Is Iraq Morphing Into The 50-Year War?

My favorite pig "the other white meat" product (JurassicPork) of Welcome to Pottersville makes some decent points about South Korea, Iraq, and now. Here's a dollop:

Perhaps we should’ve been listening more closely when government officials began making muffled noises to the effect that our presence in Iraq could stretch for decades.

Because, through Tony Snow, we now know that George W. Bush, our nation’s most creative historian, holds up as a shining example of eternal police action our 50+ year-long occupation of South Korea.

And, really now, folks: Do we have the right to feign surprise? After all, while being unable to build a single children’s cancer hospital in Basra, we’ve somehow gotten our shit together well enough to build an embassy in Baghdad that’s bigger than the fucking Vatican.

Add to the lightning fast “urban renewal” 14 permanent bases. Troop strength is going up almost constantly.

But the more this is beginning to look like South Korea, the less it does.

We don’t have 150,000 troops in South Korea but 28,000 and men and women serve there for just a single one-year tour, not three or four concurrent tours of duty. Plus the South Koreans aren’t blowing us to bits with increasingly sophisticated and powerful IED’s.

But these are the pie in the sky assumptions that you get from a rube who’s addicted to making faulty historical analogies such as synonymzing WW II with the “war on terror” and then tries in the next shaky breath to elevate himself to the level of FDR.

[...]Anyone remember “the Nixon Doctrine”? It stated that Asian nations should not have to be propped up by US troops but that they should develop their own security forces. Which, incredibly, is the exact opposite thing that we’re seeing in Iraq. In fact, the only enemy that the Iraqi security forces seem to be adept at combating are their American occupiers.

Another irony: The Bush administration is actually more prone to withdraw troops by 2008 from South Korea than it is from Iraq. We’re planning on pulling a third of our troops from Li’l Kim’s southern neighbors, which have suffered from the iron rule of one tyrant after another and have undergone five major changes in their constitution since the Korean War.