End the Occupation!!!!

The protestors demanded, and Bush has finally listened - he is ending one occupation:

Bush Declares End to Occupation of Germany
(2004-08-16) -- President George Bush today announced that the United States would begin "drawing down" its military forces in Germany, signaling the impending end of the U.S. occupation of post-Third Reich Germany and thus the official end of World War II.

"The dictator is gone and it's time for the German people to chart their own course," said Mr. Bush. "Their land is now safe for democracy and our mission is accomplished."

Meanwhile, Democrat presidential candidate John Forbes Kerry said he would have voted to give authority to the president to remove troops from Germany, "but I oppose the way the president is going about it."

"It's good that the dictator is gone, and that World War II is over" said Mr. Kerry, who is also a U.S. Senator, "but does the president have a plan to win the peace?"

Mark Steyn weighs in on the end of this 60 year defense of Europe.

In the largest military realignment in years, Washington plans to withdraw 70,000 troops plus 100,000 family members and support personnel from overseas US bases. That means, for the most part, from Europe.

This will undoubtedly be welcome news to the likes of Goran Persson, the Swedish prime minister, who famously declared that the purpose of the European Union is that "it's one of the few institutions we can develop as a balance to US world domination". It must surely be awfully embarrassing to be the first superpower in history to be permanently garrisoned by your principal rival superpower. But it's also grand news for those of us who've long argued that America's six-decade security guarantee to Europe has been a massive strategic error.

The basic flaw in the Atlantic "alliance" is that, for almost all its participants, the free world is a free lunch: a defence pact of wealthy nations in which only one guy picks up the tab.
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Like any other form of welfare, defence welfare is a hard habit to break and profoundly damaging to the recipient. The peculiarly obnoxious character of modern Europe is a logical consequence of Washington's willingness to absolve it of responsibility for its own security. Our Defence Editor, John Keegan, once wrote that "without armed forces a state does not exist".

Germany is not thrilled about this realignment because the bases provided thousands of jobs in the communities where they were located. But everyone who looks at the strategic usefulness of these bases can clearly see that they were entirely useless where they were. Additionally, in the run-up to the Iraq War some European countries would not eve allow us to move those troops through their territory to get them to Kuwait. In effect, the US was providing 100,000 plus consumers for Germany's economy; and now they will have to get some of their own.