U.S. troop pullouts: There's a political message, too

Wednesday, June 16, 2004
By RICHARD HALLORAN
Special to The Japan Times

The implications of the forthcoming withdrawal of one-third of the 37,000 U.S. troops in South Korea and two army divisions from Germany are as much political as military since both nations have been the site of vigorous anti-American eruptions in the last few years.

A researcher at the East-West Center in Hawaii, Richard Baker, asserted June 9 that the planned reduction in South Korea was "basically calls the bluff of those in Korea who have been calling for the United States to go away." He added that nobody thought it would leave.

On a wider angle, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said June 5: "We want to have our forces where people want them. We have no desire to be where we're not wanted."

Polls by the Pew Research Center in Washington suggest that Rumsfeld has solid backing in the American public for his stance on Europe. Where 83 percent of Americans saw Germany in a favorable light two years ago, only 50 percent say so now. France dropped from a 79 percent favorable rating to 33 percent.

Despite expressions of European and American unity at D-Day commemorations, in a United Nations vote on Iraq, and at the Group of Eight summit in Georgia, the Economist magazine of London called U.S.-European relations "a creaking partnership."

U.S. forces have been in Europe since World War II ended in 1945; those in South Korea since the Korean War ended in 1953. In a recent Pentagon briefing, an official said those deployments "had a logic that was based on an earlier time technologically and an earlier time historically."

Bush administration officials further suggested it was time for allies in Asia and Europe to do more for their own defense. Said one official: "There's a bigger piece in security cooperation -- how we can build up capability in allies?"

The military intent of the worldwide repositioning of U.S. forces, the officials said, was to be able to contend with uncertainty, operate across regions rather than be tied down to one nation, and respond to crises with speed. Perhaps most important, said one official: "The focus here has been on capabilities and not numbers."

Politically, the delay of President Roh Moo Hyun's government in Seoul to dispatch troops to Iraq has generated a perception that South Korea may not be a reliable ally. Some American officers have wondered privately whether South Korea could be counted on if the U.S. got into hostilities with North Korea or China.

Pro-China leanings of many South Koreans, especially those younger, has caused some South Korean specialists in international relations to caution that their nation should not weaken what one called its "maritime alliance" with the U.S. in favor of Korea's traditional role as a vassal of China.

A subtle factor in American strategic thinking is Korea's continuing anti-Japanese posture even though Japan's occupation of Korea ended nearly 60 years ago. In U.S. military planning, Japan and Korea are part of the same area of operations and Korean animosity toward Japan is seen as a hindrance to U.S. action.

American officials have been discussing changes in U.S. deployments to Japan, officials in the Pentagon briefing said, but did not give specifics. Among the changes speculated in the Japanese press are moving U.S. Navy aircraft out of Atsugi, southwest of Tokyo, and U.S. Air Force units out of Yokota, in western Tokyo.

In addition has been speculation that the U.S. Marines might move some units out of Okinawa, in southern Japan, to ease long-standing frictions between Okinawans and Americans on that crowded island. Those marines would go to Hokkaido, in northern Japan, where they would have more room to train and would be closer to South Korea.

The army's I Corps at Fort Lewis in the state of Washington is scheduled to go to Iraq and then to be posted in Japan to take command of U.S. Army forces in Asia. Officers at U.S. Forces Japan, a political-military headquarters, contend that their unit should continue to work day-to-day with the Japanese Self-Defense Force, a task that requires constant attention.

Even so, Japan is seen as a steady ally despite constitutional constraints on its military actions. Said one U.S. officer: "The Japanese have done everything we asked of them in Afghanistan and Iraq."

Richard Halloran, formerly a correspondent for Business Week, The Washington Post and The New York Times, is a freelance journalist.

US to withdraw a third of its Korean forces

June 8, 2004
From Richard Lloyd Parry in Tokyo

THE United States is to cut its military forces in South Korea, removing nearly one third of the army deployed there against the threat of North Korean invasion for the past 50 years.

The US wants to pull out 12,000 of the 37,000 US troops in South Korea by the end of next year, a South Korean diplomat revealed yesterday, as officials from the two countries met in Seoul to discuss their alliance. The move represents a change in American priorities at a time of increasing tension and uncertainty on the divided peninsula.

“The United States informed us of its plan to pull out 12,000 troops by the end of December 2005,” said Kim Sook, a spokesman for the South Korean Foreign Ministry. The redeployed units include 3,600 soldiers from positions on the border between South and North Korea, who will be sent to Iraq.

The Pentagon has been discussing reductions to its presence in South Korea for a few years, but nothing so detailed as yesterday’s announcement has been publicly disclosed. It will provoke delight and dismay in South Korea, which has always been divided over the presence of American soldiers on its soil.

To an older generation, they are the saviours of the country’s liberty and a crucial shield against North Korea, allegedly developing its own nuclear weapons. But to plenty of younger people, born after the devastating 1950-53 Korean War, the Americans are noisy, ill-mannered and unwelcome interlopers.

There are periodic bursts of anti-Americanism — the last came two years ago, after two young South Korean girls were accidentally crushed to death by a huge US military vehicle on a narrow country road. The US headquarters at the Yongsan military base in Seoul occupies a vast area of the most valuable land in the country. It also supports an adjacent district of bars and brothels, and there are frequent complaints about the behaviour of off-duty GIs.

It is partly to reduce the “footprint” left by US troops on their host country that the force reduction is being planned. In keeping with this policy, Yongsan will be vacated by the US in two years’ time and transformed into the site of luxury apartments. But the troop withdrawal is also part of a broad and ambitious revision of American troop deployments worldwide.

At present, many US troops abroad are deployed in large concentrations close to old Cold War flashpoints such as Germany, South Korea and the Japanese island of Okinawa. Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, favours deployments of highly mobile troops in a global network of small bases, supply depots and staging areas.

This year Douglas Feith, the US Under-Secretary of Defence with responsibility for policy, said: “Our forces overseas should not remain positioned to fight the Cold War.

“We no longer expect our forces to fight in place; rather, their purpose is to project power into theatres that may be distant from their bases.”

The problem, as far as many in Seoul are concerned, is that in the Korean peninsula the Cold War lives on. Apart from the US troops, 1.1 million North Koreans and 680,000 South Koreans face one another across the heavily mined “demilitarised zone” between the two countries.

The Pentagon insists that South Korean troops and the reduced number of Americans are capable of handling the early stages of any attack, but news agencies in Seoul report that South Korean favours a more gradual US withdrawal.

Pension Bills Held Up by Political Maneuvers

TOKYO, June 5, 2004 Kyodo

Selected editorial excerpts from the Japanese press:

PENSION BILLS HELD UP BY POLITICAL MANEUVERS (The Daily Yomiuri as translated from the Yomiuri Shimbun)

Confusion in the Diet over a set of pension reform bills seems to have amplified public distrust in not only the nation's pension system, but also politics itself.

A struggle between ruling and opposition lawmakers delayed a vote on the bills in a plenary session of the House of Councillors.

The largest opposition party, Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan), submitted motions to dismiss the chairmen of the health, labor and welfare committees of the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors in a protest against the ruling bloc's move to forcibly put the bills to a vote at the upper house committee by abruptly ending the debate on the legislation.

Using the so-called ox walk tactic, in which lawmakers delay the voting process by walking to the ballot box extremely slowly, and filibustering, opposition lawmakers resisted voting on the bills until the very end.

But what the public expected lawmakers to do was to conduct in-depth discussions so that the current pension systems can be transformed into ones that people trust. Many people probably were disappointed by the fact that the voting on such important bills related to people's daily life took place against a backdrop of confusion and animosity between the ruling and opposition camps.

Minshuto's stance was extremely questionable. In deliberations on the bills at the lower house, the party agreed to insert an additional clause in the bills that stipulates that discussions will be held on unifying the nation's public pension systems. The plan was based on an agreement made earlier by the Liberal Democratic Party, its coalition partner New Komeito and Minshuto.

The upper house held deliberations on that revised version of the bills, but Minshuto called for their abolition. This is hard to understand.

It can be inferred that the party intended all along to oppose the revised bills in the upper house and thus renege on the three-party agreement.

Minshuto leader Katsuya Okada said that opposing the bills should be seen separately from the pact. But Minshuto Secretary General Hirohisa Fujii has said the agreement made by the three parties would ''die a natural death.'' This is an irresponsible stance for a political party to take.

The ox walk is a tactic that frequently was used by the former Japan Socialist Party to express knee-jerk opposition to the ruling LDP under the so-called 1955 political framework, in which the LDP and the JSP played dominant roles in the nation's politics.

Minshuto's conflicting stances in the lower and the upper houses and its use of obsolete dilatory tactics in the Diet look like mere showboating. It seems that with an eye on the upcoming upper house election, the party is trying prove its credentials as a worthy opponent of the ruling camp. It was absurd to see grown men and women performing the ox walk.

But if Minshuto attempts to use the issue of pension system reform for short-term political gain, it does not deserve to take over the reins of government.

During the upper house deliberations on the pension bills, much of the discussion was centered around the issue of political leaders' nonpayment of pension premiums for the national basic pension scheme, and few in-depth arguments were made to promote a drastic review of the pension system.

There is a view that holds that the ruling camp rushed to vote on the enactment of the bills because the LDP hopes to win cooperation from New Komeito, which was the architect of the pension reform bills, in the upper house race.

It is regrettable that the upper house turned into a political battlefield.

While the end of the current Diet session is in sight, a number of key bills, such as those on the nation's handling of a foreign armed attack and one to strengthen financial systems, are due for enactment. The latest confusion in the Diet should not be allowed to hold up the passage of these bills.

(June 5)

US marines in Japan facing curfew due to rising crime in Okinawa

TOKYO (AFP) Jun 03, 2004

Junior-ranked US marines in Japan will be slapped with a night-time curfew from next week in an effort to curb rising crimes involving servicemen on the strategic island of Okinawa, officials said Thursday.

The prefectural administration of Okinawa said the curfew would be imposed as most crimes committed by US servicemen tended to take place after midnight.

"We hope that it will help prevent the recurrence of crimes," Tadanobu Higa, director of military base affairs for the Okinawa prefectural government, told AFP by telephone.

"Educational programs by the US forces in the past have failed to produce results. The number of crimes is still on the increase," he added.

Offences committed by servicemen have fueled strong protests among islanders against the concentration of US troops on the Okinawan chain, particulary after the 1995 gang-rape of a 12-year-old local girl by three US servicemen.

Okinawa, located within the striking distance of China and the Korean peninsula hosts roughly two-thirds of the 47,000 US troops in Japan. It remained under post-World War II US military occupation until 1972.

US marines with the rank of sergeant or lower stationed in Japan will be barred from going off base from midnight to 5 am in an indefinite curfew beginning on June 11, the US military daily Stars and Stripes reported.

But non-commissioned officers, who have demonstrated "integrity, maturity, reliability and exceptional performance" may be exempted from the ban, it added.

It is the first time for a curfew to be imposed on US service personnel in Okinawa, since the Group-of-Eight (G8) summit held there in 2000 amid airtight security.

Lieutenant General Robert Blackman, commander of US Marine Corps in Japan, told the GI daily that the curfew was in response to crimes involving US service members in Japan, which have been on the rise since 1998.

"This is not a form of punishment," Blackman was quoted as saying. "Its a way of controlling where liberty is conducted during those peak times.

"These incidents have a negative effect on our relationship here and I want to turn it around; I want to push that curve in the other direction," he told the paper.

According to the Okinawan prefectural government, 112 US service members were arrested in 2003, including 48 held on suspicion of theft.

The annual total has steadily increased since 1998 from a steady total of 40 in the previous three years, during which antipathy toward US troops remained fierce after the gang rape.