Will we ever learn?

Here's an LA Times article that came out yesterday. I'm going to block out the name of the country involved. Can you guess who it is?

Despite a desire by officials here to assume greater responsibility for the defense of their country, the United States and (blank) agreed Friday to leave a U.S. commander in charge of their combined armies [...]

(Blank's) President said recently that his country was ready to take on more control of its armed forces, and suggested altering the current arrangement that put (blank) forces under U.S. command during wartime.

After discussions Friday between Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his (blank) counterpart, both sides agreed that the United States would retain "operational control" during a conflict. Yet they raised the possibility that command authority could change in the future.

"As the capabilities of (blank) grow, obviously they will assume more and more responsibility as they have been doing in recent years," Rumsfeld said after the meeting. "As that happens in an orderly way there will be adjustments in the command relationship, and those are the kinds of things allies discuss."

Yes, you've got it, the answer is South Korea.

U.S. officials said there was no firm timetable for an eventual transfer of wartime authority, and that Washington would welcome serious negotiations on the matter.

The United States has maintained a large troop presence in South Korea since the end of the Korean War in 1953, but in recent years the Pentagon has begun withdrawing troops from the country as part of a larger effort to reposition its forces around the globe.

The Pentagon wants to have 25,000 troops in South Korea by the end of 2008, compared to 37,500 last year, a reduction in forces that U.S. commanders say is made possible by the growing capability of South Korea's 690,000 troops.

We've been in South Korea for 52 years, and we're still there, and we still engage in hostile actions from time to time along the border. Does anybody credibly think we're going to leave Iraq EVER? The US military simply does not remove their footprint once they drop anchor in another country.

Here's an excerpt from another LA Times article from yesterday, about the growing crackdown on Islamists in the kingdom of Morocco:

The relationship between the Moroccan government and the nation's outspoken Islamists was wobbly long before the Casablanca suicide attacks.

Fundamentalist Islam had been gaining strength as a political force for decades in Morocco, as ideas imported from Saudi Arabia and neighboring Algeria gained traction with Morocco's young, poor and frustrated populace and as radicalized volunteers filtered home from the Afghan war against the Soviets.

The Afghan holy war against the big bad Westerners was literally a training ground for thousands of fundamentalists, who then filtered across the globe to fight for their Wahhabist cause in their countries of origin, spreading terrorism around the globe.

Sound familiar?

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has created a terror network to rival Osama bin Laden's by expanding his terrorism campaign in Iraq to extremists in two dozen terror groups scattered across almost 40 countries, US intelligence officials say.

US government officials have said the threat to US interests from Zarqawi compared with that from bin Laden, to whom Zarqawi pledged his loyalty last year.

The director of the National Counterterrorism Centre considers bin Laden a strategic plotter deep in hiding and out of regular contact with his followers, while Zarqawi is involved in planning scores of brutal attacks in Iraq.

"He is very much a daily operational threat," said Scott Redd, who is in charge of the US Government's counter-terrorism strategy and analysis.

Counter-terrorism officials say his network of contacts has grown dramatically since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and includes associates in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe.

The phrase "History repeats itself" has never been more salient. Do we ever learn anything? We continue to entangle ourselves in wars of choice abroad without viable strategies for winning the peace. We continue to believe our government that we will simply let the military finish the job and come home, erasing their footprint around the globe. We see how the expulsion of the West from Afghanistan created a globalized, interconnected network (indeed we funded it); we choose to create the same kind of conditions in Iraq.

It's almost depressing to read newspapers these days, it feels too much like a rerun.