Analysis
by Steve Inskeep and Ted Koppel
Morning Edition, June 1, 2007 · A senior Army officer says that U.S. troops will be in Iraq for three to five years — at least. Can President Bush devise a plan for Iraq that is acceptable to Iraqi leaders but sustainable at home?
That's because Bush is leading everyone around like poodles:
The U.S. military is in the hands of crackpot commanders; see benefit of Korea model Now back to the merits—or rather demerits—of the analogy. In 1950, the United States beat back North Korea's invasion of South Korea, became embroiled in a Chinese-assisted guerrilla war, fought the Communists to a stalemate, and, in 1953, after suffering 54,000 combat deaths, negotiated a truce (but not a formal peace). Ever since, American troops—at present, 37,000 of them, stationed at 95 installations across the Korean peninsula—have remained on guard at the world's most heavily armed border.
In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, overthrew its regime (which posed a hypothetical threat), and, in the four years since, has kept about 150,000 troops in the country to kill terrorists (who weren't in Iraq before the war), to train the Iraqi army (which the Bush administration, for still-mysterious reasons, dismantled at the occupation's outset), and to keep a "low-grade" sectarian civil war (which erupted amid a vacuum of authority) from boiling over.
In the half-century-plus since the Korean armistice of 1953, just 90 U.S. soldiers have been killed in isolated border clashes in Korea. In the mere four years since the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, more than 3,000 American servicemen and women have been killed, and the number rises every day.
Despite the madness of civilian and military leaders, the troops know the Bush's strategy is a failure:
John Stolz of votevets.org contrasts John Kerry's visits to the troops with Joe Lieberman's
Marine who served: End war to honor troops
With allies in enemy ranks, GIs in Iraq are no longer true believers
Iraq war vets could face disciplinary action over protestsEnter Kissinger with his
rationalizations. Kissinger is trying to argue that the U.S. military can't withdraw 120,000 troops from Iraq in a year when the best estimate is that there are only a few thousand foreign fighters in the country. Yet it took only three years to withdraw more than a half million troops from Vietnam with "more than 600,000 armed communist forces" on the ground fighting. Actually, Nixon withdrew about
300,000 troops from Vietnam in about a year (Another
timeline). Kissinger briefly mentions Cambodia, but not that Nixon's secret bombing campaign made the situation in the region worse.
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