Troops home now

In an email to me about the most recent case of U.S. Marines raping a teenage Japanese girl, Japanese news reporter Renge Jibu notes:

On yesterday's news, a Japanese reporter interviewed some Americans in the U.S., asking if they knew about the rape case in Okinawa. Almost none knew about it, and although a few of them had seen the news, none knew the details. For the American media, this might not be newsworthy, but from the Japanese perspective, knowing these facts [about American ignorance] is a kind of insult. The American media sometimes criticizes Japanese conservatism, but seeing no coverage of this [rape] incident made me disappointed in the American media.

Absolutely right. Every time one of our overseas soldiers commits some crime - and believe me, it happens all the time - it stirs resentment in the local populace, and is inevitably given more attention there than here. So, decades later, those other countries hate us, and we say "Why? What did we do?"

One element of an aggressive policy to restore our country's plummeting prestige should therefore be to reduce our overseas military forces. Maybe having 50,000 troops stationed in Japan and 37,000 in Korea made sense when the Cold War was still ready to turn hot at any moment - but what purpose are they accomplishing now? Is it worth keeping 87,000 troops over there just to scare the pitiful North Koreans? And couldn't those 87,000 troops be put to better use in, say, Afghanistan?