Bushco Has No Seoul

In yet another attempt to frame the tragic spectacle of Iraq against another questionable war, P.R. flak Tony Snow said that Dubya “would like to see a U.S. role in Iraq ultimately similar to that in South Korea” here.

To say that this reflects a flawed notion of history is an understatement.

As this Wikipedia article describes, the division of Korea was a legacy from World War II in which Roosevelt and General George Marshall allowed Joseph Stalin to liberate a “buffer zone” of Korea extending to the 38th parallel in order to preserve our troop strength somewhat so we wouldn’t have to accomplish this for the entire country. At the time, our government envisioned the partitioning of Korea in this way to last for about only four years.

More to the point, though, we became involved with Korea to liberate it from the Japanese. And Bushco propaganda notwithstanding, we entered Iraq with no such pending necessity, violating a nation’s sovereignty against a leader who we now know had no such designs of global conquest.

Also, I took note of Snow’s use of the phrase “over-the-horizon support.”

Gee, I wonder where I first heard that discussed (maybe here in Section 2 of the joint resolution on the Iraq war - it was also envisioned by Patrick Murphy during his campaign last year; I’d link to what Patrick said, but the old campaign site is now inactive).

If Dubya is going to steal ideas from the Democrats, the least he can do is bother to give credit where its due.