US building up for confrontation with China: Analyst

The United States is imposing its troops on Japanese residents in the island of Okinawa as a row over a controversial US military base on the Japanese island worsens, an American military analyst in New York says.

“Seventy years after World War II, 60 years after the end of Korea (Korean War)… 25 years after the Berlin Wall, we’re still stuffing American troops down the throat of the Okinawans and they resent it very, very much,” said Michael Burns.

The US pivot to Asia “meant that the US was building up for a confrontation with China and they decided to put pressure on Japan not to allow a substantive reduction in their (American) bases in Japan. However, the Okinawans wouldn’t put up with this,” Burns told Press TV on Tuesday.

He made the comments after the governor of Japan’s southernmost prefecture of Okinawa ordered a halt on the development of a controversial plan to relocate a US military base there.

Speaking at a news conference in the prefecture's capital, Naha, on Monday, Takeshi Onaga stated that he would revoke an earlier drilling permission needed to relocate the Marine Corps Air Station Futenma to a sparsely-populated coastal region.

The new base is aimed at replacing the US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, which is located in a swarming urban area. The relocation site, known as Henoko, sits off the island’s isolated northeastern coast with an estimated construction cost of at least $8.6 billion.

The once-independent Okinawa island was annexed by Japan in the 19th century and was under US control from the end of World War II in 1945 until 1972. It still hosts about 75 percent of the US military presence in Japan.

About half of US forces in Japan are based in Okinawa. Many locals have complained about base-related crimes, noise and the risk of accidents.

According to documents obtained by the Associated Press, American military personnel were involved in more than 1,000 sex crimes between 2005 and 2013 in Japan.

AHT/AGB

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