NPR is back treating the Bush-Snow Iraq-as-South Korea nonsense as if it were a reasonable approach to ending the Iraq disaster. Flattening history and complexity, Liane Hansen opens up with this salvo:
"There are thousands of US troops in South Korea. They’re guarding against an invasion from North Korea, as they’ve done for fifty years. The deployment has worked. This past week President Bush said the troops helped achieve an objective for all of us, and today the far east is peaceful."It is worth noting how subtly dishonest this intro is. First, it portrays the US role as solely protective - nothing about the long years of propping up South Korean dictators and protecting US business investments from invasions of labor and human rights activists. And it simply declares that "It has worked" and that "the far east is peaceful." And as in Iraq, the opinions of the people who actually live there don't count for squat (see this Angus-Reid study or this RAND report).
Then we get to Tom Bowman who turns to Tony Snow sound clips, Secretary of Defense Gates, Brookings Institute hack Michael O'Hanlon, American Enterprise Institute rightist Fred Kagan, and former Pentagon official James Miller. No surprise that there is no serious dissent from the US project of staying in Iraq forever. Bowman himself declares that American troops would be
"training the Iraqi forces, serving as a stabilizing presence, and guarding against possible troublesome neighbors – especially Iran."Reread it and weep: a stabilizing presence...troubling neighbors. Amazing!
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