WASHINGTON -
Although hopes for transforming Iraq into a pro-US base
in the heart of the Arab world have been badly set back,
President George W Bush's administration is proceeding
as fast as
possible to
reinvent US forces worldwide as "globocops", capable of
pre-empting any possible threat to its interests at a
moment's notice.
In the past month, the Pentagon
has confirmed plans to sharply cut forces stationed at
giant US bases in Germany and South Korea 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.
Pentagon officials have
confirmed a proposal to reduce one-third of the US
forces in South Korea by the end of next year. That
would amount to a cut of 12,500 of the 37,000 US troops
there. South Korean officials have stressed that the
reductions are only a proposal and suggested it might be
revised.
In Germany, more than half the
estimated 70,000 US troops stationed there -
specifically the 1st Armored Division and the 1st
Infantry Division - could begin pulling out by next
year. About 100,000 US troops are stationed in Europe.
In Japan, about three-quarters of the 47,000 US
personnel in the country are located on the southern
island of Okinawa. Periodic calls for a reduction in the
numbers have been resisted, although the US is
reportedly now considering moving some Marines within
Japan, from Okinawa to the northern island of Hokkaido.
The Asahi Shimbun reported this move would
involve about 14,000 Marine Corps. The move was aimed at
promoting integration with Japan's Self-Defense Forces
to improve efficiency as part of the US Defense
Department's plan to globally transform its military,
the daily said. Among the changes speculated in the
Japanese press are moving US Navy aircraft out of
Atsugi, southwest of Tokyo, and US Air Force units out
of Yokota, in western Tokyo.
The worldwide
redeployments will be the topic of congressional
hearings beginning this week. Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, the force behind the shift in troops, is
scheduled to testify before the House Armed Services
Committee.
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 Rumsfeld's words, a "capability to impose lethal
power, where needed, when needed, with the greatest
flexibility and with the greatest agility".
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.
To most analysts, the proposed
redeployments make a lot of sense. With the collapse of
the Soviet Union, the need for big US 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.
In
addition, the presence and behavior of US 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.
Indeed, Washington withdrew its
troops altogether from Saudi Arabia over the past year
in large part because their presence there had become
politically untenable.
Nonetheless, both the
plans - and the ways they are being developed and
implemented - are provoking growing criticism at home,
as well as abroad. The reasons for this are not
difficult to understand, particularly in light of the
Iraq war.
In the first place, the planned
redeployments appear designed to ensure that the US
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.
In that respect, the strategy is an update of
the controversial 1992 draft Defense Planning Guidance
written under the auspices of current Deputy Defense
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.
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 US 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.
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.
"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
Center for Strategic and International Studies, 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".
And that,
in turn, could reinforce traditional isolationist
tendencies in the US 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.
Indeed,
the repudiation of permanent alliances in favor of
"coalitions of the willing" - a major feature of the
Bush administration's post-September 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.
A similar consideration worries South Korea,
where Washington's proposed 12,000-plus troop withdrawal
includes some 3,500 who are being sent to bolster
beleaguered US forces in Iraq.
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.
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."
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.
This is not
surprising, because most of the same people - including
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the under
secretary of defense for policy - who led the drive to
war in Iraq remain in charge of implementing the new
global strategy.
While these officials have lost
virtually all influence over policymaking in Iraq as a
result of their virtually total failure to anticipate
the challenges faced by US occupation forces after the
war, they are working feverishly to reconfigure
Washington's global military forces for the coming
generation.
possible to
reinvent US forces worldwide as "globocops", capable of
pre-empting any possible threat to its interests at a
moment's notice. 
