The Daily Background

Ugh, this is awful. The White House today said that they want US troops to stay in Iraq for fifty years or more. The Associated Press reports:

President Bush envisions a long-term U.S. troop presence in Iraq similar to the one in South Korea where American forces have helped keep an uneasy peace for more than 50 years, the White House said Wednesday.
[…]
South Korea is just one example of U.S. troops stationed more than a half-century after war. Germany and Japan are two other examples. American forces are deployed in roughly 130 countries around the world, performing a variety of duties from combat to peacekeeping to training foreign militaries, according to GlobalSecurity.org, a defense-oriented think tank.

In South Korea, about 29,500 U.S. troops are stationed as a deterrent against the communist North, but that number is to decline to 24,500 by 2008 as part of the Pentagon’s worldwide realignment of its forces. The two Koreas remain technically at war since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a cease-fire, not a peace treaty.

How is that a desirable outcome at all? Spending billions more dollars over decades to stay there and babysit the Sunnis and the Shiites in the middle of a conflict that is hundreds of years old? Is that really where we want to be spending a large part of our resources and lives over the next several decades?

And is the solution in North Korea really something desirable to anybody? Will there be an Iraqi Kim Jong Il who has tried to build nuclear weapons? Will part of Iraq be one of the poorest countries in the world despite its rulers which live in luxury? It seems to me that every time Bush compares the war in Iraq to any other conflict, it comes off terribly. For instance, in the past he’s said that the situation in Iraq mirror Vietnam– specifically the Tet Offensive period.

Ironically enough, this comes on the two year anniversary of Dick Cheney’s pronouncement that the insurgency in Iraq was in its “last throes.”

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