Comments on: Korea: Better than Vietnam, anyway

By: James Bartek

James Bartek — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:07:50 +0000

Ha Ha Ha. I especially like the part where the US (via Truman) is given “much of the credit for halting the advance of totalitarianism in Korea.” Does that make up for the whole Taft-Katsura thing?

By: Nancy Reyes

Nancy Reyes — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 23:35:48 +0000

The ignorance of both Viet Nam and Iraq is behind the left’s claim of Iraq as Viet Nam…the analogy is only used so that the left can bash the US…

A better comparison would be Luzon and the Huks, where throwing out an evil dictatorship of Japanese proxies led to a hard core insurgency that had to be fought.

But of course it wasn’t the US but the Philippines themselves who did so…

By: Frog in a Well - The Korea History Group Blog

Frog in a Well - The Korea History Group Blog — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 12:03:48 +0000

[...] Our own Jonathan Dresner takes Thomas C. Reeves to task on his use of the analogy between Iraq and [...]

By: Owen

Owen — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:16:12 +0000

Yes, I think you’re correct on the last point, the US will probably have to take whatever it can get in Iraq, barring an out and out anti-US government. But I imagine three loosely federated governments each run by an authoritarian or semi-authoritarian leader keeping a lid on the Islamists would be considered a ‘good’ outcome.

By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:18:24 +0000

Reeves is an Americanist, so I wouldn’t expect him to know about the developmental lag in South Korea — I don’t think I knew about it until a couple of years ago — but ignoring the democracy lag is gross misconduct, especially for a Cold War historian (he’s Sen. McCarthy’s most authoritative biographer, by most accounts, and a Kennedy scholar as well).

Interestingly, though, I don’t yet see a lot of evidence that the US is prepared to back an Iraqi strongman the way it backed Rhee and Park, or Chiang in Taiwan. Maybe it’s dissembling, and there’s something going on behind the scenes, but it seems to me that we’re actually more or less on the sidelines still.