Would the world be a safer place if we had walked away from Korea, as the Dems want us to do in Iraq, saying "defend yourselves" and "good luck"?

So which model will it be? Korea or Vietnam? Commitment or abandonment?

Investor's Business Daily agrees with Christopher Cook: in Korea, "We did not cut and run."

Communism's initial thrust had been blunted, but the threat wasn't over. Today, a half-century later, U.S. troops remain in South Korea, and our commitment to the democracy we saved at great cost remains firm. We did not cut and run.

South Korea is now a strong ally, a vibrant democracy and an economic dynamo. If we hadn't stuck around, it might have sunk into the North Korean abyss long ago. Would the world be a safer place today if we had walked away, as the Democrats want us to do in Iraq, saying "defend yourselves" and "good luck"?

Benjamin Franklin once said that if we didn't all hang together, we'd hang separately. That was the rationale behind the formation of NATO. After we liberated Europe from the Nazis, we didn't just throw it under the bus, saying we did our part and now Europeans had to defend themselves against the Soviet Union on their own.

Bush [aka the alleged nincompoop] understands these lessons of history.

…In a recent speech at the National Press Club, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said: "Many have threatened that there will be chaos, a bloodbath, when the United States redeploys from Iraq, and this in fact may be the case." But, he added, "if they continue to choose to spill blood, it will not be on the conscience of the United States."

At least it won't be on the conscience of the surrender caucus of a Democratic Party that time and again has demonstrated a distinct lack of conscience. The model of today's Democrats is not Korea, but Vietnam in 1975, when they cut off aid and barred any U.S. support, making the killing fields possible and inevitable.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has also mentioned Korea, saying that the way we handled that situation, by maintaining a presence, was a lot wiser than how we handled Vietnam, "where we just left lock, stock and barrel."

So which model will it be? Korea or Vietnam? Commitment or abandonment? Bush has made his choice and, we think, the right one.

Using Norman Podhoretz's "World War IV" as material, Mona Charen has more…