S. Koreans Balk at Flood-Safety Project for U.S. Troops at New Bases

This one is just for GI Korea:

The United States and South Korea have been tussling over U.S. demands for additional construction work at the Gyeonggi province site for its new military headquarters, defense officials here said yesterday.

“We are reviewing a request by U.S. Forces Korea to raise the level of the ground by two to three meters (7-10 feet) at the new base site in Pyeongtaek,” a senior official at the Ministry of National Defense said. The request was made in November, he added.

According to the official, the United States said the 2,328-acre site was vulnerable to flooding from a stream nearby. The additional work, he estimated, would cost up to 600 billion won ($607 million), and Seoul rejected the request both for reasons of cost and because it would be difficult to find enough soil to raise the elevation that much. The U.S. military estimated the cost of the additional work at $505 million, he added.

Why aren’t these negotiations progressing? Because virtually every South Korean to whom I’ve spoken on the subject believes as an article of adamantine faith that Korea is too strategically indispensable for the United States to withdraw its forces. I believe this thinking is exactly 15 years out of date. And while I do believe that South Korea has considerable strategic value if its population supports a strong alliance, Korea becomes a strategic liability if it doesn’t. The Pentagon must presume that any population with a strong element of “hostiles” hosts a network of enemy “sleepers” and potential terrorists. The Korean government also considerably diminishes the value of any alliance by working against U.S. interests and placing undue limits on the deployability of those forces.