COL (Ret) Robert Killebrew gets it:

To many in 1953, South Korea was an unlikely winner of the savage civil war that had ranged up and down the Korean peninsula for three years. More than a million South Koreans died, and the survivors were reduced to aimless crowds of refugees.

Among the wrenching photographs of the conflict, two have always stayed in my mind: The first is of bewildered families in traditional loose robes, their meager belongings on their backs, watching American tanks grind by in dusty columns. The second is of the Seoul train station, shattered and pockmarked by the fighting that raged over the city as it changed hands four times. Today the rebuilt station still stands downtown, dwarfed by towering glass and concrete skyscrapers in this prosperous city of about 10 million.

There are, of course, many dissimilarities between the Korea of 1953 and the Iraq of 2006; history repeats itself only in outline, not in detail. But the similarities are also striking. Both countries endured a long prewar period of oppression that retarded their political maturation -- Japanese occupation in one instance, homegrown tyranny in another. In neither case had the population ever known self-government. Both newly hatched governments had, and are having, to master new arts of politics, build an army and all the infrastructure of modern governance under fire and face protracted campaigns against implacable foes. There were those in the West in 1953 who doubted that Asians brought into the modern world only recently could master democracy and free-market economies. A half-century later, we hear echoes of this regarding Middle Eastern people.

Certainly South Korea's emergence wasn't easy; it wasn't until 1992 that a truly democratic government was voted in. Meanwhile, though, the country had become a modern state in every other sense, and its progress today would have been almost unimaginable to Westerners in 1953. Iraq, with its comparatively enormous advantages -- above all, its oil wealth -- may well make comparable or even better progress.

The essential ingredient, of course, has been American steadfastness. The role of the United States and its allies in the liberation and development of South Korea is a story so taken for granted that it is sometimes forgotten at home. More than 54,000 U.S. troops died in Korea from 1950 to 1953, and millions more have since served alongside South Korean soldiers guarding the icy demilitarized zone. Great Britain, France, Turkey and other allies served with us under a United Nations mandate during the war. An American military garrison remains in the heart of Seoul, where a bullet-scarred wall is preserved as a memory of the war. After three years of combat, allied and South Korean forces fought the Chinese and North Korean armies to a standstill and then faced a long and tense standoff. Billions of dollars were spent. Behind the armies, modern South Korea emerged.