RE: [Futurework] US economic initiative in Middle East

[Karen Watters Cole]

Yes, thanks for mentioning that “tend to your own house first” maxim.   Associated Press - US Trade deficit swells to record $136.1 Billion @ http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Economy.html   Meanwhile, everyone is trying to find hope in signs that layoffs may be stabilizing, not declining, or reversing.       Interesting, but the US may have an Achilles heel in all of this.  It may be unsustainable.  What appears to be increasingly apparent is that US efforts to bring globalization (American style), freedom and democracy to Gap nations is failing miserably.  Afghanistan is back in the hands of warlords and its people are no better off, and Iraq is in chaos except for militant groups who are oganizing to shoot American GIs.  With huge budget deficits looming, and the inability of the federal and state governments to maintain key public services, the US may soon have to turn some of its attention to fixing up its own house instead of trying to fix up the world. Ed Weick This article does pay tribute to the young Ms Cheney, who also received a nice write up in the WP last week saying that she got her ambition from her mother.    Juxtaposed with the apparent international goodwill that might result in fostering economic progress in the Middle East, is the other side of the equation, or who has the bigget microphone, I believe Tom Walker keeps saying.  The article below repeats some of the readings shared earlier on FW re: The Gap nations and Barnett’s article in Esquire.  I am one of those who believes that the Wolfowitz strategy preceeded any whitewashed economic strategy, which Ms Cheney is now proceeding to implement.  It’s the old which came first, the chicken or the egg equation.   I recommend that some of you go to the website from which this article came and look around:  - KWC Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org).   Pentagon Moving Swiftly to Become "Globocop" By Jim Lobe | June 12, 2003, Editor: John Gershman, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC) Project Against the Present Danger Much like its successful military campaign in Iraq, the Pentagon is moving at breakneck speed to redeploy U.S. 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 the North Korea. The latest details, disclosed by the Wall Street Journal on June 10th, include plans to increase U.S. forces in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa across the Red Sea from Yemen, setting up semi-permanent "forward bases" in Algeria, Morocco, and possibly Tunisia, and 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 in Washington, DC this week), Singapore, the Philippines, Kenya, Georgia, Azerbaijan, throughout Central Asia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Qatar, even 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 U.S. plans there. "We're facing a very different threat than any one we've faced historically." Victory for Wolfowitz Those plans represent a major triumph for Wolfowitz, who 12 years ago argued in a controversial draft "Defense Planning Guidance" (DPG) for realigning U.S. forces globally so as to "retain preeminent 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 New York Times, also argued for "a unilateral U.S. defense guarantee" to Eastern Europe "preferably in cooperation with other NATO states" and the use of pre-emptive force against nations with weapons of mass destruction--both of which are now codified as U.S. strategic doctrine. The same draft DPG also argued that U.S. military intervention should become a "constant fixture" of the new world order. It is precisely that capability toward which the Pentagon's force realignments appears 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, U.S. global strategy would not be dissimilar to Washington's position vis-a-vis the Caribbean Basin in the early 20th century, when U.S. intervention from bases stretching from Puerto Rico to Panama became a "constant feature" of the region until Franklin Roosevelt initiated his Good Neighbor Policy. Indeed, as pointed out by Max Boot, a neoconservative writer at the Council on Foreign Relations, Wolfowitz's 1992 draft, now mostly codified in the September 2002 National Security Strategy of the USA, is not all that different from the 1904 (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." Pentagon Filling Globalization's Gaps The emerging Pentagon doctrine, founded mainly on the work of ret. Adm. 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 U.S. forces must be arrayed derive precisely from countries and regions 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," areas 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." As he wrote in Esquire magazine earlier this year, "If we map out U.S. 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."   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. Seam states, 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 U.S. strategy should be "to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power."   (Jim Lobe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service.)     Here's a very interesting item from today's FT: <<<< US eyes economic regime change in Mideast Edward Alden Nearly 2,000 people, including Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, gather in Jordan this weekend for a Middle East conference that will try to focus on the low politics of economic reform rather than the high politics of war and peace. But if it is not derailed by the continuing violence in Israel and Gaza, this extraordinary meeting of the World Economic Forum will highlight a US initiative that is no less radical than regime change in Iraq or the faltering road map for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Under the awkward rubric of the US-Middle East Partnership, the US is hoping to use a combination of moral persuasion and targeted foreign aid to foment a democratic capitalist revolution in a region still dominated by autocracies and state-led oil economies. The driving force is Elizabeth Cheney, 36-year-old daughter of vice-president Dick Cheney. Her appointment as deputy assistant secretary of state for the Near East in March 2002 raised eyebrows, but even opponents say she may be the best person to lead President George W. Bush's vision of remaking the Middle East in America's image. Judith Barnett, who held the same post in the Clinton administration and is now with PA Consulting Group, calls her "brilliant", and says: "She is absolutely the right person in the right place at the right time." Ms Cheney came to the job with limited government experience, including stints with the State Department and the World Bank, but a long interest in development issues. As a college student she travelled twice in the mid-1980s to famine-ridden regions of Kenya, only to be shocked, she says, to see villagers cutting open bags of corn and using the bags to build huts while leaving the food on the ground. "They had never seen yellow maize," she recalls. But unlike the generation who joined President John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps, Ms Cheney came back persuaded that governments were a big part of the problem. "You've got the remnants of very statist-controlled economies and the failed economic policies coming out of the 1960s and 1970s which have completely stifled the potential for growth," she says of the Middle East. "Those are unsustainable." In the bureaucratic wars of Washington, Ms Cheney has already been able to increase funding for the US-Middle East Partnership initiative from $29m (�24.5m, �17m) last year to $100m this year, with a request for $145m next year. "What we're doing is really very new and important because it's the first time the US has made such a commitment to these issues of economic and political reform in the Middle East," she said in an interview. "Through successive administrations, both Republican and Democratic, there has been a real tendency to say we're going to pursue and support reform in Latin America and in Asia and in eastern Europe, but we're not going to deal with these issues in the Middle East." The initiative involves some very large steps - such as Mr Bush's call last month for a US free trade agreement with the region by 2013. That will involve persuading some of the world's most heavily protected economies that their future lies in opening to international competition and investment. Ms Cheney is focused on a series of smaller steps, which the US hopes will help push the region towards economic openness and political democracy. One of her favourites is an increased political role for women; she hosted a conference in Washington last year to help provide resources for female candidates in the handful of countries where women can run for office. Legal reform is another priority. A survey of Arab companies in 2000 found that weak legal systems that fail to enforce contracts are considered the biggest obstacle to business. Sandra Day O'Connor, the US Supreme Court justice, will lead a forum on judicial reform in Bahrain in September. The US will push these initiatives by reviewing its aid programmes in the region, beginning with the largest - Egypt - which receives $600m a year in direct US economic support. Washington wants to step up its support for small businesses through micro loans, launch education pilot projects that promote a new curriculum not tinged with Islamic fundamentalism, and support girls' literacy programmes. Sceptics say that by pushing for such sweeping reforms in tradition-bound countries the US may raise expectations that could backfire if Washington cannot carry through. "You need to be very sensitive for the process it's going to take for these countries to liberalise," says Ms Barnett. "These steps provide a certain degree of hope, and if we don't follow through on this it will leave the region in a far worse state and our interests in the region in a far worse state," she says. Ms Cheney is sensitive to the charge that the US is trying to impose its own model on the region. She refers often to the UN 2002 Arab Human Development Report - authored by Arab economists - which contained a devastating critique of the Middle East "freedom deficit" and embraced many of the same steps now backed by Washington. "This is not about imposing the US model. Each country will have to sort out what works best for them," she said. "It is about looking for ways that the US can help to support those in the region who are making the difficult decisions that are required to undertake the necessary reforms." >>>> Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England