MAYBE WE SHOULD RE-THINK A FEW THINGS

On 9-11 it's appropriate to take stock, re-think, re-examine and look forward.

Applying all of that to our relationship with South Korea, I'm moving toward one inescapable conclusion--it's time to cut them loose.

DAEGU, South Korea -- The 300 statuesque beauties of the North Korean cheerleading squad bounded up the stairs of a soccer stadium here, prompting ecstatic applause from the South Korean crowd. Wearing outfits that were part Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, part Red Army, the women, who were handpicked and rigorously trained under the auspices of the North Korean government, strode to their places and flashed matching smiles.

Ignoring the field, where a North Korean soccer team was busy crushing Taiwan, the South Korean news media kept all cameras trained on the cheers. "What do we want?" the women, whose Stalinist homeland was separated from the South more than half a century ago, barked to the crowd. "Unification!" the South Korean fans shouted back with gusto.

That understandable desire for unification is blinding the current generation in South Korea: only 9 percent of them view Kim Jong-Il's nuclear ambitions as a threat. You'll get higher readings on that question just about anywhere else in the world. Sixty-one percent favor continuing the sunshine policy--the one that makes us the bad guys for shedding blood and spending treasure to protect them from their northern menace.

Then consider the following: I've mentioned the creation of something called the Proliferation Security Initiative before. It's an 11-state alliance aimed at interdicting North Korean ships on the high seas to stop them from moving WMD merchandise. Why this isn't a bigger story around the blogosphere is a mystery to me. The US plus ten other states, many of which are nowhere near North Korea, view the prospect of Kim having the Bomb with such trepidation that they've joined us, outside the UN, to make life hard for North Korea's merchant marine. Those states are, besides the US, Japan, Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, and Spain. Who's not on that list?

South Korea.

Not having a blue-water navy is no excuse. Last time I checked, Japan has the ability but not the fact of a true blue-water navy. Its participation in the PSI will most likely be in the form of offering ports of call for allied ships and intelligence from its new satellites watching Pyongyang's every move. But Japan takes the threat, and its US relationship, seriously and is game for the hunt. So does Bulgaria, a tiny state thousands of miles from the eastern edge of Asia.

But not South Korea.

So let's pull out, the sooner the better. Let's build our wall of ships around Kim, let's forward deploy our stealth bombers in Guam and Diego Garcia and Japan, let's reprogram a few ICBMs for coordinates north of the DMZ and let the South Koreans follow Dr. Evil's debutantes to a Stalinist hell if that's what they want.

I'm tired of people who cast the US in the role of villain when we send our boys to fight and die for them. It's time such children learned to grow up.