SEOUL -- Regrettably, the preference of U.S. policymakers to look to occupied Germany and Japan for policy guidance has blinded them to the pitfalls they are now facing in Iraq. Instead, they should be immersing themselves in the six-volume, thousand-page "History of the American Military Government in Korea 1945-1948" for a sobering reality check.
What is happening in Iraq today is closer to what transpired in Korea between 1946 and 1948 -- a raging insurgency that never really ended (or, more accurately, exploded with the start of the Korean War.) In short, security was never a fait accompli in liberated Korea, and a three-year struggle to form a provisional government ended with national division and, ultimately, civil war.
Politically, the division between left and right was never resolved. The attempt to graft Koreans onto an American military government, first through a purely advisory Representative Democratic Council and later through a South Korean Interim Legislature and Interim Government, ended in failure, as the left, the single strongest political force during the occupation, boycotted these efforts.