Iraq and the Korean 'Model'

What we have to look forward to: decades of occupation and a wider war

By Justin Raimondo

"Any doubts that the U.S. is engaged in a colonial adventure in Iraq – because we're "liberators," not imperialists – ought to be permanently dispelled now that top administration officials are holding up the "Korean model" as a framework for our future role. What we have to look forward to in the "Korean model" is half a century of occupation.

Here, at last, is the frank admission that we have no intention of leaving Iraq in the foreseeable future, and, what's more, that we intend to integrate it into the web of military bases, state-subsidized economic links, and mutual "defense" treaties that our leaders are spinning into what can only be called an empire. Yet this conception goes beyond even what Chalmers Johnson calls the American "empire of bases" in that it envisions a protracted U.S. military presence involving substantial numbers of troops. Iraqi bases will be more than just "lily pads" – Korea is currently "hosting" 53,000 U.S. troops, and the DMZ is one of the most militarized borders in the world, a potential flashpoint for a renewal of a conflict that never formally ended......

In this sense, the warlords of Washington are far more dangerous than the imperialists of the past. The British, the Soviets, and even Alexander the Great had some conception of limits on their imperial ambitions: but not, it seems, the Americans. Driven by an ideological energy that is both messianic and quasi-religious in its fervor and unreason, they seem intent on driving themselves over a cliff – and taking much of the world with them."