Thank goodness Don Rumsfeld appears to know something about the principle of the sanction of the victim. After withdrawing our sanction, look what happened:
The anti-American demonstrations here have suddenly gone poof. U.S. soldiers are walking the streets of Seoul again without looking over their shoulders. The official line from the South Korean government is: Yankees stay here.
Opposition to U.S. troops in South Korea that seemed to be boiling over has quieted dramatically in recent weeks, because of new threats from North Korea and a suggestion from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that U.S. troops may be cut and repositioned.
Resentment toward the U.S. government, however, has hardly disappeared….But the mainstream South Korean public seemed sobered by Rumsfeld’s remarks last week that the Pentagon might reduce its force of 37,000 troops and move some of them away from the front lines at the Demilitarized Zone, the frontier with North Korea.
The Korean critics “went up to the cliff, peered over, and then pulled back,” said Scott Snyder, the head in Seoul of the Asia Foundation, a private, nongovernmental, grant-making organization….Whatever the motivation, the prime minister of South Korea’s two-week-old government made an unusual public plea to the U.S. ambassador on March 6 not to remove any troops until the current tensions with North Korea over its nuclear program are resolved. [Washington Post, 3/14/03]