EDITORIAL
50 years later, U.S. to trim Korea force

Fifty years ago, an armistice agreement halted three years of vicious fighting in Korea. Almost 900,000 soldiers, 54,000 of them American, had died, and more than 2 million civilians had been killed or wounded, when the fighting ended in a virtual draw.

The war's seeds lie in the final week of World War II, when the Soviet Union belatedly declared war on Japan and began to occupy northern Korea and Manchuria. Washington, which hadn't done its homework, suggested that Korea be divided at the 38th Parallel into temporary zones of occupation.

The Soviets created a northern regime under the late Kim Il Sung, and the Americans organized one in the south under Syngman Rhee. By 1949, both the Soviets and the Americans had gone home.

But Kim begged Stalin for permission to reunify his homeland with an invasion of the south. At least twice Stalin said no, but in 1950 he changed his mind, for four possible reasons:

Mao's Communist Party had won the Chinese civil war; the Soviets developed an atomic bomb; U.S. forces had been withdrawn from Korea; or, as the secretary of state in January 1950, Dean Acheson, stated in a speech, Korea "is outside our defense perimeter."

Many critics feel Acheson's statement amounted to an invitation to Stalin and Kim to invade. That helps explain why South Korea and its neighbors today are so nervous about the Bush administration's so-called realignment of American forces in Korea and elsewhere in Asia.

Yesterday, Lt. Gen. Charles Campbell, commander of the 8th Army in Seoul, announced that not only will U.S. troops be relocated many miles south of the DMZ, but total U.S. forces will be substantially reduced from today's 37,000 level.

The Bush administration says it is in no way reducing its commitment to the defense of South Korea, and that its realignment will give U.S. forces the ability to mount a more robust response to a North Korean attack.

That may be so, but these plans need detailed public discussion in the United States, Japan and South Korea to counter what has become a serious loss of confidence in the region.