So it turns out that Iraq is like South Korea.
It took the Bush administration more than four years from the time U.S. forces invaded Iraq to formulate this thought -- or, more precisely, to promulgate it. There's substantial evidence that the administration has actually envisioned, and been building, permanent, large-scale U.S. military bases in Iraq for two years. But until the past couple of weeks, it denied it had plans for permanent bases there.
As reporter Spencer Ackerman noted in a Prospect article last fall documenting the plans for permanent bases in Iraq, the official response of administration officials when asked about a permanent U.S. occupation was to deny any such desire. Early last year, Zalmay Khalilzad, then the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told Congress, "We have no goal of establishing permanent bases."
But that was then. With public tolerance for the president's war in Iraq about at its end, the White House is compelled to come up with a less costly (in lives, limbs, and dollars) way to keep our forces in Iraq. That way, apparently, is to concentrate our troops in a small number of vast, well-fortified, permanent installations.
In 2005, Ackerman reported, planners designated four massive bases to which U.S. forces could be deployed: Camp Victory in Baghdad; a second base near the city of Balad in Anbar province; a third in the town of Rawah, near the Syrian border; and the huge air base at Tallil, south of Baghdad.
The entire pattern of this war has been to deploy first and create a theory later to justify the deployment. Now that support for the war is at an all-time low, it's plainly time for the theory to justify the long-term presence of U.S. forces.
Desperate times breed desperate analogies. Enter South Korea. Within the past two weeks, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, who oversees day-to-day military operations in Iraq, and White House press secretary Tony Snow have said that our troops could settle in just like their counterparts who stand guard on South Korea's border to deter an invasion from the North.
But when you compare the situation of U.S. forces in Iraq to their situation in South Korea, there aren't a whole lot of parallels that come to mind. If anything, the situations of the two forces are closer to perpendicular.
To begin -- and it is a defining trait of the Bush presidency that its critics are continually compelled to point out the obvious -- nobody is shooting at our forces in Korea. There is no sectarian violence; no war of each against all. Our soldiers are there as a deterrent to North Korea, should that malignant Stalinist fantasyland contemplate invading the South, just as our soldiers in Germany were there as a deterrent to a Soviet invasion during the Cold War.
But what, exactly, could U.S forces in Iraqi bases deter? They cannot deter sectarian violence now, even though they're deployed in the heart of Baghdad. What they could deter would be the threat of a foreign invasion of Iraq from Iran -- a mission that truly would be analogous to the mission of U.S. forces in South Korea or Germany. Problem is, Iraq is already ruled by allies of Iran and, given Iraq's Shiite majority, is likely to be so for the foreseeable future. In which case our forces would be deployed to deter that which won't be happening.
What other functions could these bases fulfill? They could be a staging ground for an invasion of Iran or some other country: a dubious policy that would garner virtually no support from the American people. They could train Iraqi forces, except that the only Iraqi forces are sectarian rather than national. They could mount special operations against al-Qaeda forces, which, I'd argue, is an exceedingly valid use of American power.
But that's not all. Permanent U.S. bases in Iraq would also be a continual target for any number of Iraqis not reconciled to a permanent U.S. presence. They would be viewed, in the region and through much of the world, as a neocolonial provocation. They would by their very existence swell the ranks of jihadists. They would, in short, be the worst possible platform for fighting al-Qaeda, particularly when we can deploy intelligence units within Iraq and station Special Forces troops outside but nearby.
Iraq's not Korea. It's not Germany. It's a living hell, which we helped create, and redeploying our forces to bases there is more like selecting the level of the inferno to which we condemn them.
A version of this column appeared in The Washington Post.
