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[Why rest satisfied with open warfare, subversion and economic and diplomatic bellicosity toward and in Afghanistan, the Philippines, Yemen, Georgia, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Colombia, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Liberia, Moldova, Macedonia, Somalia, Venezuela, Indonesia, Congo, Ukraine and Myanmar, why not also rattle sabers at North Korea - in the name of combating the U.S.-fostered Al-Qaeda network?] AFP Wednesday March 20, 4:09 PM US and South Korea to stage biggest anti-North drills Hundreds of thousands of US and South Korean troops will Thursday start their biggest ever simulated conflict against North Korea which Pyongyang has angrily condemned as a war provocation. US military officials said on the eve of the week-long event that the exercises are purely defensive. But they come as Seoul officials step up warnings about ignoring the North Korea problem. The drill will be the biggest since the 1950-53 Korean War. The lack of a formal treaty to end that conflict has left the Korean peninsula as the world's last Cold War frontier with nearly two million troops ready for combat along the tense frontier. The joint US-South Korean Combined Forces Command (CFC) in Seoul said the exercise from March 21 to March 27 would for the first time merge two seperate joint military drills for training efficiency. This means hundreds of thousands of troops would take part, although the military gave no precise details. A CFC spokesman said the drill would involve nearly every US and South Korean military unit on the peninsula and other American troops brought in from abroad. Some 37,000 US soldiers are permanently based in South Korea to guard against hostilities from the communist North, which has an army of about 1.1 million troops. South Korea has an army of about 650,000. The CFC calls the drills RSOI/FE 02 as it combines the "Reception, Staging, Onward Movement and Integration" (RSOI) computerized war game and the annual "Foal Eagle" exercises. In the past years, 500,000 South Korean soldiers and 30,000 US troops, including 20,000 from abroad, have been mobilized for RSOI alone. "Linking these two exercises maximizes resource use while improving the quality of our training program," Colonel Cred Johnson, CFC exercise division chief, said in a contribution to a CFC magazine. "RSOI/FE 02, like all CFC exercises, is defense oriented and designed to improve the command's ability to defend the ROK (South Korea) against external aggression." But North Korea has accused the United States of seeking to provoke a war against the Stalinist regime by holding the drill. On Monday, a foreign ministry spokesman in Pyongyang claimed the planned US-South Korean drill was part of "very dangerous war gambles to seize the chance to provoke a nuclear war" targetting the communist North. Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the North's ruling communist party, has called the drill "a declaration of war." The ministry spokesman warned the North's military troops would "wipe out the aggressors to the last one" if war broke out again. US President George W. Bush angered Pyongyang this year by saying the regime was part of "an axis of evil" with Iran and Iraq, spreading weapons of mass destruction. And a top North Korean advisor to the South's President Kim Dae-Jung warned this week there could be a security crisis on the Korean peninsula next year unless worries about North Korea were addressed. "We may face a similar crisis to the one over Pyongyang's nuclear program in 1994," Lim Won-Dong, a special presidential advisor on foreign affairs and national security said in a speech at Yonsei University in Seoul. Lim highlighted North Korea's moratorium on missile test launches which ends in 2003, a dispute over the building of nuclear reactors in the North by an international consortium and its resistance to nuclear inspections. North Korea agreed to suspend its suspected nuclear arms program in 1994 after a standoff with the United States that came to the verge of conflict. "Progress must be made on these issues within a year or there will be another crisis," Lim said. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Sports - live college hoops coverage http://sports.yahoo.com/ --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9617B Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
