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."
>>>>
