I don’t see either an Obama or McCain presidency doing anything significant with USFK.

We’re locked in….and one day – it is going to cost us astronomically in terms of money and blood.

Case in point: I pay for internet. I pay more for slow internet on base than I paid for fast internet when I lived off base in Anjungri.

This is offensive all by itself, but the Koreans took it a step further. They are blocking Vonage, SKYPE, and other US VOIP providers and forcing Soldiers to use their overpriced VOIP service. Not only do I get to pay too much for the internet, but I have to pay them for what I do on it. I guess they weren’t getting enough out of us.

GEN Bell fought the implementation of this thievery for about a year, but the Koreans persisted until he caved…which is standard Korean practice.

I have not seen him strongly push the ROKs on cost sharing and the relocation as strongly as Rumsfeld did and has in fact caved into the ROKs by halting troop cuts. What did the US government get in response for halting troop cuts, mad cow craziness.

Now the Korean government is even going further and now further reducing their cost sharing burden with this “goods” payment scheme. I’m willing to bet the ROKs feel that Gates will not call them on it and can get away with it. I hope I’m wrong and Gates starts making some clear cut statements in regards to Korea policy.

If just don’t know of anyone in Washington with the political will to do it.

So people tend to see very trivial issue as life-and-death, and I am sure that this is reflected in how South Korean representatives act in trade negotiations as well.

In fact, I think I recall reading that Park Chung-hee once went mano a mano with Spiro Agnew in Seoul during a heated U.S. troop reduction talks, where he refused anyone from living the negotiating table for something like five hours! (Of course, the punchline is that the South Korean representatives, including Park, had a tube connected from their, eh, urinary tracts to a discreetly placed urine-collecting jars of sort underneath the table.)

I think there might be severe delays when comments are too long. As you can see, the comment did eventually appear–but almost an hour after I posted it.

It is also an old Korea Herald op-ed (and they delete articles after a short period), so I had to post the entire op-ed, rather than the link.