Today's Bush's-Glorious-Iraq-Surge Story: We Can Kick North Korea's Butt

In the never-ending fantasy game of Why George Bush Really, Really Got It Right on Iraq, even as the casualty level for US troops reach their highest point since September 2008, former Bush official Peter Feaver takes today's top prize:

I see [Obama] as having slightly more options now for dealing with North Korea than he otherwise might have precisely because Bush reversed the trajectory in Iraq. To be sure, the progress in Iraq is still fragile and reversible -- and there are ominous signs of that reversibility with the uptick in violence in the months since Obama codified a rigid withdrawal timeline. But the success of Bush’s surge strategy (crediting, of course, the courageous efforts of General Petraeus, General Odierno, and Ambassador Crocker, not to mention the brave men and women deployed in Iraq, who actually implemented the strategy) has gone some way to restoring America’s global strategic leverage. At a minimum, it seems to me inarguable that our strategic leverage is greater now than it would have been if we continued on the old trajectory.

I've read Feaver's gung-ho piece a dozen times for a sign of logic, but it appears that there is none, only a glowing path from soldiers in Baghdad to dropping bombs on Pyongyang:

The truth is that the availability of U.S. ground forces is at most a secondary factor in limiting our options in North Korea. The South Korean army provides all of the ground forces needed to defeat North Korea, but only at horrific cost -- a cost that probably no South Korean leader would ever choose unless North Korea launched its own unprovoked invasion. Without an active and willing South Korean ally committed to the fight, there is no viable ground-based option for the United States. In other words, our military options for North Korea are air-based and our air options are not as constrained by the Iraq (and now Afghan) surge.

Comments

[UJ]

http://freekorea.us/2009/05/27/what-that-is-your-day-job-part-1/

"It would be diplomatic ignorance to believe that China would join with us, it would be regional and historical ignorance to believe that Japan should join us, and it would be strategic and political ignorance to think that the South Koreans would be up for this. They aren’t.

If we were to come to the point of last resort, after all financial and political options had failed and where only military options remained, it would make far more sense to flood North Korea with Tokarevs, RPG’s, and Chinese AK’s than to attack North Korea directly. I’m not opposed to that idea in principle. Certainly it’s an alternative that China must fear so much that it would rather cooperate with us. But it would take years to work, and it could only succeed if a potential resistance organization had first infiltrated North Korea and established a political underground, supply system, and intelligence network. The direct military option, however, should be reserved only for imminent anticipatory self defense or to stop a proliferation incident. "

[Craig Smith]

Clearly, remnants of the GWB administration continue to live in their fantasy-world.

Too bad right-wing media live there with them, drawing a depressing number of citizens after themselves, like so many children following the Pied Piper. (IMHO).