- "Dear Brother Obama" begins a compact offer
of wisdom to the President-elect in a letter written by Alice Walker.
As author, student, teacher, and observer of a sometimes tumultuous American
history, she outlines for our new President a thoughtful set of precepts
for presidential success. First, she advises, you did not create this
mess, and second, you alone cannot fix it. Next she enjoins Obama "not
to take on other people's enemies". Then she gets to the meat of
it: "There must be no more crushing of whole communities, no more
torture, no more dehumanizing as a means of ruling a people's spirit."
In that brief dictum she summarized the impact of cumulative flaws in
American policy that Obama must confront. She did not address the how
of it, but among his early assignments Obama must rethink how to manage
our country's pursuit of its own defense as well as the growing needs
of a global civil society for a reliable regime of law and order.
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- The George W. Bush effort was a horrible experience.
He and Dick Cheney with their neo-conservative core team saw the solution
of America's self defense, including assurance of key resources, as a
program for global hegemony. Under this formula, if other governments
could not control their dissidents and keep their people in line, meaning
keep them from objecting to US interference in their affairs, then the
US would take care of it. Also under this program, without ever saying
so, the Bush/Cheney team planned to gain control of critical resources
such as oil by controlling key sources or critical pipeline and shipping
routes. This philosophy, enhanced by a close alliance with Israel, got
the US into the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan, made enemies left and
right, provoked a continuing tug of war with Iran to keep that country
from disrupting Israel's nuclear monopoly, and led the US to run up unprecedented
debt to its growing global competitors.
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- Whatever may be his eventual agenda, Obama's detractors
credit him with intent to go either socialist or fascist without ever
defining either one. He has no established intent to do any such thing,
but even if he did, his first pressing assignments are to sort out the
messes he inherits from his predecessors, notably but not exclusively
George W. Bush.
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- Obama comes along when much in the American landscape
and outlook has changed. This is simply not 1947 when the national security
policies--largely retained in the 2008 National Security Strategy-- that
still govern American behavior were established. The US now is home to
over 300 million people, and projections put the population at 400 million
by 2050. At least a third of that increase and, as more women enter the
workforce, probably half will challenge the best efforts of leadership
to create jobs. Meanwhile the US weight in the world economy is steadily
declining, more as a result of growth elsewhere than of shrinkage at home.
However the US has given up millions of jobs to outsourcing manufactures,
and the task of job creation is more complex than ever before. US outsourcing,
as well as US export trade, both reflect and feed on the growth of other
economies. The US now contributes only about a fifth of global GDP, while
less than two decades ago it contributed more than a third. Meanwhile,
the US defense budget, at well over $750 billion, is about 1.5 times the
combined defense budgets of the rest of the world, and with two ongoing
wars there is no visible cutback in sight. Finally, after post-war decades
of balance of payments surpluses, the US is now deeply in debt. Its total
debt at the end of 2008 will exceed the current US GDP; and more than
half of that debt will likely be owed to foreign lenders, public and
private. Topping that picture, foreign assets in the United States- at
roughly $16 trillion-exceed US assets abroad by more than $2 trillion.
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- All of those realities would exist if there were no financial
crisis. Fundamental changes were already occurring in the global economy;
the role of the United States was shrinking; the need to adjust to shifting
global economic weights was growing, and the nature of the US role in
the system was moving from dominant to merely important player. Bush will
leave all that under the doormat with the key to the White House.
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- Main elements of these realities were reflected in the
deliberations of the November 15 Group of 20 meetings in Washington.
Cutting through the artful bureaucratese of the Group's final statement,
one sees a global process of adjustment. More money is more widely available
in more places. More credit is more widely needed to facilitate the normal
operations of business. The various national financial systems have been
growing to accommodate these demands. In effect, the shifting weights
within the world economy are changing in all sectors of economic interest.
With all of that, the financial management capabilities of the system
outside the trilateral system of the US, Europe and Japan have been multiplying.
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- That growing smartness means that probably everybody
at the November 15 G-20 meeting understood the enormity of the US financial
system's failure to see the risks and prevent the system from capsizing
in the flood of unregulated profit devices contrived out of bundles of
subprime, hence high risk, mortgages. But it seems realistic that everyone
present also understood that sheer greed, perhaps abetted by trust in
the US financial system, had contaminated the international financial
community, and that, indeed, was why they were there. Comments in the
final statement make clear that everyone understood the need for a more
effectively regulated system, and that such universal disciplines would
take an order of international cooperation for which all of the players,
especially the biggest of the lot, the United States, were not yet ready.
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- Obama ran his presidential campaign on a promise of change,
but he may not get to his promised agenda anytime soon. As he copes with
the financial crisis in the midst of an economic recession, the largest
changes Obama may effect in the coming months and years must deal with
getting the US back to square one. That means out of debt, reasonably
fully employed, at peace with the rest of the world, and cooperating much
more effectively with the rest of the world in all common areas of interest.
Those may not sound as romantic as the undefined word "change",
but they represent wrenching changes in the way Americans have been living.
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- He confronts this whole panoply of economic and political
difficulties on the first day with any attempt to deliver on his promise
to get us out of Iraq. What actually is involved in that? The most obvious
action, of course, is bringing our 150,000 troops home. That probably
cannot be done in an orderly manner much more quickly than the three years
now specified in the signed US/Iraqi agreement. Iraq security conditions
may control the actual process, but whatever the timetable it means bringing
150,000 troops home to support in unnecessary military jobs or to hang
as job seekers or displacers of present job holders over a collapsing
American economy.
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- What about the variously estimated fifty or more American
bases in Iraq that were built with an aggregate multibillions of taxpayer
dollars? Will they be left intact with virtually no real utility to the
Iraqis, or will their billions of dollars worth of "stuff" be
brought home?
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- Bringing all that "stuff", in the forms of
survival, support, war- fighting, security, transport, and et cetera equipment,
could itself take an estimated 36 months( see: _Too Much Stuff_ by Tom
Engelhardt on tomdispatch.com). Bringing all that stuff home is a logistics
challenge, but its economic weight is another problem, because the stuff
would not have to be made again, it would overhang the market, depress
production and further slow an already weak economy. In effect, the impact
on the home economy will be least disruptive if the stuff and the troops
stay in Iraq, or, as Obama seems to have in mind, they move on to Afghanistan.
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- These and other hangover problems expose the most troublesome
obstacles to Obama's agenda for change. Yet, effectively managing them
provides perhaps the best platform for implementing the necessary critical
changes in the American system. He is confronted immediately by long needed
decisions concerning America's dependence on military power. The United
States has been able to avoid or mitigate the cyclical economic pitfalls
of post World War II economic life by continuous reliance on military
production, military force and military facility maintenance. We have
had, or we have managed to find or, in the case of terrorism, to define
enough enemies abroad to justify burning that stuff in other locations
and usually on other people.
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- Meanwhile, our affluent lifestyle has been sustained
by US indulgence in military spending. It is difficult to estimate what
that pattern of military spending and unnecessary foreign wars has meant
to American lifestyles, but this combination has kept the military industrial
complex sufficiently employed to keep US unemployment figures in the near
full-employment range. Pentagon budgets have survived, indeed grown on
this stuff of which perpetual military motion is made. In truth, a military
industrial economy works so long as some way can be found to dispose of
its military output. Hence we keep finding wars.
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- Obama's immediate challenge is how to keep this system
working long enough to keep the economy from floundering in its absence.
His long term challenge is how to replace military industrial production
and activity as a key component of American output, therefore as a key
contributor to the American lifestyle.
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- Nothing in the campaign literature or in his statements
since election indicates that Obama actually has a solution to this problem.
Rather his announced preference for bolstering and continuing the war
in Afghanistan would essentially keep the military-industrial machinery
in place. Yet if he truly intends to accomplish real change in American
society and governance, he must transfer the resources now being wasted
on military endeavors to other more productive purposes. The question
is how?
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- The choice is not simple, but it is quite real. The principal
threat to present day society is politically motivated violence, terrorism.
The Bush administration declared a military war on terrorism after 9-11,
but the solution has not worked. Practically all governments except the
United States consider terrorism a combined social and law enforcement
problem that is not responsive to military solutions. Perversely, however,
the US choice of a military response-we will defeat them over there so
they won't come here-has been used to keep military budgets large and
to sustain a useless war in Afghanistan, but at the same time it has made
other governments nervous enough about American intentions to fuel a
global arms race. The 2008 National Defense Strategy made it clear that
the Bush team did not contemplate any real changes in past reliance on
military power. Continuing US reliance on its nuclear arsenal is an explicit
feature of that strategy.
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- Far from being a constructive solution to terrorism,
the US military choice is globally destabilizing. A major reason for such
instability is the fact that US anti-terrorism alliances have encouraged
allied governments to make war on their dissidents rather than to find
accommodations. A law enforcement solution is in its nature less polarizing.
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- A law enforcement solution already exists in the International
Criminal Police Organization, Interpol. The organization currently has
187 members, only five or so fewer than the United Nations. Each of those
member states has an internal police organization that is the official
contact body for dealing with international criminal matters affecting
that country. In the US the National Central Bureau for Interpol Is in
the Department of Justice. Its *Mission Statement* is: "To provide
the United States' local, state, and federal law enforcement authorities
a central point of communication to the international law enforcement
community, and to serve as the official U.S. representative to the International
Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL)." This solid attachment of
the liaison with Interpol appears general for the system.
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- The problem with Interpol is its charter prohibits the
organization from dealing with cases involving political or religious
matters. To date at least, that effectively forecloses a major role for
it in combating terrorism. Thus the worldwide organization that is best
positioned to gather and share information about political violence has
not been encouraged to do so. That limitation has been reinforced by the
forceful US insistence on a military approach. Even so, Interpol appears
to have everything it needs save an appropriate mandate and an adequate
budget.
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- The sticky issue is sovereignty. Whereas international
trade and financial matters have progressed to the point where cooperative
arrangements are a recognized necessity, and it is basically accepted
that no economy is sovereign in the sense of being self sufficient, a
similar judgment about the nature of trans-border human relations is much
slower in coming. Economic interdependence is a recognized system reality,
but political independence is still the order of the day.
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- One of the manifestations of that independence is the
fact that each government and to be sure, each group of people, reserves
the right to select its friends, whether governments or lesser groups.
Thus, it is common that various governments support groups in other countries
whose devout ambition is to overthrow the government or unseat the party
in power. It is in this environment that conflicts of interest persist,
and here one man's terrorist may indeed be another man's freedom fighter,
even in situations where amicable relationships and thriving trade exist
between the countries involved.
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- The barriers to freeing up Interpol to do the law enforcement
job it is uniquely designed to do lie here. If it were freed up to do
the law enforcement work required internationally in cases of terrorism
related murder, robbery, property damage, and kidnapping, there would
be no military role except possibly in cases of the crimes of states.
What is required is a definition of international crime that invokes the
role of an international, essentially a federal authority. Interpol can
play that role, supported by the International Court of Justice, if their
respective mandates are properly broadened and recognized. In effect we
are almost there. The way to deal with other people's enemies is to recognize
them as enemies of the international system and provide an appropriate
international authority to deal with them.
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- The shape of a future system for managing politically
motivated violence is much clearer than its prospects. Indicative of the
barriers, the 2008 National Defense Strategy discusses both the environment
and the substance of US defense policy for 23 pages without ever mentioning
a single international organization other than NATO. Neither the UN nor
any of the relevant regional political and economic organizations are
mentioned, although the text often refers to the need for and possible
reliance upon "partners" and "allies". In effect,
what Obama must confront is a policy posture that views the world in the
bipolar terms of friends and enemies and puts forward no suggestions for
a future of international cooperation and globally shared responsibilities
for peacekeeping. In this awkward manner, the United States deals with
other people's enemies by making them its own. That is a formula for
justifying a basic military posture, but it promises nothing for real
betterment of the human condition.
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- **********
- The writer is the author of the recently published work,
A World Less Safe, now available on Amazon, and he is a regular columnist
on rense.com. He is a retired Senior Foreign Service Officer of the US
Department of State whose overseas service included tours in Egypt, India,
Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Brazil. His immediate pre-retirement positions
were as Chairman of the Department of International Studies of the National
War College and as Deputy Director of the State Office of Counter Terrorism
and Emergency Planning. He will welcome comment at
- wecanstopit@charter.net
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