The Blue House is considering a concrete plan to send a mixed force of combat troops and non-combat troops to Iraq, with the intention of keeping troop levels at or about 3000 men. A Blue House source told Yonhap News during a telephone conversation that, “the troop detachment to Iraq will be a mixed force of combat and non-combat troops, the ration of which will not exceed 1 to 1. As for size of the detachment, we will hold it as close to 3000 men as possible, and even if that number should increase, it shouldn’t do so by more than 500 or 1000 men.”
The region of Iraq to which they will be dispatched will likely be the last thing decided, according to the source.
And during a meeting of the policy committee heads of the four parties held at the Blue House, Noh said, “the Ministry of Defense is calling for [troops] to ensure security within the designated area [to which they will be sent] rather than the dispatch of non-combat troops, but as the President, political considerations are important.”
According to another source connected to the Blue House, it’s very possible that Donald Rumsfeld will meet with Noh to discuss this issue when the American Defense Secretary visits Korea this week. It’s expected that the Americans will request a larger number of troops, according to the Yonhap News report.
This all come on the heels of a briefing yesterday by Lt. Gen. Cha Young-koo, deputy defense minister for policy, in which he told reporters that “the ROK contingent to be dispatched to Iraq should be one that can carry out an independent operations in a certain area rather than one based on engineers and medics.”
Interestingly enough, and this isn’t in the KT report linked above but in this Yonhap News report, Cha also noted that while the medical and engineering corps working away in the Nasiriyah region are doing a fine job, it’s the Italians who are responsible for the area, and therefore, it’s the Italians and the British who call the shots (or, in Cha’s words, “Korea has no voice”). This is apparently one of the reasons the Ministry of Defense is opposed to sending only non-combat troops - if you want a say, you gotta play, and building schools and opening up clinics under the protection of Italian and British troops simply isn’t good enough.
Everyone seems to agree, however, that a final decision on this is not going to come soon.
One Comment
The Roh administration is going to get its young men and women killed.
It is a perfect example of how politics can kill.
Don’t send anybody if they aren’t going to send enough to offer even self-protection, much less securing an area for Iraqis.
The whole point was to free coalition forces up to rotate home or do other jobs elsewhere.
The point was not just to see South Korea send a token force or a force other people would have to protect
or a force that will offer target practice to the loyalists and outside infiltrators —- because SK was too busy thinking about how to please everybody instead of how to effectively use AND PROTECT the soldiers it will send.