Rumsfeld’s Comments at Yongsan
by Richardson ~ October 27th, 2005. Filed under: America, U.S.-Korea Relations.Last week Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld held a ‘town hall’ meeting at Yongsan. Here are some comments from someone lucky enough to be there (be sure to read the rest of his post):
I also thought his comments regarding the Korean war were noteworthy. He said when President Truman left office in 1952 his approval rating was around 25%. People were questioning why Americans were dying to defend democracy on the other side of the world. Today, Truman is rightfully considered a great leader and the ROK has the world’s tenth largest economy in terms of GNP. No one questions that our efforts here were worth it, even at the cost of 40,000 American lives. Rumsfeld believes (and I concur) that in 50 years no one will question that whether our involvement in bringing freedom to Iraq was worthwhile.
October 27th, 2005 at 6:51 pm
From T. R. Fehrenbach’s excellent Korean War book “This Kind of War”, I learned that the ‘Iraq is like Korea’ analogy is apt. The similarities are eerie. Even the list of countries contributing troops in Korea are virtually the same as in Iraq, with only a few exceptions.