then we'll leave, just like we did in France back in the 1960s and the Philippines in the 1990s. We don't stay where we aren't wanted, a lesson Germany should keep in mind (link requires registration, but it's free)*.

South Korea has reason to be concerned about the North. The DMZ isn't very far from Seoul. In fact, it's within artillery range. The North Koreans are said to have hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of artillery pieces within range of Seoul. Should the North lash out, either out of fear or a death-rattle, a lot of South Koreans are going to die.

That said, we can't give in to North Korea's frantic attemts at nuclear blackmail. They're desperately trying to prop up their failing government. All they have to do is stop their nuclear weapons development like they promised in 1994. When they do, they know who to call. We shouldn't give in to their Blazing Saddles Gambit.

* From the linked NY Times article

This increasingly shaky German government is due for yet another surprise: a briefing in Brussels Friday of a U.S. Congressional delegation led by McCain and Lieberman by the new NATO supreme commander, U.S. Marine Gen. James Jones, revealed a developing U.S. strategy. It holds that the 70,000 U.S. troops garrisoned in Germany, accompanied by their 70,000 dependents, make up too many forces with too outdated a mission stationed too far from potential trouble at too high a cost.



At a time when the U.S. is painfully closing bases at home, many defense strategists conclude that we should reduce and redeploy our troops in Europe. By cutting the number in half; by rotating the troops every six months, thereby obviating the need for dependents' schools and extensive support facilities; and by moving the bases south and east toward low-cost Hungary, southern Poland, Bulgaria and Romania, the Defense Department could spread our military techniques and equipment throughout the alliance and train with fewer environmental constraints at far less cost.

The proposed radical change is not finalized and is not punishment for Chancellor Schröder's antiwar pandering or his subsequent isolationism (although the recent weakening of German resolve, as one diplomat told me, "certainly makes the timing opportune"). German officials are right to worry that U.S. forces now headed from Germany to the Persian Gulf may not, after the war and occupation, return to their old bases.



Reducing those 70,000 personnel and another 70,000 dependents would take billions out of the German economy, something they can ill afford given their decade long economic problems.