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."
>>>>
