The White House spokesman Tony Snow’s decision this week to equate the future American presence in Iraq to the five-decade-and-counting deployment to South Korea drew barbs from Democratic campaigns. Typical of these were Barack Obama’s comments in Las Vegas: “That is not acceptable. That is not the way that we are going to make ourselves more secure. We have to bring this war to an end.” (Chicago Tribune blogger Mark Silva helpfully transcribes Snow’s entire exchange with reporters.)

And so has the lexicon of the Iraq war acquired yet another accent: Korean. The historical analogies in this war began long before the shooting, of course. It started out German. Writing in the Washington Times before the Iraq war, Republican senators Ted Stevens of Alaska and John Warner of Virginia likened Saddam Hussein to Hitler. President Bush likened Saddam to Hitler, and President Bush and other senior officials reinforced the analogy with frequent comparisons between the “war on terror” and World War II. As in that war, action shifted quickly to France. In the accent of the elite Institut d’Études Politiques, then Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, warned of post-war chaos in Iraq from the perspective of “France, from a continent like mine, Europe, that has known wars, occupation and barbarity.”

The invasion itself may be remembered, in the audio sense at least, in the clipped tones of American broadcast journalists “imbedded” with U.S. troops driving toward Baghdad. Yet not long after the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square, the twang of the Iraq War began to mutate anew. British analysts claimed to hear a hint of their own tongue from days gone by as they cited the miserable fate of Albion’s efforts to subdue Mesopotamia after World War I (See, The Last Exit From Iraq, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006). From still another quarter, with a Russian inflection, came comparisons with the Soviet nightmare in Afghanistan (New Republic).

Yet it was a leaked 2003 memo written by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that added the Southeast Asian flavor that has lingered. His reference to a “long, hard slog,” toppled the first domino. Opponents of the war equated “slog” with the “quagmire” of Vietnam, an analogy long held at bay to that point by Bush administration officials as “irrelevant” and even bordering on unpatriotic. It suddenly burst from cover and into everyday discussion of the war. “Iraqification,” noted New York Times columnist William Safire when that term began surfacing to describe U.S. policy in late 2003, “is modeled on “Vietnamization, coined in Holiday magazine in 1957 and popularized by Defense Secretary Melvin Laird in 1969.” Safire should know, having written many of Nixon’s speeches himself. (Laird, incidentally, penned a fantastically interesting perspective on the current American dilemma, Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam, for Foreign Affairs in the November/December 2005 issue). The argument rages on. Sen. John McCain, (R-AZ), whose knowledge of the Vietnam era is more intimate than any of them, delivered an impassioned denial of the validity of the analogy (National Review) this April on the Senate floor. “I happen to know something about Vietnam,” he asserted with some modesty, “and I know we do not face another Vietnam.”

Korea, perhaps, is just about right. If so, here’s a guide to what may be in store.