Truth In Advertising

WASHINGTON - 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.

The comparison was offered as the Pentagon announced the completion of the troop buildup ordered by Bush in January. The last of about 21,500 combat troops to arrive were an Army brigade in Baghdad and a Marine unit heading into the Anbar province in western Iraq.

So, just in case you though that Mr. Bush might actually be negotiating in good faith with the people in Congress who want the troops home, forget it. He sees troops in Iraq for decades. In Bush's vision, there will still be American troops stationed in Iraq on the day I die.

That's quite a change from February, 2003 when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was describing the plan to a concerned questioner during an appearance at Aviano Air Base in Italy.

Q: Thank you, sir. First, it's a pleasure to hear you and to be this close to you and see you in person. We've seen you on TV a lot, and it's a neat experience for us.

I'm part of an AEF rotation here, a part of a group that is deployed for AEF 7 and 8, and this is a great place to be deployed, no doubt. But many of us are asking, how long will we be frozen? But my question is, on the behalf of some of our Guard and Reserve men who are here, we know that some units have been mobilized, partially mobilized. Their question is, do you -- are we going to go to a full mobilization of Guard and Reserve? And if we are, when will that decision be made?

Rumsfeld: Well -- (laughter) -- let me say this about that. (Laughter.) It is highly unlikely that we would go to a full mobilization. We -- I have been signing a great many deployment orders and mobilization orders and alerting orders. The forces have been flowing now for a good number of weeks, and that has had its intended effect. There is no question but that the world's focus is on the fact that the Iraqi regime, now for some 12 years, continues to ignore and disagree with the now 17 resolutions of the United Nations. The world understands that; they are looking for cooperation and hoping that the force flow will bring about cooperation, but thus far, it has not.

We don't talk about deployments in the specific, but we have brought a good many Guard and Reserve on active duty. Fortunately, a great many of them were volunteers. We have been able to have relatively few stop losses. There are some currently, particularly in the Army, but relatively few in the Navy and the Air Force. And it is not knowable if force will be used, but if it is to be used, it is not knowable how long that conflict would last. It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.(emphasis mine)

After that, we have a responsibility as a country that if force were to be used and if the United States did have to go in with its coalition partners -- and there are a growing number of nations that would be participating in a coalition of the willing -- we feel an obligation to see that what is left after that regime is gone becomes a state that does not have weapons of mass destruction, and that would be part of our responsibility; that it would be a state that would not threaten its neighbors and launch Scuds into it, or use chemical weapons on their own people or their neighbors, as they have in the past; that it would be a single country and not broken into pieces; and that it would be a country that would be setting itself on a path to assure representation and respect for the various ethnic minorities in that country.

The number of people that that would take is reasonably predictable, and the only question would be what portion of that total number would be U.S. forces.

So I would see this buildup going up, lasting for a period, and the last choice is war, but if that is necessary, a period where that takes place and then a drawdown.

Ah, the good old days, when they still felt the need to tell us it wouldn't take long, and they'd be bringing the troops right back. I guess that was back before they realized they really could get away with just about anything they wanted to do.

The idea that we'll be keeping troops in Iraq for 50 years is so mind-boggling that I don't want to get wrapped up in unpacking the gross historical and geopolitical ignorance involved in comparing it to Korea. Besides, Josh Marshall has already done a fine job of summarizing. The suggestion just shows how little Mr. Bush understands of either Iraq or Korea.

Are we now replacing the "flypaper" strategy with the "tripwire" one we used in the Cold War? We're going to leave troops in Iraq for 50 years to deter an invasion from ... where exactly? Does Mr. Bush mean to suggest he's given up on that whole 'democracy' thing, and is now in favor of a few decades of some kind of military dictatorship?

Of course, North Korea is a massive failure of nuclear non-proliferation work by the administration. It's entirely unclear to me why Mr. Bush would want to offer us a vision for the future of Iraq involving the picture of our troops stationed for decades while, over the border, they develop nuclear bombs.

But there I go again, thinking that the President or his team actually care about making sense, or speaking rationally. Sorry.