- \WASHINGTON (IPS) -- Although their hopes for
transforming Iraq into a pro-U.S. base in the heart of the Arab world have
been badly set back, neo-imperial hawks in the Bush administration are
proceeding as fast as possible to reinvent U.S. forces worldwide as "globocop",
capable of pre-empting any possible threat to its interests at a moment's
notice.
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- In the last month, the Pentagon has confirmed plans to
sharply cut forces stationed at giant U.S. bases in Germany, South Korea
and Okinawa, Japan, and to redeploy them to smaller, more widely dispersed
facilities -- sometimes called "lily pads" -- along an "arc
of crisis" stretching along a wide band from Southeast Asia to West
Africa, as well as to bases in Guam and back home.
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- The planned redeployments, the most sweeping since the
onset of the Cold War more than 50 years ago, are all part of a global
strategy to build, in Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld's words, a "capability
to impose lethal power, where needed, when needed, with the greatest flexibility
and with the greatest agility".
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- As for where the "need" is, Pentagon officials
state publicly that would be defined by threats to "stability".
But a closer look at where Washington is most interested in acquiring access
to military facilities suggests the determining factor may be proximity
to oil and gas-producing areas, pipelines and shipping routes through which
vital energy supplies pass.
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- To most analysts, the proposed redeployments make a lot
of sense. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the need for big U.S.
military bases that housed conventional forces in Germany and elsewhere
in Western Europe evaporated from a strategic point of view, while the
steady build-up of well-equipped and well-trained forces in South Korea,
where Washington has stationed nearly 40,000 troops for the past 25 years,
made it more than a match for North Korea.
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- In addition, the presence and behaviour of U.S. forces
in both Western Europe and Northeast Asia, particularly in South Korea
and Okinawa, have become increasingly unpopular and a lightning rod for
growing anti-Americanism and resentment. Reducing their "footprint"
might have the opposite effect.
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- Indeed, Washington withdrew its troops altogether from
Saudi Arabia over the past year in large part because their presence there
had become politically untenable.
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- Nonetheless, both the plans -- and the ways they are
being developed and implemented -- are provoking growing criticism at home,
as well as abroad.
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- The reasons for this are not difficult to understand,
particularly in light of the Iraq war.
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- In the first place, the planned redeployments appear
designed to ensure that the United States could indeed enforce a "Pax
Americana", based on its ability to exert unilateral military control
over the production and flow of energy resources from Central Asia, the
Gulf region and the Gulf of Guinea off the coast of West Africa in the
face of potential rivals.
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- In that respect, the strategy is an update of the controversial
1992 draft Defence Planning Guidance (DPG) written under the auspices of
current Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick
Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser, I Lewis "Scooter"
Libby -- both of whom played key roles in driving the Bush administration
to war in Iraq.
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- The 1992 paper, which was significantly watered down
at the insistence of then-Secretary of State James Baker and National Security
Adviser Brent Scowcroft, called for Washington to act as the guarantor
of global security and predicted that U.S. military interventions would
be a "constant fixture" of the future -- a prospect that, in
light of the unhappy and costly experience in Iraq to date, is not very
popular at the moment, either here or abroad.
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- A second concern is the damage that such a redeployment
could do to Cold War alliances, particularly Washington's commitment to
Europe, where the Pentagon wants to cut its military presence in Germany
-- currently some 70,000 troops and scores of warplanes -- in half. Some
of the forces would be sent home, while most would be moved to cheaper
bases in Bulgaria and Romania, closer to the Caucasus and the Middle East.
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- "The most serious potential consequences of the
contemplated shifts would not be military but political and diplomatic",
wrote Kurt Campbell, a former senior Pentagon official now with the Centre
for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Celeste Johnson Ward,
in a 'Foreign Affairs' article last year. The redeployments, they warned,
could be construed as the beginning of a withdrawal from what Rumsfeld
last year scornfully called "Old Europe".
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- And that, in turn, could reinforce traditional isolationist
tendencies in the United States that, before World War II, sought to prevent
Washington from engaging in political "entanglements" with European
countries or international institutions in ways that might constrain its
freedom of action in the Americas or anywhere else.
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- Indeed, the repudiation of permanent alliances in favour
of "coalitions of the willing" -- a major feature of the Bush
administration's post-9/11 policies as it was in the Wolfowitz-Libby paper
-- not only recalls isolationism; it is also entirely consistent with the
strategy underlying the proposed redeployments.
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- A similar consideration worries South Korea, where Washington
is proposing the withdrawal of more than 12,000 troops, including some
3,500 who are being sent to bolster beleaguered U.S. forces in Iraq.
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- The Koreans worry that such a significant withdrawal
now might not only complicate a particularly tense time in intra-Korean
relations, but may also signal Washington's desire to reduce Seoul's say
in whether or not Washington attacks North Korea. "This is about psychology",
Derek Mitchell, a former Pentagon Asia expert recently told the 'Los Angeles
Times'.
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- A related concern was voiced by Campbell and Ward when
the proposed redeployments were still on the drawing board. "Unless
the changes are paired with a sustained and effective diplomatic campaign",
they warned, "they could well increase foreign anxiety about and distrust
of the United States".
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- That, in effect, is what has happened, as officials from
both Germany and South Korea have complained that they were not fully consulted
about the redeployments before they were leaked to the press or officially
announced -- a failure that only increases the impression that Washington
is proceeding unilaterally, even with its closest allies.
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- This is not surprising, because most of the same people
-- including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the undersecretary
of defence for policy -- who led the drive to war in Iraq remain in charge
of implementing the new global strategy.
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- While these officials have lost virtually all influence
over policy-making in Iraq as a result of their virtually total failure
to anticipate the challenges faced by U.S. occupation forces after the
war, they are working feverishly to reconfigure Washington's global military
forces for the coming generation.
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- Copyright © 2004 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights
reserved.
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- http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=24211
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