Forged in Whose Blood, Exactly?

For the uninitiated, Korea robotically answers questions about the unraveling of the U.S.-Korean alliance with the wierd cliche that the alliance is “forged in blood” and therefore, strong. Now the last thing I’d want is for any person–whether that person be an American, an Iraqi civilian, or a Korean soldier, in short, anyone but one of Michael Moore’s minutemen–to spill blood in Iraq. My point here is to compare the military value of South Korea’s deployment of 3,000 troops to Iraq to its efforts to bluntly extract a high price for sending them.

It’s apparently a useful fiction to some that our international coalition appear larger than it really is, which is fine if you think righteousness and consensus are the same thing (Hitler and Stalin once reached a consensus on Poland, too). If you think that coalitions matter because of their military advantages, then read on, because a new report tells us what we pretty much knew already, that the South Korean deployment to Iraq has added no apparent military value. The Korean troops themselves are all volunteers, and we owe them our personal appreciation for their courage. Not so the men who sent them there.

What risk did South Korea take to support the ally that lost 38,000 troops so that it could exist and has kept tens of thousands more on its soil ever since? Well, it had to put up with a lot of bitching, mainly from its supporters. The South Korean government finally answered our request for troops with great reluctance and much delay, and after taking great care to do so in a way that did more than minimize the risks; it pretty much eliminated them. The Korean troops sit behind barbed wire and concrete barriers in the safest Kurdish region in Iraq and never leave their fortress. Their contribution to the military and reconstruction efforts, as you might expect, is just north of zilch. It mainly consists of letting locals come into the camp for treatment using Western or “oriental” medicine.

At what price? First, the Koreans demanded that Colin Powell make concessions to North Korea in exchange for the deployment, which evidently pissed him off royally without achieving the desired effect. Later, the Pentagon announced that it was withdrawing a combat brigade from Korea for service in Iraq, and that the U.S. would cut its total force in Korea by a third in three years. The Koreans panicked and immediately agreed to send the long-delayed bulk of their promised Iraq contingent. Coincidentally, perhaps, the U.S. agreed to slow down the USFK withdrawal shortly thereafter.

Again, if you think it takes the approval of a coalition to make what you do right, then great, and thanks. Maybe it’s worth some kind of break on trade talks about rice, movie piracy, or computer chips, but it doesn’t put Korea in a position to make demands on issues where South Korea expects us to keep exposing American lives to the North Korean threat.