apart, as they did that other child of Versailles, Yugoslavia.
It is to be hoped that the U.S. can yet devise an honorable exit strategy from Iraq, along the lines suggested by the Baker/ Hamilton Iraq study group. But wishful thinking equating Iraq’s bitterly divided society with the culturally homogenous Korean people won’t get the job done.
