Strategic Partnership

Along the lines of what I write about below, here Chris Matthew, Ezra Klein, Chuck Todd, and April Ryan talking about Bush's newer, more explicit talk about his desire for a perpetual American military presence in Iraq:

It should be said that the difference between Iraq and South Korea isn't just that post-armistice our troops stopped taking casualties in Korea. The bigger difference is that a US military presence in Korea was part of a larger strategic doctrine -- defending the anti-Communist ROK government from the Communist government in Pyongyang as part of a larger strategy of containment -- that made sense. What we're doing in the Gulf right now is driven by confusion, hubris, and vainglory.

Comments

driven by confusion, hubris, and vainglory.

You left out greed.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | September 14, 2007 3:56 PM

How's about being driven by our need/greed/desire to get and keep our mitts on Middle Eastern oil. Bush's stubbornness seems plenty rational if you adopt the view that it's all about the oil.

Posted by Ethel-to-Tilly | September 14, 2007 4:06 PM

The bigger difference is that a US military presence in Korea was part of a larger strategic doctrine.

Are you daring to say that Islamo-fascio-communo-totali-scaryianism isn't a diabolical plot to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids after all?

Why do you hate God and America, Matt?

Posted by Dan Kervick | September 14, 2007 4:13 PM

Re "The bigger difference is that a US military presence in Korea was part of a larger strategic doctrine "
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Nah. We were there to grab the fucking tungsten. We needed a shitload of it for steels needed for jet engines,etc. Couldn't have fought the Cold War without it.

US Civilians are so fucking gullible. Which shows what a great success our $1 Trillion educational system is. You don't think we pay those teachers to actually educate, do you?

Korea was one of the few sources outside Russia and China. The other was a mine in Thailand next to a country called...ummm... Vietnam.

In the 1950s, Government suddenly started classifying economic data on our imports of Tungsten. Declassifed data a decade or so. It shows a huge surge in imports of tungsten.

Dwight Eisenhower actually let the cat out of the bag on one occasion during his Presidential campaign.

As always, citations available on request.
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"I have complete files" --Terminator 2

Posted by Don Williams | September 14, 2007 4:20 PM

Yeah it's like me with my last girlfriend, one time we were shaggin and I knew I couldn't make her cum, but I kept trying and finally I had to quit and we both looked like losers.

Later on, I found out I got herpes from her.

Posted by Kid Rock | September 14, 2007 4:30 PM

Yeah it's like me with my last girlfriend, one time we were shaggin and I knew I couldn't make her cum, but I kept trying and finally I had to quit and we both looked like losers.

Later on, I found out I got herpes from her.

Posted by Kid Rock | September 14, 2007 4:31 PM

Awwwwww, how cute! Ezra wearing the same coat and tie he wore last May to the prom!

Posted by Citizen (World) | September 14, 2007 4:36 PM

Hey, there's something to the tungsten story:

Time article from 1957:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,824766,00.html?iid=chix-sphere

The price doubled between 1950 and 1951!

stats:
http://minerals.usgs.gov/ds/2005/140/tungsten.xls

(or google html cache)
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:T94YQP2G7JsJ:minerals.usgs.gov/ds/2005/140/tungsten.xls+annual+tungsten+production&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=13&gl=us&client=safari

Posted by chris | September 14, 2007 4:54 PM

What Bush seems to forget is he does not have the power to make the multi-decade commitment of which he speaks. No president does. What sustained the commitment in Korea was a bipartisan consensus that our presence there served a vital interest. The mutual defense treaty with South Korea that underpinned our deployment there was ratified by a vote of 83-7. Any bets on whether Bush could get a similar vote on a defense treaty with Iraq?

Posted by KenS | September 14, 2007 5:57 PM

"What we're doing in the Gulf right now is driven by confusion, hubris, and vainglory. "

This isn't really fair, in that there are stated reasons we are in Iraq that are part of a strategic doctrine. You just don't agree with them/think they will work. Even if that's true, the occupation is being justified by Bush for various reasons, and those reasons should be attacked.

Posted by Jeff | September 14, 2007 8:02 PM

"What we're doing in the Gulf right now is driven by confusion, hubris, and vainglory."

No, that's HOW the policy is being realized in the Middle East.

When your policy makes no sense in the real world, confusion, hubris and vainglory is how it ends up looking when you implement it.

That's not the policy itself.

The POLICY is money, power, and domination - as usual.

Get the oil. Screw the Arabs for Israel. Dominate the world as an "American Empire". Line our pockets with the money the idiot taxpayers pay us to do this crap. Meanwhile, pass laws that enable us to control the idiot taxpayers even more than we do. Steal as much money as we can, hopefully without totally destroying the economy in the process, so we can steal more later. Don't worry about the civilian population - they're suckers who can be bribed, threatened and conned by fear of someone else being somehow better than they are to support anything we do. They're the betas, we're the alpha males. That's all that matters.

Reminds me of the corporate guy in the "Doom 2099" comic book. He laid it out pretty plainly what his plan was: strip mine the world, as is our right, sacrificing all the workers to enough pollution and economic collapse that they'll die within five years, then migrate the corporate leaders to Mars and do it all over again.

Bush (Senior and Junior) and Cheney don't think much differently than that, really, disregarding that it was a comic book.

The slogan could be: Power and Corruption forever!

Like the guy in the movie "Ballistic" said: "Power and profit! It's what we do!"

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | September 15, 2007 12:07 AM

What we're doing in the Gulf right now is driven by confusion, hubris, and vainglory.

Having a continual ME military presence based out of Iraq has always been a major strategic goal of the Iraq War. Remember how we ditched the bases in Saudi Arabia (that bin Laden was so pissed about)? Iraq, the geographical center of the Middle East, is basically the replacement. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's the only reason, but it's pretty important, and for the US to lose that would be a strategic disaster.

Posted by Toadmonster | September 15, 2007 2:58 AM

D'oh! I see that the previous post is actually about that.

Posted by Toadmonster | September 15, 2007 3:02 AM

"The bigger difference is that a US military presence in Korea was part of a larger strategic doctrine "

Chalmers Johnson thinks it's just part of our foolish desire for empire.

Posted by Hedley Lamarr | September 15, 2007 8:12 AM