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.

Progress? Bush & Pentagon Win Battle Over Corruption In Iraq

This is one of those rare times when even I must admire how effectively President George W. Bush and the Pentagon/CentCom have found one major and seemingly very successful tactic for combatting the sky-high corruption in Iraq, much of it introduced by the U.S. itself (directly through war profiteers like Bush-friendly private contract companies and indirectly by the way we set up operations in the occupied Iraq.

What's the BIG secret to their success in drastically reducing reports of corrupt in Iraq?

Simple: stomp on any attempts to investigate said corruption.

Gee. Why didn't we think of this before? Silly us!

Maureen Dowd: "More Con Than Neo"

I think MoDo pegged this in her April 14th column I'm belatedly referencing: "con" in the term neocon has never meant conservative but "confidence" operators whose game is to part you from your money, your trust, your possessions, and your good sense (and many other important values). The entire column is here, but I offer a healthy snack-sized portion:

Usually, spring in Washington finds us caught up in the cherry blossoms and the ursine courtship rituals of the pandas.

But this chilly April, we are forced to contemplate the batrachian grapplings of Paul Wolfowitz, the man who cherry-picked intelligence to sell us a war with Iraq.

You will not be surprised to learn, gentle readers, that Wolfie in love is no less deceptive and bumbling than Wolfie at war.

Proving he is more con than neo, he confessed that he had not been candid with his staff at the World Bank. While he was acting holier than thou, demanding incorruptibility from poor countries desperate for loans, he was enriching his girlfriend with tax-free ducats.

He has yet to admit any real mistakes with the hellish war that claimed five more American soldiers yesterday, as stunned Baghdad residents dealt with bombings of the Iraqi Parliament, where body parts flew, and of a bridge over the Tigris, where cars sank.

But he admitted Thursday that he’d made a mistake when he got his sweetheart, Shaha Ali Riza, an Arab feminist who shares his passion for democratizing the Middle East, a raise to $193,590 — more than the taxpaying (and taxing) Condi Rice makes. No doubt it seemed like small change compared with the money pit of remaking Iraq — a task he once prophesied would be paid for with Iraqi oil money. Maybe he should have remunerated his girlfriend with Iraqi oil revenues, instead of ripping off the bank to advance his romantic agenda.

No one is satisfied with his apology. Not the World Bank employees who booed Wolfie and yelled, “Resign! Resign!” in the bank lobby.

Not Alison Cave, the chairwoman of the bank’s staff association, who said that Mr. Wolfowitz must “act honorably and resign.”

Not his girlfriend, who says she’s the suffering victim, forced by Wolfie’s arrival to be sent to the State Department (where, in a festival of nepotism, she reported to Liz Cheney).

And not his critics, who say Wolfie has been cherry-picking again, this time with his anticorruption crusade. They say he has used it to turn the bank into a tool for his unrealistic democracy campaign, which foundered in Baghdad, and for punishing countries that defy the United States.

Wolfie also alienated the bank by bringing two highhanded aides with him from Bushworld, aides who had helped him with Iraq. One was the abrasive Robin Cleveland, called Wolfie’s Rottweiler. The other was Kevin Kellems, known as Keeper of the Comb after his star turn in “Fahrenheit 9/11,” where he handed his boss a comb so Wolfie could slick it with spittle for TV. (Maybe his girlfriend didn’t get enough of a raise.) Like W., Wolfie is dangerous precisely because he’s so persuaded of his own virtue.

Just as Ms. Riza stood behind her man on the Iraq fiasco, so Meghan O’Sullivan stood behind W.

Ms. O’Sullivan, a bright and lovely 37-year-old redhead who is the deputy national security adviser, is part of the cordon of adoring and protective female staffers around the president, including Condi, Harriet Miers, Karen Hughes and Fran Townsend.

Even though her main experience was helping Paul Bremer set up the botched Iraq occupation and getting a reputation back in Washington “for not knowing how much she didn’t know,” as George Packer put it in “The Assassins’ Gate,” Ms. O’Sullivan was officially promoted nearly two years ago to be the highest-ranking White House official working exclusively on Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was clear that she was out of her depth, lacking the heft to deal with the Pentagon and State Department, or the seniority to level with W. “Meghan-izing the problem” became a catch phrase in Baghdad for papering over chaos with five-point presentations.

See Rozius Unbound for the Rest.

WaPo: Too Few Contract Workers To Rebuild Iraq

I guess giving Iraqis - rather than Halliburton, Bechtel, etc. - the money to rebuild themselves is just too wild an idea?

Here's the story from WaPo.