Is Petraeus all the liberal hawks have cracked him up to be?

People like Thomas Ricks, Washingtom Post military reporter, author of Fiasco (an attack on the conduct of the war) and adherent to the position that the war in Iraq was a good idea but we just screwed it up with incompetence, have presented a picture of General David Petraeus as a military who more or less walks on water – a genius of counter-insurgency tactics who had his part of Iraq in the earliest phase after occupation eating out of the palm of his hand and loving their American liberators. I suspect that analysis does not hold up, but rather, that the region he apparently pacified with his carrot-heavy control methods that seemed to work in 2003 and into 2004 has descended into a level of violence comparable to that in the rest of the Sunni-dominated parts of the country.

Beyond that, though, Petraeus made an effort the other day – on Fox, surprise, surprise -- to buy into the “Korea model” that the administration has been floating. By implication that means permanent or indefinite military presence in Iraq on the order of our contingent of troops at the DMZ for over 50 years.

Isn't that an incredibly stupid, inappropriate analogy? Five years before communist North Korea invaded South Korea, American troops had genuinely liberated the southern part of Korea from the despised Japanese control. Korea, as a football in between Japan and China, had been subject to foreign control and disdainful or cruel treatment by one of those powers for centuries. It was the Poland of Asia, caught between two great powers.

After World War II, with the Russian army occupying the northern part of the Korean peninsula and the U.S. the southern, the UN divided Korea into two trusteeships divided roughly on the 38th Parallel. These evolved by 1948 into two countries, communist North Korea dominated by the U.S.S.R and China, and South Korea that would be aligned with the West. When North Korea invaded the South in 1950, threatening the further expansion of communism after Mao Zedung’s communists had taken over China (Mao Tse-tung, per the previous spelling convention), the United Nations unanimously supported protecting the political and military status quo on the Korean Peninsula.

The result of the immeasurably different circumstances: there was no insurgency to defeat in South Korea, only an organized military force to repel back to defined geographical borders. We never have had to expose American soldiers in Korea to a daily round of roadside bombs, suicide bombers, snipers and rounds of mortar. After Eisenhower – General Eisenhower, the Republican President who actually had some real knowledge of massive casualties in warfare – brought about the armistice in Korea based on the present DMZ, there were no combat deaths in Korea, in contrast to about 100 Americans killed in Iraq every month. And it has been growing in the last few months, not getting better. Our presence in Korea has not been without any resentment, but we try to keep our soldiers more or less to themselves helping to guard the border – not carrying guns throughout the cities and towns of Korea to maintain order -- and fundamentally we have been there to protect South Korea from its historical enemies, Japan and China, and now from North Korea as well. There is nothing there like the Emerald City.

In Iraq, we are the Western, Christian nation that embarked on another crusade to get rid of a thorn in our side, Saddam. A few Iraqis perhaps are pleased that we did that. But probably only a small minority. In contrast to Korea, our soldiers are everywhere, carrying guns and other incredibly, instantly lethal stuff. In fact, it seems, the majority of Iraqis, including the overwhelming majority of Sunnis, actually support attacks on American soldiers. And an overwhelming majority want us to clear out as soon as possible, within a year or so, and to say we are doing so now.

For a similar take on this, see “Iraq Is the New Korea,” by Robert Scheer, Truthdig. Posted June 6, 2007 (“President Bush's modeling America's presence in Iraq upon the 54-year-old stationing of U.S. troops in South Korea is as outlandish as it is alarming”). One would hope the American media would attack this apparently absurd analogy with some vigor, although one should not place a bet on it. The most mainstream of them have a vested interest in not facing up to their past failure to perform their essential functions relative to this war. After all, that's where the "liberal hawks" are -- like Ricks.