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.
This makes sense. The Iraqi security forces are geared for counter-insurgency at this point. Even as we succeed in turning over security duties and the counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism fights to the Iraqis, Iraq will need American combat units to deter conventional assaults on Iraq.
Our presence will also tend to reinforce the development of democracy as our presence did in South Korea, Japan, Italy, and Germany. So we need to stay in Iraq for the long haul. But the article also notes:
The comparison with South Korea paints a picture of a lengthy U.S. commitment at a time when Americans have grown weary of the Iraq war and want U.S. troops to start coming home. Bush vetoed legislation that would set timetables for U.S. troop withdrawals, and forced Congress to approve a new bill stripped of troop pullout language.
Of course, that might be a problem:
Our loyal opposition won't let us analyze this war objectively. They want to lose this war and are limited only by the state of public opinion. We have been in a race between defeating our enemies and defeating ourselves since fall 2003. We have to look ahead to the entire race and not just our portion. In Vietnam, we won our part of the race. But we stayed long enough to give a defeatist Congress the strength to forbid the South Vietnamese from finishing that race. I don't have the answer to this question. We have to draw down soon enough to preserve residual support for finishing the war but not so fast that we hinder the ability of the Iraqis to take the lead. And whenever we pull back (not out completely), we must not look like we are retreating or sound like it back home.
I hope we are in Iraq for decades as we have been in South Korea. It will mean a complete victory.
UPDATE: Henry Kissinger identifies the problem as I have (tip to Real Clear Politics):
Did the time needed to implement Nixon's design exhaust the capacity of the American people to sustain the outcome, whatever the merit?
I still don't know what the balance must be between staying to directly fight and build up the Iraqis versus pulling out and back to large bases even when those jobs aren't completed in order to retain enough support here to back the Iraqi government in fighting on its own.
