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America's military 'imperial
perimeter'
By Marco Garrido
MANILA - Late last month unidentified senior
officials in the administration of US President George W
Bush revealed to the New York Times that the Pentagon
planned to maintain at least four military bases in key
locations in Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
lamented the report as "inaccurate and unfortunate",
denying that the US planned to establish "some sort of
permanent presence" in Iraq. "We don't plan to function
as occupiers," he said.
Despite Rumsfeld's
demurral, there is no doubt that a US presence in Iraq,
whether considered "permanent" or not, goes a long way
in furthering US strategic objectives in the region.
With more than a foothold in Iraq, the US military can
now more effectively convey its power into neighboring
Iran and Syria. Already, Syria has shown signs of
capitulating to US influence by closing the offices of
three militant anti-Israel groups that the United States
considers terrorist. Iran, for all its obduracy, is
virtually enmeshed in a web of US influence, flanked on
either side by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Indeed, it is not just Syria and Iran. The war on
terror, with its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, has seen
the US military gird the globe like never before.
We have you surrounded
In the words of
one senior official in the Bush administration: "On
September 11 [2001] we woke up and found ourselves in
Central Asia. We found ourselves in Eastern Europe as
never before, as the gateway to Central Asia and the
Middle East." And after Iraq, the US found - or rather,
placed - itself in the Middle East. The widening scope
of US military deployments configure what one analyst
calls an "imperial perimeter" hemming in the aspirations
of regional great powers-rivals with the United States
for local influence - by projecting US might as
preponderant and proximate.
New bases in the
Central Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and
Tajikistan, along with its sizable military presence in
Afghanistan, not only enable the US to loom over Iran
and Syria but put it right in Russia's underbelly and at
China's western frontier.
To its west, Russia is
further pinched by US bases in a number of Central and
Eastern European states. Although temporarily set up to
assist in the campaign against Iraq, bases in such
states as Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia are likely to
become more permanent, especially given their recent
inclusion in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
China finds itself likewise corralled. Looking
east, it finds 47,000 US troops in Japan and 37,000 in
South Korea. If that weren't daunting enough, it finds
in Southeast Asia a security network woven out of
bilateral access agreements with the United States.
Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and
the Philippines allow the US access to their ports,
airfields, repair facilities, and training grounds in
return for aid, equipment, and training. This web of
access agreements, which provides for the rapid
deployment of US troops, in effect checks Chinese
ambitions on Taiwan.
While US military
pre-eminence curbs the influence of regional great
powers, it can also foster dependence in lesser ones.
The US-dominated security net in Southeast Asia, for
example, discourages the emergence of alternative
balance-of-influence arrangements - among the United
States, Russia, China and Japan, for instance - as well
as mutes the potential of regional organizations such as
the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional
Forum (ARF). That is to say, US military power has a way
of becoming entrenched by making itself seem necessary.
An ambiguous war on an elusive
enemy
Recent US military expansion could not have
happened if not for the events of September 11, 2001.
The "war on terror" provided both the justification and
opportunity for new military campaigns. It also informed
the strategic objectives behind them. Under the war on
terror, military deployments are expected to do more
than maintain balances of power in the United States'
favor. They are expected to reduce the threat of
terrorism for the US and the world.
To this
extent, a new strategy is needed for the new enemy. In
terrorism, the US confronts a notoriously elusive
adversary, one with multiple forms and faces and without
clear national allegiances. Since terrorism is
transnational, targeting states proves at best a blunt
resort. As with Afghanistan, one may succeed in
eliminating a terrorist haven and even go so far as to
topple regimes sponsoring terrorism but still fail to
extirpate the terrorists themselves.
Moreover,
security arrangements designed for Cold War realities
have become archaic. While maintaining 80,000 US troops
in Germany may have provided an effective bulwark
against Soviet expansionism, it does little to deter
terrorist activity in Asia and the Middle East.
Senator George Allen, chairman of the US Senate
Foreign Relations Committee's Subcommittee on European
Affairs, argues that basing options in Central and
Eastern Europe have become more relevant in this new
war. They are closer to current threats, they would be
cheaper to maintain and, in contrast to recent sentiment
in Germany over war with Iraq, their host nations in
Central and Eastern Europe would be more welcoming of a
US military presence. "Now is the time to re-evaluate
our basing choices in Europe. We should do this not to
punish any ally who did not agree with us, nor even
simply to reward our newest (and supportive) European
allies, but to serve the strategic interests of the
United States of America."
In the war on terror,
access is what matters. With access comes greater
military maneuverability, which security analyst and
Asia Times Online contributor Stephen Blank credits with
honing US military superiority to virtual decisiveness.
Even without basing, as long as the ability of US forces
to deploy in key nations remains unhindered, the United
States achieves its tactical objective: to make its
presence felt, not only in terms of managing the
ambitions of rival regional powers but, in at least one
case, also in terms of being able to involve itself in
local campaigns against terrorism.
In the
Philippines, US troops have taken part in operations
against the bandit-cum-terrorist Abu Sayyaf group. While
US forces have been restricted to largely non-combat
roles, critics question their involvement in the local
conflict of a sovereign nation. The United States has
justified involving itself by citing links between the
Abu Sayyaf and global terrorism. Under the war on
terror, the imputation of such links is sufficient
reason for intervention.
Whether the Philippines
will be a singular case remains to be seen. Clearly,
however, as recent campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq
attest, the objectives of the war on terror are broad
enough to justify not only the expansion of US military
might across states but also its extension into states.
Growing resentment
US military
expansionism understandably alarms some countries such
as Iran and Syria that fear an invasion; and it
discomfits others such as China and Russia that fear
competition for influence and natural resources such as
Central Asia's oil. But America's growing military
presence also makes its allies uneasy.
US bases,
especially in Asia, have long been a lightning rod for
anti-American resentment. Okinawans living near the base
there have had to contend with such daily irritations as
the deafening noise from shelling practice or from jets
flying overhead. The growth of vice industries such as
prostitution and gambling tinge their community with an
air of corruption. Prime land is gobbled up by the
military for airstrips and golf courses, while the
refuse from the bases is dumped, sometimes
indiscriminately, in the surrounding area. In Seoul, US
troops were found to have dumped untreated chemicals
into the city sewerage system. In the Philippines, the
legacy of toxic-waste dumping continues to ail residents
living near the site of former US bases.
But it
has been incidents of criminal abuse by US servicemen
that have ignited the most strenuous calls for the
Americans to withdraw. Okinawans still remember how
three US servicemen raped a 12-year-old girl in 1995. In
2000, after a 14-year-old girl had been fondled by a
drunken marine, then president Bill Clinton promised to
lessen the US "footprint" on the island and try harder
to be "a good neighbor". The following year, when a
marine sergeant lifted up the skirt of a schoolgirl to
take photographs, Okinawans took matters into their own
hands. The Okinawa Prefectural Assembly passed an
unprecedented resolution demanding, unsuccessfully, that
the United States reduce its military presence on the
island.
A US military presence can incite
anti-American sentiments even in nations without bases.
Although the Philippines got rid of its bases more than
10 years ago, security agreements concluded with the
United States continue to rouse fierce opposition. In
order to pass the 2002 Mutual Logistics and Support
Agreement through the Philippine Senate, an accord that
Philippine Foreign Secretary Blas Ople described,
perhaps understatedly, as "nothing but administrative
and accounting procedures", a clause had to be inserted
explicitly prohibiting the establishment of US bases,
facilities, and permanent structures. Similarly, when
Rumsfeld seemed to sanction a combat role for US troops
in the Balikatan 03-1 joint US-Philippine military
exercises against the Abu Sayyaf, public outcry was so
great, even after the terms of Balikatan had been
clarified to disallow any combat role for US troops,
that Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had to
scuttle the exercises until after the war with Iraq.
At a time when the mandate of US troops abroad
seems increasingly ambiguous, this insistence on
precision, on defining the exact scope of US operations,
seems to reflect an assertion of sovereignty in the face
of US ubiquity. While America's allies permit, perhaps
even bless, its military predominance, they seem as
interested in limiting its scope to that which is
absolutely necessary. Power within limits, largely
unsheathed, seems the goal, as embodied in the
administrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry
Truman. Under their helm, Fareed Zakaria writes, the
United States "reassured countries - through word and
deed, style and substance - that [its] mammoth power
need not be feared".
However, recent forays into
Afghanistan and Iraq raise the specter of a military
power utterly unharnessed and ultimately threatening,
even to its friends. Political sociologist Walden Bello
argues that under the current neo-conservative
administration, Washington's goal of even greater global
dominance will succeed only in generating widespread
opposition. This opposition, whether articulated by
states or through popular demonstrations, will belie US
gains in military reach and strength and beset its
movements with resistance. In short, what Bello calls
imperial overstretch will ultimately prove
self-defeating.
Zakaria sounds a similar
warning. "America's special role in the world," he
writes, "... is based not simply on its great strength,
but on a global faith that this power is legitimate." If
such faith is squandered, the United States of America,
for all its power, will find itself increasingly under
fire and isolated.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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