Now Official -- US in Iraq FOREVER.

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Wednesday May 30, 2007 · 9:56 AM PDT

2007/05/30 · 09:56

From Reuters via the always excellent Josh Marshall:

President George W. Bush would like to see a lengthy U.S. troop presence in Iraq like the one in South Korea to provide stability but not in a frontline combat role, the White House said on Wednesday.

The United States has had thousands of U.S. troops in South Korea to guard against a North Korean invasion for 50 years.

There you have it, straight from the horse's ass.

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This is not guesswork. It is now the official policy of this Administration that US soldiers will remain, in the thousands or, more likely, tens of thousands in Iraq more-or-less forever.

Josh Marshall has a quick round-up of reasons why South Korea is different from Iraq (ethnic homogeneity, a history as a military dictatorship) but in my opinion he misses the most critical -- there was no large-scale objection within South Korea to the presence of American forces, and certainly never an active insurgency against them.

One can understand, perhaps, (if one is very generous) that the Bush Administration and members of the Think Tank of Magical Thinking who pushed for the Iraq invasion in the first place may, at one time, have imagined that the situation would develop along the lines of South Korea. Anyone with a modicum of sense would have believed otherwise, but let's grant for the sake of argument that the war supporters thought so.

In the current circumstances, however, it's madness to believe that American soldiers will ever perform a function in Iraq related in any way to the role we've played in South Korea. There isn't any scope of opinion on this issue -- it's a form of lunacy.

Any Republican candidate who doesn't run from this newly espoused policy is in serious trouble. Of course, that requires that they be forced, by the media, to address the issue. I'm not holding my breath.

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