Lost among all the farewell coverage of Reagan comes the story that the US plans to pull 12,000 soldiers out of South Korea by December 2005. This amounts to aproximately a third of our current troop level. The link to the story is here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3782213.stm
Sorry, I'm not computer savvy enough to figure out how to hyperlink it.
The official reasoning behind the withdrawal seems to be an expansion of the good ol' "Rumsfeld Doctrine", wherein large armies are considered obsolete and replaced by much smaller forces with "better technology".
The twist, you ask? Already 3,000 of these soon to be removed troops are ear-marked for deployment to Iraq, and that number is sure to rise.
The "Rumsfeld Doctrine" has left us grossly undermanned in Iraq. The obvious irony here is that the administration's fix to this problem is to continue to apply the same strategy to other parts of the world, and pray that these areas will remain calm. We're using the proven-wrong Rumsfeld doctrine to fix the mistakes that proved it to be misguided in the first place.
That popping noise you may have just heard was my head exploding.