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Pentagon steps closer to 'GloboCop'
role
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
Much like its successful military campaign in Iraq, the
Pentagon is moving at seemingly breakneck speed to
re-deploy US forces and equipment around the world in
ways that will permit Washington to play "GloboCop",
according to a number of statements by top officials and
defense planners.
While preparing sharp
reductions in forces in Germany, Turkey and Saudi
Arabia, military planners are talking about establishing
semi-permanent or permanent bases along a giant swathe
of global territory - increasingly referred to as "the
arc of instability" - from the Caribbean Basin through
Africa to South and Central Asia and across to North
Korea.
The latest details include plans to
increase US forces in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa
across the Red Sea from Yemen, set up semi-permanent
"forward bases" in Algeria, Morocco and possibly
Tunisia, and establish smaller facilities in Senegal,
Ghana and Mali that could be used to intervene in
oil-rich West African countries, particularly Nigeria.
Similar bases - or what some call "lily pads" -
are now being sought or expanded in northern Australia,
Thailand (whose Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has
found this to figure high on the bilateral agenda in
talks here this week), Singapore, the Philippines,
Kenya, Georgia, Azerbaijan, throughout Central Asia,
Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Qatar, Vietnam and Iraq.
"We are in the process of taking a fundamental
look at our military posture worldwide, including in the
United States," said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz on a recent visit to Singapore, where he met
with military chiefs and defense ministers from
throughout East Asia about US plans there. "We're facing
a very different threat than any one we've faced
historically."
Those plans represent a major
triumph for Wolfowitz, who 12 years ago argued in a
controversial draft "Defense Planning Guidance" (DPG)
for realigning US forces globally so as to "retain
pre-eminent responsibility for addressing selectively
those wrongs which threaten not only our own interests,
but those of our allies or friends, or which could
seriously unsettle international relations".
The
same draft, which was largely repudiated by the first
Bush administration after it was leaked to the press,
also argued for "a unilateral US defense guarantee" to
Eastern Europe "preferably in cooperation with other
NATO states", and the use of preemptive force against
nations with weapons of mass destruction - both of which
are now codified as US strategic doctrine.
The
draft DPG also argued that US military intervention
should become a "constant fixture" of the new world
order. It is precisely that capability towards which the
Pentagon's force realignments appear to be directed.
With forward bases located all along the "arc of
instability", Washington can pre-position equipment and
at least some military personnel that would permit it to
intervene with overwhelming force within hours of the
outbreak of any crisis.
In that respect, US
global strategy would not be dissimilar to Washington's
position vis-a-vis the Caribbean Basin in the early 20th
century, when US intervention from bases stretching from
Puerto Rico to Panama became a "constant feature" of the
region until Franklin Roosevelt initiated his Good
Neighbor Policy 30 years later.
Indeed, as
pointed out by Max Boot, a neo-conservative writer at
the Council on Foreign Relations, Wolfowitz's 1992
draft, now mostly codified in the September 2002
National Security Strategy of the US, is not all that
different from the 1903 (Theodore) Roosevelt Corollary
to the Monroe Doctrine, which asserted Washington's
"international police power" to intervene against
"chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a
general loosening of the ties of civilized society".
Remarkably, the new and proposed deployments are
being justified by similar rhetoric. Just substitute
"globalization" for "civilization".
The emerging
Pentagon doctrine, founded mainly on the work of retired
Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, chief of the Pentagon's Office
of Force Transformation, and Thomas Barnett of the Naval
War College, argues that the dangers against which US
forces must be arrayed derive precisely from countries
and region that are "disconnected" from the prevailing
trends of economic globalization. "Disconnectedness is
one of the great danger signs around the world,"
Cebrowski told a Heritage Foundation audience last month
in an update of the "general loosening of the ties of
civilized society" formula of a century ago.
Barnett's term for areas of greatest threat is
"the Gap", places where "globalization is thinning or
just plain absent". Such regions are typically "plagued
by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty
and disease, routine mass murder, and - most important -
the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation
of terrorists".
"If we map out US military
responses since the end of the Cold War, we find an
overwhelming concentration of activity in the regions of
the world that are excluded from globalization's growing
Core - namely the Caribbean Rim, virtually all of
Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the
Middle East and Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast
Asia," Barnett wrote in Esquire magazine earlier this
year.
The challenge in fighting terrorist
networks is both to "get them where they live" in the
arc of instability and prevent them from spreading their
influence into what Barnett calls "seam states" located
between the Gap and the Core. Such seam states, he says,
include Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria,
Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, the
Philippines and Indonesia. Those nations, the logic
goes, should play critical roles, presumably including
providing forward bases, for interventions into the Gap.
At the same time, if states "loosen their ties"
to the global economy, "bloodshed will follow. If you
are lucky", according to Barnett, "so will American
troops".
On the eve of the war in Iraq, Barnett
predicted that taking Baghdad would not be about
settling old scores or enforcing disarmament of illegal
weapons. Rather, he wrote, it "will mark a historic
tipping point - the moment when Washington takes real
ownership of strategic security in the age of
globalization".
Observers will note that
Barnett's arc of instability corresponds well to regions
of great oil, gas and mineral wealth, a reminder again
of Wolfowitz's 1992 draft study. It asserted that the
key objective of US strategy should be "to prevent any
hostile power from dominating a region whose resources
would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to
generate global power".
(Inter Press
Service)
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