WASHINGTON: Decades before the prison photos from Abu Ghraib gave evidence that American soldiers can behave so much more badly than American civilians like to think, even the United States Army worried about the way the troops were acting.

As this scandal unfolds, it's worth remembering that young Americans, high on hormones and low on cultural awareness, regularly cause incidents and incite hatred overseas - even in peacetime.

The only solution is to stop basing so many troops in so many lands. That would not be isolationism - just common sense. After 9/11, I was stunned to hear an American official say that we should now turn more attention to defence of the homeland.

That's my point: The homeland should have been the priority all along - not overseas bases that didn't really protect us. In fact, US bases in Saudi Arabia were a major irritant that goaded Osama bin Laden into making his heinous attack on innocent American civilians.

As a young lieutenant in Korea in 1968, I somehow got chosen to add "Cold War officer" as an additional duty. After brief training in Seoul, I gave occasional (probably futile) lectures to the most recently arrived troops, explaining Korean culture - before we could give them weekend passes and turn them loose on Chunchon.

What those troops didn't understand is that American bases overseas attract the worst elements in any society. That's because many young Americans in uniform, newly away from home and eager to act out their freedom from parental restraints, are willing consumers of prostitution, gambling and other vices.

Worse, the same soldiers who want to buy these services somehow think everyone in that society is a thief or a prostitute. The troops have also internalized the we're-No. 1 attitude that can lead them to look down on citizens of the host nation. So they develop hostility to local culture, but don't bother to learn about it.

This is not to say that US soldiers are worse than those of other nations. It's just that Americans get more chances to act dumb and immature in someone else's country.

"Most nations in the world regard their militaries as being intended for homeland defence and as a symbol of sovereignty," said a leading military sociologist, David Segal of the University of Maryland. "We are a deviation from the norm. We are one of the few nations in the world that defines the military as being an expeditionary force."

In other words, young soldiers from other countries are probably equally boorish in their off-duty pursuits, but they don't get the chance to ignite an international incident because the acting out is confined to their own homeland.

That's a difficult concept for us to grasp. "Americans cannot possibly understand the impact on what is 132 countries right now that we have troops in, because we don't have any foreign troops in America," said Chalmers Johnson, author of two books that deal heavily with the effects of American bases: "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire" and now "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic."

Americans find a variety of ways to inflame public opinion. Examples include fatal accidents in Italy and Korea, caused by US troops and insensitively handled by their commanders, and the rape of a 12-year-old girl on Okinawa, a Los Angeles-sized island with a huge American presence.

In Korea, a 2002 truck accident killed two teenagers and made headlines for months - with no major consequences for the GIs involved. Now, after five decades of American presence there, Johnson says Korea is perhaps the most anti-American democracy.

Whatever others may think, many Americans revere our military as the best in the world. Our troops certainly are better trained, better paid and better armed than those of most nations. But they're just as human, and they're too often asked to serve overseas in societies about which they know nothing.

That's a difficult situation in peacetime, but one that can be addressed with a sharp reduction of overseas bases. In war, when demonization of the enemy acts in synergy with cultural ignorance, the results will too often be disastrous. -Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) Newsday.