50 years, wonderful. Want to keep an air base and a spec forces brigade fine, but to hell with the korean model. As an astute backroomer pointed out to me in another thread Korea is the last place that the cold war actually exsists.

Its largely due to our troops there, well the south koreans have been able to defend themselves for some time, certainly they have the economic prowess to fund the needed military expense.

This smells of legacy to me, Bush is probably trying to find a palatable way to project the future of our involvement there to save his library funding down the line.

A minimal troop deployment should be kept in Iraq, maybe larger then a normal embassy detail thats it, the rest should be brought home and redeployed first to thier homes, second to U.S. infrastructure and crucial economic assets.

This korean example reference is killing me....