The Iraq Deployment Gets Even Stranger

The Korean troops to be deployed to Iraq will be sent to either Sulaymaniyah or Arbil -- both in northern Iraq -- rather than Kirkuk as originally planned. Our government plans to send a survey team to Iraq in the middle of this month to select an area of deployment; the troops should be sent by late June at the latest. Our forces were initially tasked with peacekeeping and post-war reconstruction duties. In a war zone, one needs to establish public order before one can carry out those duties. But we are changing our deployment region in accordance with a refusal to engage in establishing public order. The new prospective sites are mostly Kurdish, and since they have enjoyed substantial self-rule in the past, they were not greatly harmed during last year's war and there are no major security problems. The U.S. military is currently controlling both regions with an undersized battalion of 300 men.

What 3,500 Korean soldiers will do in this area, a year after the end of the regular war, has become unclear. The area wasn't beat up during the war, so there isn't much to reconstruct, and major construction projects aren't the job of gun-carrying soldiers. Since we find ourselves in the far north as the result of us searching out only quiet places, our overland supply lines from Kuwait have now become elongated. As a result, it might become more dangerous along those lines than in the region of deployment itself.

From July, Iraqi sovereignty will pass from coalition headquarters to the Iraqi provisional government, and with that the nation building process will begin in earnest. There's a possibility that political tensions between the Kurds and the central government may increase as the Kurds demand as much autonomy as they can get; perhaps they will ask for independence. The Korean military may become embroiled in strife brought about by those tensions at a moments notice.

The United States is still welcoming, at least verbally, the Korean deployment -- a deployment that will be the dead last of the 34 countries that have contributed troops in Iraq. But feelings of genuine thanks have already passed. From the very beginning, we didn't want this situation to get any worse, but one wonders if taken a turn for the worse again.