Standing in the center of bustling Seoul in Thanksgiving, I found it hard to believe that 53 years ago the city was a pile of rubble, the ruined capital of a ruined country. The full scope of the Korean War is forgotten by many today, eclipsed by memories of Vietnam. But at this time of war and occupation in Iraq, South Korea's story is worth remembering as a case of American nation-building that worked.
To many in 1953, South Korea was an unlikely winner of the savage civil war that had ranged up and down the Korean peninsula for three years. More than a million South Koreans died, and the survivors were reduced to aimless crowds of refugees.
There are, of course, many dissimilarities between the Korea of 1953 and the Iraq of 2006; history repeats itself only in outline, not in detail. But the similarities are also striking... Some in the West in 1953 doubted that Asians brought into the modern world only recently could master democracy and free-market economies. A half-century later, we hear echoes of this regarding Middle-Eastern people.
The U.S., essential ingredient: Certainly South Korea's emergence wasn't easy; it wasn't until 1992 that a truly democratic government was voted in. Meanwhile, though, the country had become a modern state in every other sense, and its progress today would have been almost unimaginable to Westerners in 1953. Iraq, with its comparatively enormous advantages — above all, its oil wealth — may well make comparable or even better progress.
The essential ingredient has been American steadfastness. The role of the United States and its allies in the liberation and development of South Korea is a story so taken for granted that it is sometimes forgotten at home...
Great Britain, France, Turkey and other allies served with us under a U.N. mandate during the war. An American military garrison remains in Seoul. After three years of combat, allied and South Korean forces fought the Chinese and North Korean armies to a standstill and then faced a long, tense standoff. Billions of dollars were spent. Behind the armies, modern South Korea emerged.
Because Americans are famously impatient, we sometimes fail to give ourselves credit for the stick-to-itiveness that it takes to do great things. But in hindsight, all our greatest accomplishments have taken more time than we realized at the start. American democracy took two centuries to reach universal suffrage. Defeating communism took decades and a number of wars — including the one in Korea...
South Korea, Not Vietnam, is the Parallel for Iraq
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